The following
story consists of vignettes from H. Lee Barnes’
“Dummy Up and Deal: Inside the Culture of Casino
Dealing,”
I look back on how
audacious I was the first time I tried out for a dealing job. A friend of mine
knew Benny Binion and had promised he could get me an audition at the Horseshoe.
I got a deck of cards, a layout and some used roulette chips and practiced for
two days. Actually, a couple of hours each day. On the third night I called my
friend. He walked me up to the old man’s booth in the front of the restaurant
and introduced us. Benny, who was eating a bowl of his famous chili, tilted his
hat back and looked me up and down. He seemed a bit amused as he asked how long
I’d been practicing. I told him several days.
“You nervous?” he asked.
“No, sir.”
“Then it must be your hands is nervous,” he said with a wry smile.
He told me to follow him into the pit. There he introduced me to the pit boss,
who pointed to a game. The boss told the dealer on the game that I was coming in
for an audition. I tapped the dealer out. The old man stationed himself at the
pit podium, that same smile on his lips. I shuffled the cards, which was
difficult, as the dealer I’d taken out had obviously had honey or glue on his
hands. I let one of the players cut the cards and buried the top one. The deck
was by then just about the size of a good shipping crate and weighed about 10
pounds; still I managed to pitch two cards to each player. The only problem was
that I forgot to deal myself a first card. One of the players looked at me as I
took the last card and tried to put it under a top that was nonexistent.
“What’cho gonna play with?” the player asked.
The pit boss came over, apologized to the players and told me to take the first
card off the deck and use it as my up card. It was a face card. Now I had to
look underneath it to see if I had an ace in the hole. This was no easy task,
since the deck had nearly doubled in size in the last two seconds. I managed
somehow to peek underneath. By then sweat was trickling down my neck and my
armpits were soaked. I went from left to right to give hits to whichever players
needed them. Everything went well until I reached the player on third base. He
scratched his cards along the felt to ask for a hit. He got more than he
expected. The top card was one of the four that landed right in front of his
bet. The next thing I knew, the pit boss was telling me to pay everyone at the
table.
Benny’s smile hadn’t faded one little bit. He waited for me as I backed away
from the table. He tilted his hat back again and said, “Some fellas don’t
pick this up on the first try. You’re welcome to come back sometime and give
it your best.” Recommending his chili, of course, he told me to have a bite to
eat in his restaurant and not to worry about the bill.
BREAKING IN IS HARD TO DO
Before they can make the cards do ballet in the air, before they can spin a
roulette ball at speeds approaching the sound barrier, before they can pay 12
bets on a layout faster than a car salesman can calculate his commission,
dealers must break in. Although it’s their hope that their careers will lead
them someday to work at the Mirage or Caesars Palace, dealers don’t start
there; they begin as “break-ins” at places like the Four Queens or the
Horseshoe if they’re fortunate, or, if not, the Lady Luck or El Cortez. In the
late ’70s, before they were closed and torn down, Little Caesar’s and Big
Wheel were the worst of the break-in joints, dives that offered 50-cent
blackjack and 25-cent craps, heated arguments flying as soon as the dice were
tossed, claims about every other hand in blackjack. These were the places
dealers found work on the way up or the way down—the toughest of the tough
joints, one-room casinos that bored holes in dealers’ eyes and left scars on
their souls.
At Little Caesar’s, pay was minimum wage and roughly a dollar a day in tips.
Across the Strip at the Dunes, craps dealers were knocking down $60,000 a year
in tips and keeping most of their wages as well. On her second week of
employment at Little Caesar’s, a break-in feeding her kids with food stamps
asked if she should declare income tax on her tips. Sure, the boss told her, put
your pennies in a piggy bank. Insane as it may sound, in the early 1980s, many
dealers were audited and hounded to pay taxes on undeclared tips at places like
Little Caesar’s, while those who worked at the Dunes or the Sands were granted
amnesty if they complied thereafter by declaring the full amount earned to the
IRS.
Breaking in is not so much a process of gaining mechanical skills as it is an
acclimation, a slow hardening of the soul. Dealers survive the daily rigors by
recognizing signs, by wearing wreaths of emotional garlic to fend off faux
vampires from the Upper Peninsula. Dealers who often have no sense of themselves
or their spouses or children often express surprising insights into the forces
that operate around them. Cynicism is pervasive. Survival in a casino depends on
acquiring it.
