Bally’s $5 Million CCRI Wager Still Trains Table Dealers

Nearly two years after CCRI opened a Bally’s-funded Casino Training Academy in Lincoln, the college is still running a free 96-hour dealer class and Bally’s is still hiring off it. The gift was sold as a gaming college. The working product is a blackjack room.

Bally’s chairman Soo Kim said in 2023 that the company could not find enough people for hospitality and gaming jobs. The public campus next door became the hire.

Bally’s $5 Million Gift Was a Hiring Plan

On Sept. 14, 2023, Bally’s Corporation put $5 million into the Community College of Rhode Island Foundation, the largest gift in the college’s history, and a sum the company said doubled the endowment. Governor Daniel McKee, Senate President Dominick Ruggerio, and then-interim CCRI president Dr. Rosemary A. Costigan stood with Kim at the Flanagan Campus while the press release promised certificates and associate degrees in dealer training, casino operations, cybersecurity, iGaming operations, culinary arts, hotel management, and slot technology, with a goal of degree programs by fall 2024.

Kim called Rhode Island home and said the gift would create jobs. Costigan said the money recognized CCRI’s record of opening new pathways. House Speaker K. Joseph Shekarchi said hundreds of Rhode Islanders already had jobs at Bally’s and that the academy would give graduates more of them.

The fine print was labor. Short-term credentials were supposed to upskill people already on the Bally’s payroll and feed new hires into Lincoln and Tiverton. Scholarships were promised, with details to come. The only higher-education shop in the state with a full gaming course list, Bally’s said, would be CCRI.

Once you’re done with this, and you pass your test, you can go in and start working right away.

Craig Eaton, President of R.I. Operations for Bally’s, at the Lincoln academy opening

Eaton, who runs Bally’s Rhode Island houses, treated the class as a door onto the floor, not a campus major. That is the wager that can be checked.

Thirty Students Walked Onto Casino Carpet

CCRI cut the ribbon on Oct. 3, 2024, in a simulated pit at the Flanagan Campus that used the same carpet as Bally’s Twin River Casino Resort. Gaming tables in the room had come from Bally’s Tropicana in Las Vegas, which came down six days later, on Oct. 9, 2024. Speaker Shekarchi said that if he didn’t know any better, he thought he’d be at Bally’s. Eaton called the space sizzling. Cigarette smoke was the one floor note nobody imported.

Lead instructor Andrew Toye, a dual rate floor manager at Twin River, ran live demos for students including Douglas White and Austin DiStefano. Coursework began Monday, Oct. 7, 2024, with 30 students enrolled. The opening-week wage cited for table dealers was $35 an hour.

WHAT THE 96-HOUR CLASS COVERS

• Core games: Blackjack, plus Spanish 21, Let it Ride, Three Card Poker, and Texas Hold’em.
• Floor craft: Cheque, or chip, breakdowns, card and currency handling, gaming etiquette, customer service, and conflict work.
• The exit test: Prep for a live audition and a Rhode Island gaming license, not a CCRI diploma.
• The hours: Six weeks, Monday through Thursday, 3 to 7 p.m., with an optional Friday for makeup or extra reps.

Applicants have to clear a criminal background check, show basic math and customer-service skill, and accept a room with noise, smoke, and odors. That is the job, taught in a classroom built to feel like the job.

Cohorts Run When the Casino Needs Them

Cody Fino, CCRI’s director of workforce partnerships, said the table games class does not yield any certification. How often a new group is trained, he said, is ultimately up to Bally’s. The college built the room. The operator sets the tap.

That arrangement is still visible. CCRI’s public listing for a free 96-hour Introduction to Table Games course, sponsored by Bally’s, sat on the Flanagan Campus at 1762 Louisquisset Pike and named a Jan. 19, 2026 cohort on the same 3 to 7 p.m. weekday pattern, with Laurie Cepeda as the contact. Bally’s own 2026 job boards in Lincoln and Tiverton kept posting table games dealers, game presenters, and a “CCRI Table Games Dealer School” slot as if the college class were a requisition.

Posted pay for casual dealers is $7.50 an hour plus tokes and shift premium, which is the house base, not the $35 all-in figure used at the ribbon cutting. Experienced dealers have been offered a $3,500 hiring bonus, paid in pieces at start, at 90 days, and at one year, which is the market admitting that a six-week class does not replace a veteran on craps or baccarat. Rhode Island’s Department of Business Regulation still licenses Bally’s staff, with fingerprinting through Bally’s human resources and the State Police Gaming Enforcement Unit. Pass the class, then audition, then get the license. The state, not CCRI, stamps the dealer.

A Lincoln worker posting in August 2024 pointed at shuttered cashier windows and cuts on the floor while six-figure jobs kept landing. The academy can mint dealers and leave other hourly roles thin. It is a tap for one job title.

