Dummy Up And Deal: Inside The Culture Of Casino Dealing

1. Breaking In

1 BREAKING IN Before they can make the cards perform ballet in the air, before they can spin a roulette ball at speeds approaching the sound barrier, before they can pay twelve bets on a layout faster than a car salesman can calculate his commission, dealers must learn the basics of the craft. They must break in and are therefore called “break-ins.” 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, at the Lady Luck or El Cortez. Before Little Caesar’s and Big Wheel were closed and torn town, they were the worst of the break-in joints, dives that offered fifty-cent blackjack and twenty-five-cent craps, heated arguments flying as soon as the dice were tossed, claims about every other hand in blackjack. These were the places where 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 who d u m m y u p a n d d e a l 6 was 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. Stories of breaking in, although unique taken one at a time, are at the core essentially similar because they evolve from interaction peculiar to casinos where a sprinkling of neon dust and a touch of big-shot treatment turns Goob Wellbody from Sault Sainte Marie into a Bela Lugosi or Lon Chaney caricature. 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 itself 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 what 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. But the break-in hasn’t developed those skills, just as he or she hasn’t acquired the confidence to send a roulette ball whining around the track or the mental facility to count cards on the turn or the dexterity to flip the dice over to the winning point before sending them to the shooter. Rendering a break-in’s story seems merely a matter of transposing names, places, and times; the events will vary in degree, but the gist of b r e a k i n g i n 7 their stories is strikingly similar. Old-timers speak of pitbosses kicking them...