Poker News

Kathy Raymond Venetian Poker Operations Director

Venetian Poker Operations Director Kathy Raymond was recalling the essence of that long ago time when she reached one of those life-changing moments and decided enough is enough. This was the early 1990s, a time when poker was a refuge she visited to escape the rigors of her 8 to 5 job as a certified public accountant.

A CPA, of all things … if the people who know her now can even imagine such a thing.

“I was bored out of my head,” is the way she remembers it. There had to be something with a bit more pizzazz to it, and so she gave the issue serious thought.

Poker eventually came to mind. Poker was a pastime she had enjoyed since childhood, that place she went, so to speak, for some R&R.

Maybe she’d be a poker dealer.

Thinking about it, letting her mind play with all the relevant possibilities. Yes, an intriguing notion. So let’s go for it, she finally decided.

There was this new casino going up down the road a piece from her New England home, a place called Foxwoods, which she understood was going to offer poker when it opened in 1992.

Raymond shared her thinking with a few people, most of whom responded with raised eyebrows, shakes of the head and statements that sounded like, you’re gonna what? You’re gonna walk away from being a CPA to deal cards? They did not believe Raymond would make the big leap, but leap is what this wife and mother of two children finally did.

She began her training as a poker dealer in 1991. “Putting on my little dealer uniform when I finished my CPA work and going off to learn how to deal cards,” is how she put it.

Raymond did not deal for long, only a couple of months. Turned out she had come on to an opportunity much bigger than she initially realized. “Connecticut gaming was new then and they were kind of starving pretty much for management material, which made me kind of an easy pick, I suppose, because of my background in management and business.”

She began her steady movement through the supervisory ranks, managing over time to become involved in all elements of the Foxwoods poker operation, supervising this and that, training dealers, even serving for a couple of years as tournament director, which gave her the chance to have a big hand in starting up the New England Poker Classic, an event that has since become one of the stops on the World Poker Tour.

She became the Foxwoods director of poker operations in 1998. Not bad, not bad at all she figured, butthe best therefore needed an executive with a solid reputation in a big time organization. They turned toward Foxwoods.

Would Raymond be interested?

Raymond talked it over with her family and eventually decided the Venetian offer was too big an opportunity to let slip away. It was March 24, 2006 that she was hired, about the time she was also supervising the expansion of the Foxwoods operation to 114 tables in a new room.

She opened that room on a Saturday, went home, packed and was in Las Vegas the following week to supervise the opening of the Venetian poker room in April. Her husband gave up his custom motorcycle manufacturing business and joined her.

At Foxwoods, Raymond had accomplished what she wanted to do in terms of creating a sophisticated operation with a staff of more than 800 that became a role model for others. It had become something of a “comfort zone and I don’t really like comfort zones … I like change, I like creating,” is the way she puts it now. In Las Vegas, she saw a chance to be part of a large organization that was making a “big commitment to poker” in the middle of an area that was something of a research and development laboratory for pokerrelated events that would have an impact around the world.

What Raymond has discovered during nearly a year and a half at the Venetian is that poker is poker wherever it is played.

“But the business of poker is different, east coast versus west coast. The competitive nature of the business is more obvious in the west.

“In Las Vegas there is always the challenge of trying to come up with something new, something fresh. I had the same challenge at Foxwoods, but there it was maybe easier to anticipate the impact because it was more of a monopoly.”

At the Venetian, she has had to quickly identify what players want and then move quickly to offer it.

Raymond’s challenge at the Venetian has been eased, she says, by the fact that “the commitment to poker is high and the desire for poker to succeed has always been there. “I think the first thing that makes the Venetian worth a visit is the venue itself. We are absolutely the most luxurious poker room I have ever experienced, not just in Las Vegas but anywhere in the world.”

Raymond and the Venetian have moved quickly to plan and crank up events that seem likely to catch the attention of the poker world.

The National Poker League will make the Venetian the site of the November 24-30, Las Vegas Open to be followed December 3, by the NPL’s World Championship Tournament that will bring to the Venetian the winners from previous NPL events in such exotic locales as London, Manila and Australia.

Additionally, the Venetian will serve as home base for the NPL broadcast center of all 26 episodes of the NPL series airing to a projected audience of more than 100 million viewers around the world via a number of cable outlets such as superstation WGN and the MOJO HD Network.

The National Poker league is a media-focused company that creates poker programming. It does not own any gambling sites. “They’re a very class act,” Raymond says of the League.

As for other promotions, Raymond has scheduled a $50,000 free-roll September 21, for players who accumulated at least 50 hours of playing time in the Venetian poker room during August.

Raymond is also planning a repeat of the Deep Stack Extravaganza that was held as a “complement” to this year’s WorldSeries of Poker.

The added chips and what she describes the “generous” structures and blinds made it a hit with players, many of whom had been drawn to Las Vegas by the World Series. One thing she has to do next year is make room for more players, probably a lot more. The biggest Deep Stack event this year attracted 629 entries.

Raymond thinks Deep Stack could have accommodated many more had additional tables been available.

But as first efforts go, it was a start that put a smile on her face as she looks ahead to next year.

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