Senior lecturer Tammy Perri opens each semester of her accounting class with a simple prompt: “How many backpacks do you think it would take to carry a million dollars in cash?”
For Perri, it’s not a random guess. For seven weeks every summer, she trades the structure of her Lee Business School classroom to go behind the scenes at the World Series of Poker (WSOP), helping players walk away with their winnings. Sometimes it’s direct deposit; sometimes it’s all in cash. [For the record, the answer is three backpacks.]
The question is a subtle reminder that UNLV's many connections throughout the Las Vegas business community enrich classroom learning.
Perri’s summer job at the WSOP, for example, gives her a front-row seat to the kind of regulatory realities most textbooks only reference. “Having worked in the gaming industry gives me credibility that what I am teaching them is current and relevant,” Perri explains.
Her background makes her uniquely positioned to teach gaming auditing. She spent seven years in the gaming division of the North Dakota Attorney General’s Office and another seven as an internal audit manager in Las Vegas. She does not just explain what anti-money laundering rules say; she shows how compliance works during a live, high-pressure international event. She does not hypothesize about what can go wrong — she has lived through it, corrected it, and can walk students through every layer, from payout errors to IRS filings.
While her class addresses auditing practices across the industry, including slots and table games, “stories from WSOP always get students' attention,” Perri explains. “They love the poker side [of gaming] because they’ve played at home or watched it on TV.”
Perri, a poker player herself, started with WSOP in 2018 as a payout clerk after a friend suggested her skills, and the tournament's timing, would make her a natural fit for the temporary position. Now a player services supervisor, Perri helps manage the thousands of players from around the world who roll through Las Vegas in hopes of poker's Main Event glory.
Some of her former students now play in the tournament themselves and stop by the payout window to say hello. “It feels like summer camp for adults,” Perri says. “You meet people from around the world and get to know players who come in year after year.”
With long days, tech hiccups, frustrated players yelling, and the occasional ID flying across the counter, it’s not always glamorous — but it is reality. With each experience, she finds a lesson about compliance systems, financial documentation, or regulatory oversight to bring back to the classroom. And that’s the real jackpot.
She can tell students what it’s actually like to respond to a customer complaint from the Nevada Gaming Control Board. “We discuss in class how the GCB strictly regulates gaming activity in Nevada and how seriously they take violations and maintaining the public’s confidence and trust in the gaming industry,” she says. “I can attest to this.”
