Tales from the Slot Floor: Casino Slot Managers in Their Own Words
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UNLV Gaming Press Books UNLV Libraries 2018 Tales from the Slot Floor: Casino Slot 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, and the Operations and Supply Chain Management Commons Recommended Citation Schwartz, David, "Tales from the Slot Floor: Casino Slot Managers in Their Own Words" (2018). UNLV Gaming Press Books. 1. https://digitalscholarship.unlv.edu/gaming_press/1 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]. TALES FROM THE SLOT FLOOR Casino Slot 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 gamingpress.unlv.edu Tales from the Slot Floor: Casino Slot Managers in Their Own Words © 2018 UNLV Gaming Press All Rights Reserved. Library of Congress call number HD8039.C3462 U763 2018 Paperback ISBN 978-1-939546-11-1 Layout by David G. Schwartz Cover design by Nikole Herrold and Erik Swendseid of Bergman Walls & Associates Set in Minion Pro and Raleway 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 book reviews and cited attributions in scholarly and legal works. For Bill Eadington, who blazed a trail for everyone who studies gambling. Without his work, few of us would be here. Contents Editor's Note vii 1 Introduction 1 2 Starting Out 11 3 The Slot Floor 33 4 What Customers Want 57 5 Do You Gamble? 73 6 Working with Vendors 83 7 Essentials of Good Management 103 8 Signs of Bad Management 129 9 Changes in Slots 147 10 The Future of Slots 187 11 Advice 211 Contributors 229 Index 237 Editor's Note This book is a companion to the UNLV Gaming Press’s 2016 volume, Tales from the Pit: Casino Table Games Managers in Their Own Words. That book, the result of a series of oral history interviews with casino professionals, sought to provide some sources for research into table games management. This book does the same for slot management. For this project, about 20 currently working and retired casino slot managers, at various stages of their careers, were interviewed. Generally, the interview process unfolded as follows: the editor would identify a potential interview subject, discuss the interview, and, if both parties agreed, conduct the interview. After the interview was completed, it was transcribed and edited, then sent to the interviewee for further editing. Upon being received back, the interview was edited once more before being formatted and printed. This book is comprised of excerpts from the oral history interviews, and is intended to highlight the diversity of opinions recorded in them, rather than giving the “last word” on best practices or operational philosophies. With that in mind, I must caution the reader that this is not an attempt to present a consensus about best practices, and that some interviewees may contradict or fundamentally disagree with one another. That is by design. I will also note that the views and opinions expressed in this collection are not necessarily those of UNLV, its faculty, staff, adminstration, students, or benefactors, and that their appearance in the interviews and in this collection does not imply an endorsement. The complete interviews can be found on file at UNLV Special Collections and Archives, and are accessible online through SCA’s website: https://www.library.unlv.edu/speccol. The oral history project that yielded this book was made possible by the generosity of the UNLV 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. viii The publication of this book has been greatly helped by the leadership shown by Maggie Farrell, the dean of University Libraries, and Michelle Light, director of UNLV Special Collections and Archives, who have supported the work of the Center for Gaming Research and the UNLV Gaming Press. Further help came from Claytee D. White and Barbara Tabach at UNLV’s Oral History Research Center. Claytee guided me through the Internal Review Board process and gave me sound advice about the mechanics of conducting a series of interviews. I was fortunate to work with an excellent transcriptionist, Joseph Belmonte, who did a fantastic job of transcribing the interviews and was also the primary administrator of the editing process, coordinating drafts with the interviewees and serving as a vital communication link. Assembling the interview excerpts into a readable book required a great deal of labor, much of it undertaken by Jasmin Bryant, a Digital Collections student assistant. This book's cover was designed by Nikole Herrold and Erik Swendseid of Bergman Walls & Associates. Thanks also to Jennifer Kleinbeck of BWA for her instrumental support in putting together that collaboration. 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 assisted with many of the administrative details of the interviewing and publishing process. My deepest gratitude goes out to the men and women who made the time to sit down for interviews. They were all very generous, and I hope that readers will benefit from their experiences and insights. I am honored to have had a role in helping them share their perspectives. Lastly, I would like to thank everyone who is reading this, and everyone who supports the work of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, University Libraries, and the Center for Gaming Research. Thank you. TALES FROM THE SLOT FLOOR 1 Introduction Slot machines have been, since the 1970s, an integral element of the modern casino resort. From the early 1980s, they have garnered the bulk of gaming revenues in Nevada and in most American jurisdictions that have legalized casinos since then, they also produce the majority of gaming win. For that reason, they are an incredibly important part of any modern casino resort, and their management deserves documentation and investigation. In 2016 and 2017, the University of Nevada, Las Vegas Center for Gaming Research, in cooperation with the Oral History Research Center, conducted an oral history project focusing on slot managers. This was a follow-up to the previous year’s project, which documented the stories of table games managers. Excerpts from that interview project were published in Tales from the Pit: Casino Table Games Managers in Their Own Words. The current volume is a companion piece to that book, intended to complement it and to give a more complete side of the world of casino managers. The Project As with the table game managers’ interviews, interviewees were approached about their interest in contributing their time and expertise to the project. Many interviewees suggested additional people to speak with, expanding the pool of interviewees. After being recorded, the interview was processed and transcribed. After two levels of editorial review at UNLV and additional editing and feedback from interviewees, the interviews were bound and, in many cases, made available via UNLV Special Collections and Archives’ website. The interview project, similar to the table games project, did not have an overarching theme or research agenda—there was no thesis to prove or disprove or point to make. Instead, the interviewer 2 • Tales from the Slot Floor asked open-ended questions designed to solicit interviewees’ candid recollections of their career and their unfiltered thoughts on the industry’s current state. Thanks to the remarkable generosity of the interviewees with their time and thoughts, the Center has been able to document significant pieces of slot management history and practice that might otherwise have not been memorialized. This book collects excerpts from the many interviews, organized around common questions and themes. It is intended to whet the curiosity of readers and demonstrate to researchers the valuable oral histories collected by UNLV, both in slot management and in many other areas of interest. A Brief History of Slot Management A trio of German immigrant mechanics living in San Francisco developed the reel slot machine in the 1890s. Previous “nickel in the slot” machines had been present from the 1880s, but the innovations of the 1890s, which culminated in Charles Fey’s Liberty Bell (1899), delivered a three-reel machine that accepted and paid coins out automatically.1 Over the next half-century, slot machines, though often illegal, were popular. Commonly manufactured in and around Chicago, Illinois and operated by groups with more than a passing familiarity with local organized crime figures (allegedly). Slot machines could be found in tobacco stores, candy stores, and other small retail outlets in cities throughout America. These illegal machines required only the crudest “management.” Persuading merchants to host the machines, removing coins periodically, and repairing any malfunctions were the only substantive functions these managers served.