A casino is a microcosm of a society that desires immediate gratification, risk
without danger, reward without labor, recognition without earned respect. Our
culture demands a Las Vegas or a Reno or an Atlantic City or the dozens of
river-boat casinos found in the South and Midwest to provide an arena in which
to act out that which is otherwise leashed. We need a place absent of reproach
or reprisal. Dealers are sometimes the target of the most outlandish behavior.
It is then that they are drawn into the theater, then that they become actors in
the comedy or drama. What dealer doesn’t have a story?
Dealers merely help facilitate chance but are perceived quite differently.
Veterans of the casino wars understand this and have developed mechanisms to
deal with it—unflinching eyes, a deadpan expression, methodical motions that
express disgust or boredom. Old-timers speak of pit bosses kicking them in the
ankles and asking, “Can’t you win a hand?” Others tell stories of bosses
sprinkling salt on losing tables. Both versions suggest, in some way, that when
Pascal’s mathematics collide with the human desire to control an outcome,
superstition and intimidation win.
At Little Caesar’s, a defunct casino legendary as hell for break-ins, one of
the bosses would switch dealers every hand if a player had a streak. At the
Mint, a floor man changed decks four times in 10 minutes. At the Maxim, a pit
boss in craps often took dice off the game to spin and mike them, then he would
hide them in his pocket. Men in $300 silk suits have not advanced much beyond
the aboriginal stage of the tribesman in New Guinea who paints his face to
control the weather. Don’t look for calm reasoning here. There are spirits at
work.
You’re a break-in and you don’t yet have the stories in place, so you try to
function on a rational level in an arena where reason is out of place. This is
how it begins: confusion, anger, anxiety. Turn the dice over; give the deck an
extra shuffle; go slow; go fast; get ’em in the air; dummy up and deal.
THE FACE-OFF
This may be just an urban legend, as it has been repeated so many times and gone
through so much revision that the source is lost, except those who have dealt
don’t doubt it one bit. The story goes that a young female break-in was placed
on a blackjack game where a high roller was playing $500 on five spots. The high
roller was way ahead of the game, up more than 20,000. This woman was picked to
go in and deal to him because she had been winning on another game and the
bosses were superstitious. Break-ins, after all, are lucky.
The shift boss and pit boss and floor man hovered nearby. Though nervous, she
picked up the deck, shuffled and offered the cut card to the player, who
carefully cut the deck. Hands trembling, she buried the top card and dealt two
cards each to all five of his hands and two for herself. Her top card was an
ace. She called for insurance. The pit boss smiled at the shift boss. The axiom
about break-ins being lucky was holding up.
One by one the player peeked under each of his hands, pinned the cards under the
bets, and when he’d looked at and pinned the last hand, he shook his head,
signaling no insurance. The dealer carefully looked at her hole card. She
didn’t have a face card. She asked if the player wanted a hit. The high roller
shook his head. He was good on all hands. She turned over her hole card and hit
and hit again to 16, then again to an 18. The pit boss growled under his breath.
The dealer reached to turn over the first of the high roller’s hands, but
before she could, he swept all of the cards from all of his hands into one pile.
Immediately the pit boss and shift boss charged the table, shouting that he
couldn’t do that. The player smiled and said, “Just go ahead and pay
them.”
The boss turned over the cards. The player had 10 of the 16 face cards in the
deck. No matter how the hands were arranged he’d have 20 on each of them.
THE PROJECT
I was on the floor on graveyard at the Maxim, which wasn’t a break-in joint.
Most of the dealers were required to have three years’ experience to work
there. In those days it was a good house in terms of tips. The casino manager
was known to be kind of his own person, which is another way of saying he had
some unorthodox notions, but he’d also do some humane things from time to
time. One of his little acts of kindness came after a porter found a wallet with
several hundred dollars in it. The porter turned the wallet in, and the casino
manager took this act of honesty to heart and gave the porter a job as a dealer.
At the time, we got some pretty good action in the casino, especially on late
swing shift and early graveyard. Well, the porter was assigned to graveyard.
That meant he came in at 4 in the morning. At the same time, another of the
casino manager’s project dealers (people he was determined would become
dealers), a woman who’d worked in the accounts department as a secretary, was
also breaking in. I spent half my time watching these two break-ins and
correcting their mistakes.
By the end of the first month, the ex-porter still couldn’t pay off a
blackjack, any blackjack, other than a $2 bet, without making a mistake. Every
blackjack payout, no matter how many times he’d made the payoff before,
flustered him as much as the last one had, and yet every time I came to his aid
he got upset and even more nervous. More than once I thought the poor guy was
going to have a seizure.
