One-armed poker dealer works for new arm

• Heather "Lefty" Schneck has started a gofundme page to help raise money for a new arm.
• She estimates it could cost up to $250,000 for an arm with five working fingers, including the upkeep and medical care.

Heather “Lefty” Schneck handed a stack of cards to another dealer to shuffle.

“I’m her right-hand man,” said Leo Navarro, as he whacked a set of nonexistent drums. “Bah-dum-bump.”

A few players at Schneck’s table on a recent evening snickered.

“If he hadn’t made the comment, I would have,” Schneck said.

They were a motley group of poker pals at this back table in a Cape Coral sports bar and bowling alley. Players ranged from a 24-year-old to a woman celebrating the 50th anniversary of her 36th birthday.

Schneck, as far as she and her bosses know, is the only one-armed dealer around. The 36-year-old’s personality lures players. She’s usually the one with the punchlines about the loss of her right arm, which was severed in a 2008 car crash. She has swum in circles to mess with friends ("I do a broken breaststroke."). She had a T-shirt made that reads: "When I said, eat me...This is not what I had in mind!!"

“Here we go, if you have any questions, let me know,” Schneck said, flicking out the cards to the nine players at the table.

After her 8-to-5 IT job, Schneck moonlights as a dealer at Cape Coral bars five nights a week for No-Limit Entertainment, a free poker league. Winners earn gift cards or a paid bar tab. Her money comes in tips. Schneck, who supported the league as a player, began promoting it more than two years ago and recruited about 500 of the league's 5,000 players.

At the same time, she honed her own playing skills. Last year, in a statewide No-Limit tournament with about 400 players, she made it to the final three.

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Six months ago, her bosses and company co-owners, Gunny and JoJo Gracey, decided it was time to make her a dealer. She had wanted to be one for a while. First, she had to pass training and an audition. Dealers are also expected to teach newbie players.

“Are you cool with you capitalizing on us and us capitalizing on you?” Gunny recalled asking.

“It’s all good,” Schneck said. “Let’s go.”

Early on, she used automatic shufflers.

“They were too slow for her,” Gunny said.

Now, she uses a manual shuffler or another dealer or player to shuffle.

“Most of our dealers can shuffle and flip cards in about 12 to 15 seconds. Add about 10 seconds to that for me because of the time it takes to run the shuffler,” she said.

Most poker players want to see the most possible hands, so they don’t want to sit at a table with a slower dealer, Gunny said, but “when it comes to Heather, they really don’t care.”

Even at her pace, Schneck deals at least 200 hands in an evening like last Tuesday, when one of the players helped shuffle the cards.

“Hold on, I think it’s a conspiracy!” Chawn Edmondson said, after the woman who was helping played a good hand.

Schneck recruited Edmondson, 41, to the league. He didn’t notice she was missing one arm until she started using the card shuffler. Frankly, he was surprised. That first evening, he approached her during a break, “If you don’t mind me asking, what happened?”

She told him she had been in a car crash. She doesn’t mind talking about it, but the word “crash” doesn’t adequately describe the trauma of the December 2008 night that brings tears to her eyes. One of the other passengers died. She was with friends returning from a poker tournament with another company. The driver was drunk and hit a broken-down truck in Charlotte County.

“The truck sliced into the vehicle like a can opener,” she said, though she remembers nothing of the crash. Part of her arm was severed and the skin was peeled from her upper arm. She lost about half of the blood in her body and flat-lined. A crowd of her poker friends amassed at the emergency room. After they heard what was left of Heather’s right arm was amputated at her shoulder, they gathered for a photo, some with tear-stained faces and flashed the “I love you” sign with their left hands.

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Poker, which had given her a sense of belonging after moving to Florida a few years earlier, also pulled her through. Just 13 days after the crash, the day after Christmas, still in a wheelchair, her sister wheeled her into her regular poker haunt.

“I’m a poker addict, can you tell?”

The photo of her poker family, which has since grown, sits at her bedside.

Despite her steady stock of jokes, being without an arm is a significant complication.

She can’t pull her hair into a ponytail, tie her shoes or cut steak. Denied disability benefits after the crash, she returned to college to prepare for a job she could do with one arm, she said. The pain made it hard to sit, but she graduated in 2010 with a degree in network administration.

She has phantom limb pain she describes as akin to the burning feeling of a sleeping body part, a hundred times worse. Her back often hurts while dealing but she covers grimaces with grins.

She deals for the love of it, but also because she needs the income to cover school loans, medical bills and save money for a prosthetic arm. She and No-Limit are raising money to help her get an arm with five working fingers. By her estimation, it could cost more than $250,000, which she’s trying to raise through a gofundme page.

“This is the hand I’ve been dealt with and all I can do is move forward,” Schneck said. “I just want part of my life back.”

On this Tuesday, Edmondson bought a round of shots to toast Marion Hoey, the woman celebrating the 50th anniversary of her 36th birthday.

“I couldn’t spend it with a nicer group of people,” she smiled, before slugging it.

Not only does Hoey like the way Schneck cares for her players, she admires her for dealing well, literally and figuratively, with her disability.

“I think she’s amazing,” Hoey said, tossing in another five bucks of tip

How to help

Heather "Lefty" Schneck has started a gofundme page to help raise money for a new arm. She estimates it could cost up to $250,000 for an arm with five working fingers, including the upkeep and medical care.