Casino Table Games Managers in Their Own Words
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UNLV Gaming Press Books UNLV Libraries 2016 Tales from the Pit: Casino Table Games Managers in Their Own Words David Schwartz University of Nevada, Las Vegas, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalscholarship.unlv.edu/gaming_press Part of the Gaming and Casino Operations Management Commons Recommended Citation Schwartz, David, "Tales from the Pit: Casino Table Games Managers in Their Own Words" (2016). UNLV Gaming Press Books. 2. https://digitalscholarship.unlv.edu/gaming_press/2 This Book is protected by copyright and/or related rights. It has been brought to you by Digital Scholarship@UNLV with permission from the rights-holder(s). You are free to use this Book in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s) directly, unless additional rights are indicated by a Creative Commons license in the record and/ or on the work itself. This Book has been accepted for inclusion in UNLV Gaming Press Books by an authorized administrator of Digital Scholarship@UNLV. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Excerpts from Tales from the Pit They told me that if you were a dice dealer, you could have a job for the rest of your life, which still pretty much holds true today. We’re always looking for good dice dealers. Dave Torres And I wore glasses, I looked like a little school teacher...and it took me a good year and a half before I totally felt comfortable, and if someone called me a name or became argumentative or took a shot or anything like that, I would keep my mouth shut and deal my game. Chris Tonemah I came back to Vegas, and four days later, I was working back at the Fremont Hotel. And I worked for Fremont from 1977 to 1979....Frank Rosenthal and Anthony Spilotro were all part of that scene...back in those days, that’s the way it was. Cliff Conedy Well, obviously everything’s different, just like it’ll be different forty, forty-five years from now. You know, the casinos were all privately held with the exception of the Hughes properties.... And the people that broke me in at the Las Vegas Club, were all guys that had worked in the illegal joints around the country. Jimmy Wike TALES FROM THE PIT CASINO TABLE GAMES MANAGERS IN THEIR OWN WORDS EDITED AND WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY DAVID G. SCHWARTZ UNLV Gaming Press 4505 Maryland Parkway, Box 457010 Las Vegas, NV 89154-7010 Tales from the Pit: Casino Table Games Managers in Their Own Words © 2016 UNLV Gaming Press All Rights Reserved. Library of Congress Call Number HD8039.C3462 U76 Paperback edition ISBN 978-1-939546-09-8 Cover and interior layout by David G. Schwartz Front and back cover photography: Aaron Mayes, UNLV Special Collections Proudly designed and printed in the United States of America Set in Minion Pro Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, this book or any portion therof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review. Dedicated to Bobby Parsons, who is missed by many. Contents Acknowledgements vii 1 Introduction 1 2 Breaking In 11 3 Craps and Pai Gow Tiles 33 4 Cheating & Advantage Play 41 5 Moving Up 55 6 Memorable Players 85 7 Dealers 107 8 Bosses 119 9 What Makes Good Management? 131 10 What Makes Bad Management? 149 11 Las Vegas Casinos 165 12 Casinos Outside of Las Vegas 191 13 Changes in the Business 207 14 Do You Gamble? 235 15 General Thoughts 239 16 Advice for Those Starting Out 253 Contributors 271 Index 277 Acknowledgements Naturally, my first thanks go to the men and women who took the time to sit down with me and share their lives and thoughts. I learned a great deal by listening to them, and I hope that this book conveys some of their wisdom. The original transcripts of their interviews are available in UNLV University Libraries Special Collections; this book is a collection of thematically-linked excerpts from those interviews. I am honored and humbled by the eagerness with which so many of them shared their stories, as well as their candor. For their help in supporting the work of the Center for Gaming Research and the UNLV Gaming Press, I would like to thank UNLV Libraries Dean Patricia Iannuzzi and Director of Special Collections Michelle Light, as well the rest of the faculty and staff of UNLV Special Collections and its student assistants. The oral history project that yielded this book was made possible by the generosity of the UNLV University Libraries Advisory Board, which funded the transcription process. Without the support of the Board, not only would you not be reading this book, but the stories shared by the men and women through the project would not be available for future researchers. I am grateful for the Board’s foresight in understanding the value of this project. Further support came from Claytee D. White and Barbara Tabach at UNLV’s Oral History Research Center. Claytee guided me through the Internal Review Board (IRB) process and gave me sound advice about the mechanics of conducting a series of interviews. I was lucky to have an excellent transcriptionist, Joseph Belmonte, who did a fantastic job of transcribing the interviews and in general viii • Tales from the Pit made this project much easier for me. He also did a great final proofread of the manuscript. Thanks, Joseph, for your great work, which will inestimably benefit researchers. Aaron Mayes, UNLV Special Collections Curator of Visual Materials, photographed the cover and gave me great advice on design and layout. More support at UNLV came from Kathy Rankin, who provided a Library of Congress classification for the book, and Angela Ayers, Terry Deem, and Amy Gros-Louis in Library Administration, who helped tremendously with too many important details to count. I’d finally like to thank my family and friends, who make it possible for me to work on books like this, and everyone who supports the work of the Center for Gaming Research and UNLV Special Collections. Thank you all. TALES FROM THE PIT 1 Introduction Dealing in a casino presents challenges and rewards not seen in many workplaces. With hundreds of thousands of dollars at stake every minute, casinos are high-stress workplaces. Managing a casino workforce brings stresses of its own. In 2015, the Center for Gaming Research received a grant from the UNLV University Libraries Advisory Board that enabled it to undertake an oral history project intended to capture the stories of table games managers, including both those currently working in the field and those who have retired. There were several reasons for undertaking this project. First, the table games manager occupies an important vantage point in the casino. As someone with a long tenure in the business and employment at a number of properties and sometimes jurisdictions, he or she is privy to insights into the nature of the casino industry that might elude line employees or executives who have not spent significant time in operations. Second, table games managers—floor people, boxmen, pit bosses, shift managers, and casino managers—have, thanks to their long tenure in the industry, seen many changes in the casino business. The city in which many of them started their careers in the 1970s (and, in one case, as early as the 1950s) has changed tremendously since then. Listening to table games managers describe their early careers in their own words provides a window into a Las Vegas that is now gone. There are, unfortunately, few documentary sources that describe the everyday operations of casinos and the work conditions in them as these interviewees do. 2 • Tales from the Pit Finally, the nature of table games management is currently in transition. The traditional career path described by most interviewees—a low-paid break-in stint in a Downtown casino, followed by progressive moves “upward” to dealing on the Las Vegas Strip, ultimately in the highest-end casinos like the Desert Inn, MGM Grand, and Caesars Palace—is no longer the form. Dealers today break in even at casinos that, a generation ago, might have demanded a decade or more of dealing experience even to audition. Casinos have eliminated several management positions, from box to pit manager. Generally, interviewees felt that dealing, while still a viable career choice, has become less prestigious and less remunerative. For all these reasons, the Center undertook the oral history project. This is a necessarily Las Vegas-centric look at table game management, given the Center’s location in Las Vegas, but interviewees described their work in Las Vegas, Reno, Atlantic City, numerous tribal and state jurisdictions, cruise ships, and as far away as Australia. The crisscrossing career trajectories that some interviewees describe provide a ground-level look at how the proliferation of casino gaming created opportunities for both dealers and managers. It is hoped that the interviews captured via the project will provide a source for future historians to consider in their writing about gambling in Las Vegas in the late 20th and early 21st century, and will be of interest to those who, right now, are curious about what goes on in gaming pits, and how that action has changed over the past several decades. The complete transcripts of the interviews can be found in UNLV Special Collections; this book presents excerpts from the interviews grouped by topic.