The woman, on the other hand, made mistakes because she tried to go too fast and
carry on conversations with the players, and it was impossible to correct her
mistakes without her whining about being corrected and reminding me how she had
her job because the casino manager wanted her to have it because she was “so
good with people.” When she looked at her hole card, players in the MGM across
the street could see it. Of the two, she was the harder to supervise. The
ex-porter, essentially a nice guy, was thankful for getting a dealer’s job,
and he tried but just wasn’t competent.
Invariably, the two of them ended up in my pit.
One morning I was exhausted already from watching the two of them and fixing
their mistakes when I finally got a well-earned but short break. Earl, the floor
man who relieved me, had been in the business for more than 25 years. He always
looked like he’d been interrupted from a nap, but he knew the score. He told
me to take a 15. He looked at the ex-porter and the ex-secretary and said,
“Well, well, Lumpville. Have a good break and hurry back.”
When I returned, the ex-porter was staring at a player’s $15 bet and trying to
figure out what to pay the player for his blackjack. He took a stack of $5 chips
out of the rack and set them before him on the layout, but didn’t do anything
with them, just stared at the blackjack. A couple of seconds later, he put those
back in the rack and scratched his head. Now he came out with a stack of $25
checks. He scratched his head again. It was obvious that he had advanced beyond
flustered into completely boggled. He scraped the toe of his shoe over the
carpet. I asked Earl if he was going to help the dealer.
Earl looked at me with his perpetually drowsy-eyed look and said, “When he
scratches his ass, I’ll go over.”
It wasn’t half a second later that the porter reached behind himself and
scratched his butt.
“Excuse me,” Earl said. “Time to go help.”
MAKING ENDS MEET
At 26, she has two kids, a girl, 5, and a boy, 3, and a mortgage,
responsibilities. She’s still on the extra board after eight months and
working only three or four days a week, making barely enough to make the house
payment and feed her kids. She seeks the advice of another dealer, a woman a
year or two older, who’s been in the business three years. They sit on the
couch in the break room, smoking and talking. The younger one talks around the
subject, says her ex-husband isn’t real good about child support, that she’s
been late twice with the mortgage.
The older woman listens, occasionally sucking on a cigarette and blowing the
smoke at the ceiling. She’s a good listener and quickly figures out in what
direction the conversation’s headed. Before it gets too intimate for her
liking, she snuffs out her cigarette.
“Tell you what,” she says and names the man who schedules the dealers.
“He’s the guy to see.”
The younger dealer says the man intimidates her. The older one understands, as
he used to intimidate her as well. She smiles knowingly and looks the other up
and down. “He’s a man. You’re attractive. Figure it out.” The older one
stands and smoothes her skirt, checks her nylons in the mirror and starts to
leave. She has a second thought. “I’ll tell him you have a problem. That way
he’ll make the approach. Never know, you could get to like him.”
ELVIS INSURANCE
Colonel Parker bet every number every way he could get to it. Sometimes, so many
chips were on the roulette layout that the numbers were hidden. The table was
reserved for him and him alone, and the Hilton allowed him to have all the
colors of the chips, each marked at a given denomination. It was virtually
impossible for him to know how much he was betting on a given spin. He spread
the chips until he had no more. The table was roped off. A gallery would form to
watch. People were almost as intrigued with Colonel Parker as they were with
Elvis.
Rumor had it that Elvis wanted to stop playing the showroom but that the Colonel
was buried in markers and kept renewing the contract. They were supposed to have
argued over it. On the night in question, the dealer had been buried for some
four hours, and when he came off the break, he asked Colonel Parker if he knew
he couldn’t win.
“Don’t have to, son. Got me a million-dollar pair a sideburns making me more
‘an I ever could lose to you.”
The dealer went on his break, knowing it was true. Of course the reason Elvis
never performed at other hotels is that Colonel Parker was using the contract to
pay off his markers at the Hilton. The casino kept extending him credit, so the
cycle went on and on. The dealer was called down from his break and told to
report to the pit boss, who told him he was suspended for telling the Colonel he
couldn’t win.
“I asked him a question,” the dealer said.
“Same thing.”
The dealer, happy for the extra time off, took the two-day suspension and went
fishing at Lake Mead. Years later, when the Colonel had died and Elvis had died
and the dealer had been fired in a mass layoff, he told the story to another
boss at a different casino.
“I heard that story,” the boss told him. “But that the dealer was
fired.”
Knowing he was part of a Las Vegas legend, the dealer smiled.
