Dealers Going for their Own...Will it finally work THIS TIME?

This very controversial article was written in July, 2020, when Brian Stanton , then Table Games Director at the Strat became the first casino executive to institute the policy of dealers keeping their own in decades. I am republishing it now as current Table Games Director and industry leader Bennie Mancino has posted with the news that Binion′s and the Four Queens casinos, two Downtown Vegas stalwarts that have been there since before most of us were born, have taken a new initiative to reinstate this policy in their respective casinos. R. Glenn Casale , the Casino Operations Director of both properties, has made a daring move to say the least! And Bennie seems to be very optimistic about it, stating that it might "be a game changer."

But does that necessarily mean a game changer in a positive way? Well, I was a dealer back in the day...way back in the day, and, ironically, it was at none other than the Four Queens casino, where, for a short time, we did have a dealers-going-for-their-own policy. And that "short" because it did not work. So, in writing this article, I am speaking somewhat from firsthand experience, though that experience definitely is dated.

So, again, will it FINALLY work? And after reading, please comment on why you think it will or won't. My take on it is just a take. I am not trying to convince anyone to agree with me.

So, here we go!

I see that in this struggling re-opening phase (during Covid), some casinos have been experimenting with the ultra-dangerous policy of letting dealers go into business for themselves! That is what letting them keep their own tokes boils down to. So shelve the flasks and forget the experiment...FAST!

This article will piss a lot of people off, but you need to hear this because I know it firsthand.

Where I start this article doesn't matter. There are soooooo many problems with letting dealers keep their own tokes. That said, let's begin with its very clear-cut history.

For those of you as old as me, you may remember the grand hoopla this issue caused in the late '70s and early '80s. Vegas dealers were still in their heyday as far as making money via tokes was concerned, and many Vegas casinos, both Downtown and on the Strip, still allowed dealers to keep their own tokes. What happened was the IRS decided to crack down on it, in the knowledge that hundreds of dealers working at top Strip casinos were making a quarter-million and up a year...and becoming tax evaders along the way. Then panic swept through the industry when dealers fiercely objected and threatened to form unions and even picketed in front of casinos in protest to the IRS taxing their tokes. Dealers have tried to unionize in Vegas many times but never had their attempts been as frenzied as that one forty years ago...over tokes.

Recently, dealers at Caesars Palace tried to unionize, so let's go back and take a look at Caesars' history with dealers' tokes, some of which I was indirectly involved with.

There is a famous Caesars incident that some of us old-timers remember. In the mid-'70s, Las Vegas legend Fletcher Jones, then the country's number-one automobile dealer and a big Vegas gambler whose son married ex-Vegas mayor Jan Jones, had a huge run at the Caesars craps tables. He won several hundred thousand, maybe more, and when he heard that the craps dealers were working for themselves, he gifted each one working his hot table with a brand new Corvette. This sparked an outrage from the rest of Caesars' dealers who may have gone home with just a hundred bucks that night.

The same scene often played out with Asian high rollers in the baccarat pit. Some of them who made multi-million dollar scores occasionally dropped a half-million on the dealers. In fact, most of you probably don't know this, but back in the day Caesars baccarat dealers had to buy their jobs, plus they had to have the "juice" (be in good favor with someone powerful) to be a qualified Caesars-Palace-Baccarat-Job-Buyer. Those baccarat jobs once sold for up to fifty grand and I don't know if there was some kind of longevity guarantee or not.

This went on from the time Caesars opened until the early '80s. And it did not sit well at all with the rest of Caesars' dealer population. To say there was resentment goes without saying. But the proof in the pudding was a huge chip stealing/cashing scam pulled off by a group of Caesars dealers and pit supervisors shortly after the Fletcher Jones incident.

Enter Richard Marcus.

Those of you who read my memoir "American Roulette" know how much I loved Caesars Palace and might even remember that at the end of the book, I wrote, "When it's all said and done, I hope to be buried somewhere on the property of Caesars Palace Las Vegas."

