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All around her were other anxious job-seekers competing for potentially transformative casino dealer gigs: An unemployed mother who hadn’t received a paycheck since being laid off from Verizon Wireless 19 months earlier. A Giant pharmacy tech who hated his dead-end job. A Cheesecake Factory waitress who coveted the casino’s excitement.

More than 8,600 people applied to work in the new gambling pits at the Arundel Mills casino, but only 831 had been invited to attend the three-month dealer school. Two-thirds might be offered full-time jobs paying $45,000 to $55,000 a year.

With the April 11 launch of live-action table games at Maryland Live just weeks away, some of the novice dealers were cracking under the pressure of performing — even in a mock casino with fake money.

Hand selected by their instructors, the craps students were the gifted and talented whiz kids compared with the multitudes who spent much of their time studying blackjack.

But they also faced the greatest challenge in learning the iconic dice game. With countless odds and procedures to remember and an enormous number of bets to track, craps is the most complicated casino game to deal.

And one day in late February, DeRosa, a 37-year-old group fitness instructor from White Marsh, was overwhelmed — muttering, sweating and shaking as she struggled to pick up the clay casino chips she would need to pay the winner, whatever that amount might be.

“Come on, Cara, you know this,” her teacher said encouragingly. “You’ve got this.”

To become a dealer at Maryland’s largest casino, DeRosa would have to pass her audition. To pass the audition, she would have to pay the bet.

Instead, she froze. Then she sobbed. Then she held out her hands and rotated them for the surveillance cameras that didn’t actually exist in the classroom. Then she ran for the exit.

“What is going on here?” barked the teacher, Albert Foschini, as somebody went to console DeRosa.

Foschini called off the tryouts. He couldn’t bear to observe more implosions. “It’s like death, watching youse guys audition,” he said. He puffed his cheeks like a blowfish and exhaled. “Just get back to practicing.”

DeRosa eventually returned to the tense classroom and the laborious business of learning.

“This may be fun and exciting for the players,” she said later. “But it’s not playtime for us on the other side. Dealing craps is difficult. It’s stressful.”

But, she vowed, “it’s what I want to do.”

Middle-class paycheck

As Maryland voters considered a dramatic expansion of commercial gambling last November, the pro-casino forces pushed two selling points: tax revenue and jobs. Legalizing blackjack, roulette and other table games would generate as much as $51 million in additional annual revenue, supporters promised.