THE DRAGON LADY
I never knew her name. We just called her the Dragon Lady. She had a temperament
that was half fire and half poison. Every dealer in the joint hated her. One
even told the bosses they could fire him if they wanted to, but he wasn’t
going to deal another hand to her. He didn’t get fired, but it created a
problem because other dealers started balking about going in on the game if she
was playing. Once a boss sent a Vietnamese woman dealer to the Dragon Lady’s
table. The temperamental player snatched some cards from the discard rack, tore
them up and threw them in the air. She wouldn’t let women deal to her, or
Asians, male or female, so the Asians and the females were all excused and the
only ones left were white and black males. The women dealers showed no sympathy
toward us males. One said it was what men had coming for being the pigs they
were.
I had no desire to go on the game the day of my blow-up with the Dragon Lady,
but I did. The casino books the bets and pays the winners, and that’s what
makes the paycheck come home. I’d dealt to her before, and, yes, it was every
kind of pain short of physical torture a human can endure, but a shift is only
eight hours and I had survived my past encounters. At least that was my
thinking.
She was already stuck, not in the grave exactly, but down 40 or 50 grand. I
buried a card and waited for her to bet. But she just sat there sipping a straw
in a glass of ice and stared at me about as hatefully as one human can at
another. I remembered seeing as a kid old reruns of “Flash Gordon.” She
reminded me of the evil Ming. I figured I was there for eight hours, and if it
took her that long to bet, all the better. No sweat off me. Finally she spoke.
“You think you one hot motherf---er,” she said. “You not. You not shit.
You not even a piece of dirt under my fingernail.”
I didn’t say anything.
She stood. “You think you better than me?” She held out her hand for me to
see the rings on her fingers. One diamond was about three carats.
I looked at the diamond and asked, “How many batteries does that take?”
She cranked her arm back and heaved the glass she’d been sipping out of. It
missed me, cleared the pit and hit a slot machine somewhere. By then she had
gone completely berserk, throwing around profanity and threats. The pit boss
came over and tried to calm her. He kept asking her to relax, but she didn’t
slow down a bit. The shift boss and two security guards arrived, but she held
them at bay with her threats. Players at nearby games gathered up their chips
and moved farther away. It took most of 10 minutes to get her calm enough to ask
her what had provoked the incident. What the bosses really wanted to know was
what I had said, but she really didn’t know. She kept pointing to her rings
and muttering that I’d insulted her. Her explanations weren’t lucid, and the
more she tried to explain what I’d said the worse her accent got. Finally the
shift boss asked me what had happened. I told him about the batteries. He cupped
his hand over his eyes and shook his head. The way he acted, shaking his head
and clicking his tongue in his cheek, you’d think I’d threatened her or
called her a name, maybe vowed to kill all her posterity or something. He told
me to see him when I went on break.
She sat down and started playing as if nothing had happened. And I did my best
to deal as if nothing had happened, all the while thinking how sick this all
was.
I found the shift boss on my break, but when I asked what he wanted, he merely
dismissed me with a wave of the hand. After the break, I went back to the same
game. The Dragon Lady was waiting for me. She said that I would be lucky for
her, and if I wasn’t, she would have me fired.
I dealt the cards. If she lost a hand, she tore those cards in two. If she won a
hand, she threw the cards at me. No one intervened. No one told her that her
behavior was inappropriate. No one cared about anything but the chips that went
her way or came back to the house. She won most of what she had lost. When my
hour was up, my feet were burning and my back was sore. I was particularly
grateful to see my relief enter the pit. He tapped me out and I started to clap.
As I raised my hand, the Dragon Lady dropped a $5 check in front of me and asked
for change. I gave her $5.
“Here, for you,” she said, setting a dollar token on the layout. “You
lucky me.”
I took the token to the dealers’ box and dropped it. A woman dealer saw what
I’d dropped and asked if that was all I got for all the money I’d given out.
“No,” I said, “I got that for taking all the bullshit you don’t have
to.”
She said that now I knew the kind of crap women had to take every day.
Some time later that same week the casino barred the Dragon Lady from playing
and asked her to leave. By that time, she’d been banned from playing in so
many other casinos, there remained only a handful where she was still welcome. I
heard she started playing at the Imperial Palace, and then a few weeks, perhaps
two months later, a rumor circulated that she’d been found dead, the victim of
a robbery or foul play. It’s hard to put teeth into rumors, but I remember
hoping it was true. Sick as it sounds, it seemed fitting at the time.
BUSTED
In 1987, we had this well-endowed woman with no bra on the craps game at the
Aladdin. It was busy, the dice were rolling for the players and she had them.
