As you know, there are three shifts in a casino’s twenty-four hour day: grave, days and swing. Under the traditional system, the outgoing and incoming shift bosses "take the count" three times a day, at the shift change. As the shift bosses move from game to game, security guards follow them and change the drop boxes on each table game. The incoming shift boss completes the "master log" which, when completed, will have the "opening" amounts for all games on his shift. The outgoing shift boss will complete the "brownie" which lists the individual amounts by denomination and the total "closing" amount of the game and will be dropped in the outgoing shift’s drop box. The outgoing shift boss will then accompany the cart containing the drop boxes to the cage and turn in a copy of the master log and a copy of the brownie for each game.

The new trend for shift change involves the same procedures, except that the drop boxes are only changed once a day: during the change from swing to grave shifts.

Besides attempting to maintain game protection during this vulnerable period of the day, a floorperson has three main responsibilities during the count:

1.) To complete a new sweat sheet for the incoming shift and turn in the sweat sheet for the outgoing shift. This was discussed in the last chapter.

2.) To close out player’s rating cards for the outgoing shift and start new rating cards for the incoming shift. This will be discussed more thoroughly in the next chapter.

3.) To avoid doing table fills after the outgoing shift boss has totaled the old master log, which is usually thirty to sixty minutes before the count and to avoid doing fills after the count until the cage has had a change to "roll" the shift. Rolling the shift involves entering the closing amounts for the outgoing shift, for each game. Those amounts then become the opening amount for the incoming shift.

This last point becomes the first guide to when to do table fills: don’t do fills unless absolutely necessary in the last hour of the shift and don’t do fills in the beginning of a shift until the cage has had a chance to roll. Sometimes, it is impossible to follow these guidelines. Events, such as a big player choosing to buy-in for five-thousand dollars on a five dollar minimum game will necessitate you making a call to your pit or shift boss and informing him that you need to do an "emergency fill" for that game.

What you don’t want is for laziness or bad planning on your part to be the reason that an emergency fill is needed. You also don’t want to order your fills piece meal, ordering one or two fills at time, which causes security to be making too many trips to the fill bank at the cage. The strategy most floorpersons seem to discover on their own is to fill all tables in their section as soon after possible as the new shift rolls. Unless of course they aren’t needed, then it is better to wait until the conditions of the racks justify it. And to fill all of their games towards the end of their shift, so the games are ready for the shift change and so your relief will have ample checks when he takes over your section.

The cardinal sin for a floorperson is to run out of checks on a game. If you have a big player, you need to make sure you keep enough checks on the game to insure you will be able to withstand a protracted winning streak. If you do run out of checks, all you can do is stop the game and order an emergency fill.

The "order for fill" (or "request for fill") forms are either kept on the podium or bound together in a book. There is almost always a top (white) copy and a carbon (yellow) copy. When using order for fill slips that aren’t bound together it is sometimes easier if you use a clipboard, however you don’t want to write on a form with other forms under it, as your writing will show up on the carbons of the forms beneath it. If completing an order for fill form that is contained in a book, make sure you have the cardboard cover inserted under the yellow copy of the form you are writing on.

Your supervisors will be expecting you to follow one of the two possible guidelines for ordering fills. The first and probably least common is that the total of a fill must be in increments of one thousand dollars. If this is the case, you will need to start with the smallest denomination first. E.g., I want to order $20 is halves, so I order $80 in ones, so it is an even one hundred. I then need to plan on ordering either $900 in red or $400 in red and $500 in green, so it will total an even $1000. If you are expected to use this method it is because the pit manager wants to be able to record your fill on the master log as 1.0 as apposed to 1010 and have the total of the fills on the master log match exactly the total amount the cage says were done.

The second and more common guideline is only order checks in full stacks. This is done to make the job of preparing the fills easier for the person working the fill bank in the cage and to reduce the chances of them making a mistake. It is this guideline I will be using in the examples presented in this chapter.

When completing an order for fill form, I always enter the peripheral information (shift, date, game type and number and my signature first so I am unlikely to forget them. While few pit managers expect your signature to be legible, your employee number must be, so someone can figure out who signed the form.

So the pit boss has informed me that the shift has rolled and I can do fills if I want to. I will still be using the examples of BJ’s 1, 2, 9 and 10 that were used in Chapter 2. When I ran down those games I knew of at least two games that I wanted to fill so I will take my sweat sheet, my black ink pen, a pencil and the fill book that contains the "request for fills" forms.

The general procedure begins with checking my sweat sheet to insure it’s accuracy. Then checking my rack and deciding how much it needs and then subtracting whatever checks are on the layout (or I know a player has gone south with) because I want have room in the rack if the players lose those checks or colors up.

As much as I would like to get the blacks to three stacks, the six checks are enough to prevent me from ordering a stack. If there were only four or five extra black, I would definitely order a stack. I will order one thousand in green so I will be at twenty four hundred. I never order to achieve two full tubes of green, since I want to be able to absorb a couple of hundred without the necessity of utilizing the empty tube I always leave myself with.

I leave myself an empty tube so the dealer will have a place to put barber pole losing bets prior to cleaning them and so he has a place to accommodate at least three stacks of checks a player might come up to the table with and lose.

Ordering four hundred in red will get me where I want to be. Each tube of the rack will hold eighty dollars worth of dollars or halves. I want to get the silver as close to the top as possible, without going over. In this case, I will order eighty in dollars and forty in halves. Always make sure you fill the silver up when filling a game. Nothing demonstrates incompetence better than a table being short on silver after a fill is done!

I complete the fill slip as shown below, and then time-stamp the back of the yellow copy and leave both copies near the paddle. If this casino’s procedures don’t call for either copy of the request for fill to be dropped when the fill arrives, some floorpersons will sign the "filled by" section of the form and leave just the white copy on the game and leave the yellow copy on the podium.

If this game were dead I would order five hundred green, four hundred red, sixty in dollars and fifty in halves. Remember, my one player on this game has one hundred black, one fifty in green and one hundred red. The player’s black and green won’t affect my ordering decision. However, I will mentally subtract the player’s one hundred red from the four hundred red I need to complete the rack.

Remember that I have two players on this game that at the moment have a total of six hundred green. So I will order three hundred in red, twenty in dollars and twenty in halves.

BJ-10 is a twenty-five dollar minimum game and I won’t fill it the way I would a five-dollar minimum. I will only fill up to two full tubes of red and in some houses, I would only fill up to one tube of dollars, especially if the game is subject to having one thousand dollar checks on it.

The player still has ten thousand purple and seventeen hundred black. I don’t like to keep more than one tube of purple but I will order a stack of purple because I am counting on one of three things happening. Either the player will quit with the checks he has now and color up his black, in which case I will have the black and purple the way I want it. Or he will lose everything and in the case of this unlikely miracle, I won’t mind either having an extra stack of purple or doing a credit. Or he will continue his winning streak and I might well need another stack of purple.

The green in the toke box certainly won’t be coming back so I will order two thousand green. Twenty in dollars and twenty in halves will complete this fill.

Continued......

Introduction to “CMS”   - Chapter 3 Part Two

Chapter 4

Rating Cards

Transferring cards.