Is it in Error, or Theft?
And the art of prevention
This Week’s Subscriber Question:
What are some measures that are taken to prevent casino dealers from cheating or accidentally giving players too much money/chips when making change?
Procedure. Any deviation away from house policy and all eyes are on (high) alert. There are floor supervisors, pit mangers, shift managers, eye-in-the-sky, and mystery shoppers who are trained to note any variations in (house) procedure. Details such as shuffling sequence, how the monetary bills are fanned out across the table, positioning of the chip values from the chip rack to the felt, and what hand is used while stacking and handing the chips off to the player, are a few examples. In gaming your hands are everything, and must stay in view at all times. Unnatural behaviors such as going to your body repeatedly, brushing the hair away from your face, and picking your nose are movements that bring attention.
It’s all in the details.
In the event certain detected errors are discovered (intentional or otherwise) inspection is then focused on reviewing surveillance footage. The casino manager further reviews, and many times his trained eyes can often note any minute details deviating from the procedural patterns.
Making change, or exchanging denominations of chips or money must by okay’d and verified by floor supervisors prior to all exchanges.
One or two mis-paid bets may go unnoticed, depending on the floor manager’s attention (or lack of) to watch their assigned games. Inaccuracies are reviewed and studied in surveillance at great length to determine possible nefarious behavior and potential collusion between supervisor, dealer and player.
Players are also carefully observed. Typically a dealer can’t cheat without a player. It takes time to catch those working solo in most instances.
Guess who the real eyes are in the casino?
The players!!
Yup, they will drop a dime in a New York second if they see something they don’t like or think someone is getting a better deal than they are. Players rarely confront that dealer directly.
The errors may involve the same or an entirely different player each time. In any event, if multiple inaccuracies are made, and the other gamblers(s) feel slighted they will go and tell a manger, a host, or even another dealer, typically the relief.
Most dealers who cheat are outed by suspicious players or their fellow dealers.
For example, if one dealer on a crap crew of four is cheating, the entire crew is held responsible as well as the box (person) and floor supervisor. Everyone is accountable and can be fired, even those not directly on the game while the direct incident takes place. We’ve (all) been taught to trust no one.
Dealers not paying attention (gazing off into space, checking watches, looking for relief to break, watching TV on the big screens, or eyeballing a hottie walking past the game, you get the idea) make careless mistakes and have been fired resulting in difficulty getting another job.
Often times wrong accusation is simply a poor dealer who can’t do the math, follow proper procedure, or (often times) accidentally overpays the player and can be accused of cheating. It rarely happens, but it does. If a dealer is accused of cheating he can be blackballed and his livelihood and reputation go up in smoke.
One layer put in place to combat cheating: no fraternizing with players, and no husband/wife or significant others can work together on the same shift or in the same pit. Exceptions to this rule are Native American gaming establishments — they don’t seem to mind, and I’ve never understood the lax.
Mistakes are made all the time but when added up, they all matter.
Casinos are built on numbers, probability, and precision. Errors can cost the casino thousands into millions of dollars annually. The more mistakes, the more the bottom line is affected. There is little room for miscalculation. Casinos are all about making money.
And for this reason procedures are put into place to protect their businesses and customers.
Dealers aren’t cheating the players. They are stealing from the casino.
Why Do Dealers Steal?
They are few and far between, but there are some.
I worked on one particular gambling ship in Florida. The dealer pay was $2.13 an hour. The tokes (dealer parlance for tips) ranged from $23-$28 an hour for the (2) four-hours, while tables were in play.
The floor supervisor pay was $85 a shift for the two 4-hour shifts a day — travel time in and out of port was not counted.
The dealers and floor supervisors were responsible for doing the soft count on the return from international waters. They were also required to clean the tables, empty ashtrays, wipe down the slot machines, and pick up trash from the floor. Uncompensated. Well, do we factor in that $2.13 an hour?
(I looked up the definition of uncompensated in the Oxford Language Dictionary and they used “…uncompensated exploitation of the Third World….” Apropos definition of the word in the above example is spot on — don’t you agree?)
The ship was 165' long and held (optimistically) 402 give-or-take passengers and staff. It was nicknamed The Vomit Comet because it was flat-bottomed and in rough seas it tended to roll sideways down inside the tough of sea swells. On rough days at sea as the gaming continued many of the players were reduced to hanging off the side of the ship throwing up overboard until we made it back into port.