She was wearing a halter top, screaming and bouncing around like she’d just
been granted a divorce and a million-dollar settlement. I sent her the dice. She
shook them and jumped up and down. Just as she got ready to throw, her halter
straps came loose, both of them. But she was bent over and looking up at the
other end of the table. There she was, breasts hanging out and so excited about
rolling the dice she didn’t realize it. Everyone else did, though. All the
action stopped except her. The dice went down the table. It was my job to watch
them, but I didn’t. And neither did the box man. We were all staring at her.
She was still jumping up and down, her breasts putting on a hell of a show, when
she noticed. She pulled up her top, held it firmly, and asked what the number
was. No one knew.
SWEETHEART DEAL
We called him the Sweetheart. “The Sweetheart’s here,” we’d say, and
everything that was grim turned bright. He’d land in the baccarat pit and put
us up for a tie right off, never a second thought. He knew our names and even
the names of a few of our children. He’d ask about them and wonder if we were
saving for our kids’ educations. He was a regular guy, only better, if you
know what I mean. He lived in Los Angeles, actually Brentwood, I think. He
played tennis. Once in while, he showed up in tennis apparel. We’d ask how his
game went, and he’d just answer with a shrug. He never was one to talk about
himself. Humble, you could say.
“I’m not very good at it,” he once said. “My employees try to let me
win, but I’m just not very good. But I bet we can beat this game.”
He used “we” a lot whenever he talked about beating the game. We were on his
side, and he knew it. Even the bosses were for him. Of course, they were in for
the layoff whenever the Sweetheart was in. One weekend we gave over 10 grand to
the bosses, three of them, each night. The pit boss got four grand, while the
other two picked up three apiece. I think we gave the casino shift boss two
grand as well, but in the form of a Rolex. I don’t know how much the cocktail
waitress made, but that was the weekend the Sweetheart took the table for three
million, and she couldn’t bring him grapefruit juice and coffee fast enough.
He caught the streak he always wanted, stayed awake almost to dawn every night
and walked out the happiest man alive.
I bet he’d be pleased to know that the money I made then is paying for my
daughter’s college right now, business administration, and I already put the
boy through law school. How much did we make in tokes that weekend? Ten percent
of what he walked away with, plus about $10,000 from other players who were in
on the streak. I took home over $70,000, most of it on Saturday. I woke my wife
up at 4 o’clock in the morning and dumped the money on the bedspread.
Forty-two thousand, we counted out. She tossed money in the air and buried her
face in it. She’s a country girl who didn’t have milk money when she went to
school. She never imagined so much money at once. The most I ever brought home
before that was $6,000. We couldn’t sleep. We got up out of bed and counted it
again and after we set 20 grand aside for the kids’ college fund, we made a
list of all the things she wanted for the house. We tiled the patio and
installed a gas barbecue. No pool. I didn’t want my kids drowning. I have a
terrible fear of pools. When I first came to Las Vegas, I lived in the area
called the Naked City. It’s over by the Stratosphere. A baby boy drowned in a
swimming pool. His mama left him alone for two minutes with the door open, and
when she got back the baby was gone. They found him in the pool. Three years
old. No pool, I said to her. Most things, I let her have her way, but not that.
No pool. I took her hand and led her into the daughter’s room. She was 5 then
and sleeping like an angel. I gave my wife a hug and said to her, “The
Sweetheart’s done a good thing for us.”
I’m a simple guy. I never expected a lot of things out of life. I got lucky.
This business is a crazy one, me making all this money and all. But I’m a
family man. I take vacations with the family, even now. I’ve seen people make
all sorts of money and they’ve got nothing, some of them because of drugs;
some just because they buy everything they can or they blow it gambling or on
women or on men, depending. My wife’s a good woman. I never held back a nickel
of what I made. I write up one parlay ticket a week during football season. I
love the Falcons, pathetic as they are. My wife approves of $20 a week on
football. She watches the games with me and tells me her picks, though I never
bet them. She likes the Oilers, which is about as sad as liking Atlanta.
She’s helped me stay close to what life’s about. I think the Sweetheart
would appreciate that as well. That’s why when he died, I took the week off
work and flew my family to the funeral. I wanted my son and daughter, and
especially my wife to pay respects to the man who made our life a lot better.
It’s easy for people in the business to get bitter. They forget what life is,
if they ever knew. Me, I try to give everyone a chance. It’s not always easy
to like another person, but spending time disliking people can’t be very
healthy if what I’ve witnessed is true. I’d like to add that the
Sweetheart’s funeral was a fine one. Everyone spoke highly of him. I told him
that the other dealers sent their best. The old timers, me being one, talk about
him even now. I guess being remembered is something.
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