Now, I bet you can imagine why I said that. Not because I loved the restaurants and the Julius Caesar statues and fountains...not on your life!

I loved the dealers! You see, I knew their situation there. The ones working the high-action pits were juiced into their jobs by their payments and connections, thus they had control of their pits. They were the supervisors who supervised the supervisors. They made five times more than their supervisors (at least) so they didn't have to tell them jack shit about what was happening on the tables and didn't care what the supervisors knew or thought anyway.

So how did my cheat-buddies and I take advantage of this and cheat Caesars out of a few million over that heyday decade? You guessed it! By toking the dealers working for themselves.

We would go up to their $100 minimum blackjack tables, bet three $100 black chips, then upon winning the bet and being paid three black chips, we'd switch out the original bet and replace it with two $5,000 chocolate chips with a black on top and claim to the dealers that they paid the bet wrong, of course with four or five chocolate chips sitting on the table as back up.

And as the claim went down, so did a black-chip (or two) toke go down on the table. So each move netted $9,800 minus toke. Did this little-big bet-switch ever fail? Sure...of course...on the 152nd attempt!

You think I'm full of crap...think again!

And now get this...the vast majority of those 151 straight times getting paid over a six month period at Caesars Palace, the dealers didn't even mention his/her "mistake" to a supervisor. Simply because they made lots more money than them.

Would this scam have worked so well had the dealers not been working for their own tokes? I doubt it.

Next, you have the problem of high rollers getting too friendly with dealers whom they've been toking, maybe knowing the dealers are working for themselves. This can lead to collusion scams between those players and dealers. Say a high roller goes bad and he's been chummy with the dealer he's tipping big. This makes it easier for that player to approach the dealer to turn against the casino. Do the big inside baccarat scams ring a bell?

Okay, forget me and the rest of the cheats. The real dangers of this policy are internal. You let dealers keep their tokes, lots of them will be making more than their supervisors. That is a BIG NO-NO. How do you think supervisors, who'd been dealers for many years prior and worked themselves up to better jobs with better pay, would feel when their "underlings" are making more than them? You could end up with supervisors stealing with or without other disgruntled dealers' help.

Steve Wynn is well aware of this problem. Even without dealers working for themselves, he had dealers making more money at the Wynn Las Vegas than his supervisors and pit managers were. His solution was to force dealers to yield a percentage of their tokes to the supervisors, which, in my opinion, is not a great idea either. You just need to have your supervisors making more than the dealers in ANY case. You cannot have job promotions bringing less money to those climbing ranks. If the dealers are making that much, then so is the casino, so you just have to pay the supervisors more or they will lose faith in the company. In virtually all cases, just making sure that dealers pool their tokes will avoid this problem.

What about the internal problems that have nothing to do with cheating and stealing? What about the age-old problem of dealers hustling tokes? How do you assign the tables when dealers are working for themselves? Sure, you say, "Just rotate them from low to high minimum games and from pit to pit. But it just doesn't work. You get a super high-rolling "George" on a $15 game who wins a hundred grand and tokes the dealer ten or twenty grand. Yes, it could happen. And when it does, the other dealers get upset again; you have the resentment again, and you're back with the same problem. And of course, let's not forget the pretty-women dealers making the most money on tokes and the jealousy and resentment that is going to cause among both sexes dealing.

Now, I get it that some of you trying this in the Covid Era might be seeing some favorable results for your casinos, such as dealers encouraging more action and speeding up the games, having more incentive, etc., etc., but it will not last. And the speeding-up of the games is most likely temporary and due to fewer players and bets at the tables.

Some casino areas have reportedly had previous success with it, such as New Hampshire, but New Hampshire is not Las Vegas. Dealer attitudes and other elements are much different.

Best is to dump the dealers-keep-their-tips policy now before you really see what I mean.

Look, I can go on and on about this. But I shouldn't have to. Casino history has already proved it. The policy has never worked and it never will.

And BTW, does anyone remember whether Brian Stanton's attempt at dealers keeping their own tips worked?