Anyway, surveillance was minimal and there were many dealers and supervisors that came in from other part of the world who had different work ethics. They were used to long hours, little pay, and sparse working conditions.
Not so for many of the Americans who worked on board. The boat was ripe for criminal activity, especially from the inside.
I came to work in Florida straight from working in Las Vegas, the city of procedural oversight, and gaming rule where The Gaming Control Board had the authority to suspend, revoke, and blackball anyone caught cheating, ending any and all chance of working on the legal side of gaming for a lifetime.
I was scared straight to play by the rules.
In Florida there were no governing bodies to oversee casino gaming laws in international waters, except for the respective ship owners themselves. It was the wild, Wild West of gaming.
The federal Johnson Act does authorize casino gambling on both cruises to nowhere and multi-day cruises. As previously noted, the State of Florida has no authority to regulate or tax casino gambling on cruise ships. — The Florida Senate Interim Project, Nov. 2003
Was I tempted to steal?
I’d be lying to say it wasn’t tempting to think about it. Especially when some of the biggest thieves were the very supervisors being paid to watch the dealers. These weren’t the days of driving Lambos, trading cryptocurrencies, or living in penthouses. But. New Cadillacs, the occasional Rolex watches, and flashes of large bankrolls popped up often enough to get my imagination teeming with ideas of retiring and living in that delusional place of forever paradise.
Stealing from the casino is one thing. Hustling tips (known in gambling parlance as tokes) was the area where I chose to bend the rules. Another story for a different day.
Back to the sea.
One night I was on the stick (running and calling the crap game) when a box supervisor (who sits in the middle of the game, on a stool where he watches the action) named Fran tapped a black chip ($100 denomination) on the table; a known ritual indicating he was dropping a tip for us into our toke box. I looked around at the players and nobody was playing black chips.
Warning. When something doesn’t feel or look quite right, we as dealers are signaled to go on high alert and watch for signs of foul play.
Fran was tapping the table with the black chip in one hand, the other was busy sliding a purple ($500 denomination) chip down into his cowboy boot.
This had been going on for months before I got there. I never found out if the dealers were in on it and turned a blind eye, or if they simply were unaware it was going on. I tended to think the former rather than latter, but Fran was the only one who was terminated. It was a miracle the rest of us didn’t get fired, but (maybe) not so much of a rarity on the high seas.
There were 29 gambling cruises to nowhere that sailed the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Ocean that year. It was easy to jump ship and get a new job if the working conditions and money didn’t fit. The money was generally good and could be great on most ships. It was hard working two shifts daily, sometimes six days a week.
But.
Living in the tropics where rum punches were served for breakfast, and working where the office windows held the mind captive to the hypnotic turquoise and emerald seas for as far as the eyes could see, while the white sandy beaches and balmy breezes beckoned, who could resist, especially after living in the desert for 15 years?
It’s natural to ask, why steal?
Fran had recently remarried and between the two of them they had 11 kids. His wife Denise was also a supervisor. She worked the 21 pit.
Do the math.
Did I condone it?
Desperate times sometimes requires drastic measures. What did bother me, was wondering if Denise knew what was going on, or if she had her own thing going on.
Morally, stealing is offensive to me, even in what can be construed as sometimes a dirty and unfair business.
Years later I saw Fran in downtown Las Vegas where he supervising in a grind joint, likely making close to what he’d been making in Florida, sans the stealing. We spoke briefly, and shared a laugh or two about our adventures at sea.
He’d recently divorced again and his kids were grown and out on their own. We didn’t talk about details of his termination. But he did casually mention a (newly hired) Atlantic City dealer had turned him in, for not following procedures. Sometimes things are better left unsaid.
Once upon a time the gambling industry was rife with corrupt characters, and as in any industry, there are always a few rotten eggs. The rotten eggs in gaming get cracked more often today than days gone by.
Today casino gaming is a respectable business, traded on the Nasdaq, and forecasted to reach $266.44 billion between 2022 and 2027 — Top Trends for the Gambling Industry
I can’t think of a reason why dealers or supervisors today would want to steal, can you?
I find this article very interesting and informative. I never would have guessed that the payers were the real eyes in the casino, but it does make sense. Also, I did not realize casino gaming is a part of Nasdaq. Thanks for sharing, Patti.
I'm not a gambler and have walked through one casino in Atlantic City...that's the extent of my experience. But it's interesting to hear about the various players and the 'games' being played!