If ever an employee was meant for a specific job, Sean Tate was born to work in gaming.

“This is one of the greatest jobs anywhere,” said the Eastside Cannery dealer, a recent Premier Performance quarterly award winner for his property. “I don’t see myself doing anything else. It’s not like any other job. This is the only one in which you are constantly interacting. You are never alone. You can come to work, tell jokes with people, have a great time and then come back. Sometimes I’m on a game and it’s time to leave and I’m thinking, ‘No, I want to stay here with these people.’”

Tate’s infectious enthusiasm has practical roots. After living in New Orleans and surviving Hurricane Katrina, he relocated to Reno and then to Houston. He obtained a “normal” job with a phone company and experienced claustrophobia.

“I was in this cubicle, with stuff I had to fill, some big old box with numbers, and there was isolation,” he recalled. “I couldn’t take it any more, I just had to move.”

Three years ago, he vacationed here in search of a job. It happened for him, and last August he opened Eastside Cannery. The adrenaline matched his penchant for activity.

“It was like a fun chaos,” he said. “Everybody is rush, rush, rush, there is a full table and people standing behind people waiting to play. Everything is moving real fast. It was intense, but it was a nice experience.”

Tate gained the approval of superiors, who noticed his versatility. The Premier Performer award surfaced from the nomination of John Verley, his assistant shift manager.

“He is always smiling,” Verley said. “Sean can talk to anybody. When a table opens up, he’s my first pick to go on it. He can talk to the customers and deal at the same time, which is a nice skill. Some people can talk and not deal and some people can deal very well, but not talk.

“We love him. We also love to kid him about being from Louisiana and rooting for the Saints. They are not going anywhere.”

Tate has lived through his own version of fourth and 40. He was in New Orleans, working for Harrah’s, when Katrina struck. This was one time he believed the boy-crying-wolf philosophy and ignored the warning signs. It gave him an undesirable view of the carnage, both from inside a local school and from his own rooftop.

“I was stuck on the roof for a week because I waited too long to get out,” he said. “My whole life, I had been hearing that one day the big one was going to come. So I’d get out and we would get a close call maybe, but the big one did not come. I decided this one time to ride it out and wished I didn’t.

“The water woke me up one day. It was powerful. I never knew that refrigerators sloped. My neighbor untangled his boat and we got out of there, but then it conked out. As that was happening, we were going by a school and there was some ladder that we climbed up to get to the second floor.

“Some people worked together well, some panicked. In some cases, there were people with babies, and dogs. I can’t say I panicked or was scared, but I was kicking myself the whole time for not getting out.”

That has changed. Tate will never experience another flood, maybe not even a puddle, in Vegas. And he has found the place that makes him the happiest.

By Dave Bontempo

Casino Connection Sports Editor Dave Bontempo is an award-winning sports writer and broadcaster who calls boxing matches all over the world. He has covered the Philadelphia Flyers in the playoffs, as well as numerous PGA, LPGA and Seniors Golf Tour events, and co-hosted the Casino Connection television program with Publisher Roger Gros.