Where the Gaming Degrees Landed

The 2023 release said CCRI would be one of the few New England colleges with a comprehensive gaming-focused degree. The 2026-2027 catalog is thinner than that list. Dealer training remained a noncredit workforce class. A dedicated casino-operations, iGaming, cybersecurity, or slot-technology associate degree does not appear as a named major.

PROMISED CURRICULUM VERSUS WHAT SHIPPED

What did ship on the credit side is food and rooms, not the pit. On March 7, 2025, McKee and CCRI announced an associate degree in culinary craftsmanship at the Newport Campus for fall 2025, with $850,000 proposed for a culinary and hospitality hub. That release named the Bally’s $5 million as support for labor-market programs and said students would get resources in culinary and hospitality. Karl J. Guggenmos, a global master chef, helped align the cooking courses. Casinos need kitchens. They also need dealers, and that work stayed in the noncredit room in Lincoln.

Costigan, by 2026 the college president rather than the interim, had opened the academy talking about degree pathways in gaming, hospitality, and security. Hospitality got a catalog home. Security and iGaming did not show up as the degrees billed in 2023. The bet that can be marked to market is the dealer class, which kept a page, a room, and a Bally’s recruiter attached to it.

Table Games Brought In $124 Million in 2025

Rhode Island does not run a hobby pit. The American Gaming Association’s 2026 state report, using Rhode Island Lottery figures, put commercial casino gaming at $745.3 million in 2025, up 4.8 percent, a record that leaned on the first full year of legal iGaming. Traditional land-based play at the two Bally’s houses was $646.6 million, essentially flat. Electronic gaming devices did $522.6 million, up 1.1 percent. Sports betting did $40.8 million, up 7.1 percent. Bally Bet Casino Rhode Island’s iGaming handle rose to $58.0 million from $26.3 million in 2024.

RHODE ISLAND CASINO REVENUE IN 2025

• Whole market: $745.3 million in commercial casino gaming, up 4.8 percent.
• Land-based floor: $646.6 million across Lincoln and Tiverton, little changed.
• Slots and VLTs: $522.6 million, up 1.1 percent.
• Tables: table games revenue of $124.0 million, down 4.5 percent.

Tables shrank and still mattered. Casino table-game revenue is taxed at 16.5 percent, 15.5 percent to the state and 1 percent to the host town, so Lincoln and Tiverton feel an empty blackjack seat in the budget. A dealer class that costs students nothing is cheap insurance on a $124.0 million product line that is drifting down, not disappearing. Slots do not need a 96-hour auditions course. Live tables do.

The State Monopoly Behind the Classroom

Bally’s is the only casino operator in Rhode Island. That exclusive seat was locked in on June 11, 2021, when McKee signed the Marc A. Crisafulli Economic Development Act, a 20-year, no-bid lottery package with IGT and Bally’s. The state protected its third-largest revenue source. The companies wrote checks and promised jobs.

FROM THE COMPACT TO THE CLASSROOM

1. June 11, 2021: McKee signs the Crisafulli Act. IGT keeps the lottery through 2043 with 1,100 jobs and a $27 million upfront fee. Bally’s keeps the casinos and owes a $100 million renovation and expansion in Lincoln, plus 30 headquarters jobs.
2. September 2021 to April 2023: The Lincoln project adds 40,000 square feet of gambling space and a 10,000-square-foot spa, the brick-and-mortar piece of that $100 million.
3. Sept. 14, 2023: Bally’s announces the separate $5 million CCRI Foundation gift and a gaming course list.
4. Oct. 3, 2024: The Casino Training Academy opens. The dealer class starts Oct. 7 with 30 students.
5. March 7, 2025: The culinary associate degree is announced at Newport, with Bally’s named as a partner.
6. Jan. 19, 2026: CCRI’s course page lists another free dealer cohort on the original weekday clock.

The $5 million gift is not the $100 million expansion. They are two bills in the same relationship: a company that holds the only casino licenses in the state, and a public college that now teaches the cards. Kim described Bally’s as a public-private partnership and said training the next associates was good business. The academy is that sentence with felt and a shoe.

iGaming, legalized in June 2023 and live on March 1, 2024, was on the original course poster as a degree subject. The money showed up online. The catalog did not. The room that opened in Lincoln teaches the live games that still need hands, math, and a license, which is the labor shortage Kim named, narrowed to the one skill the floor cannot automate.

CCRI’s inquiry form for the dealer class stayed up. Bally’s dealer postings stayed up. The $5 million wager was never really on a full gaming college. It was on whether a community-college pit could keep Rhode Island’s only casinos in dealers, and that class is the part of the promise a student can still walk into.