Dire Straits

Nothin' for money and no chips for me...

Sorry for the lack of updating this week, but circumstances dictate that I remain super-busy for the foreseable future. It stems from a piece of memorable advice I got from my advisor back when I was putting myself into life-long debt back while attending Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University and harboring the fantasy of becoming an airline pilot. Anyhow, he told me that when times are good, make sure you're working, and when times are bad, make sure you're going to school.

It's not so cut-and-dry right now, however. The economy is booming and Las Vegas is as busy as ever. Unfortunately, I'm employed by a casino that isn't fully participating in the tourist boom, and it seems that some of the decisions being made are far-removed from the dealers' best interests. Our tokes are down. WAY down. And after midnight, just about every night, the casino is as quiet as a tomb. Yet we still have twenty or more dealers standing around on games that shouldn't be open in the first place. And then on the weekends, instead of all $10 limits with maybe one or two $5 games per pit, it's mostly all low-limit games.

Low limit games do not bring in the good players. $5 Pai Gow and $5 Blackjack bring in the fleas. We're not introducing any new players to the games, we're providing a place for fleas to spend more time grinding away. I remember last summer, occasionally we'd get somebody asking if there were any $5 games available. Now we get people asking where the $2 games are. Nice. (When they ask, however, I'm more than happy to give them directions out to Joker's Wild).

Once the holidays ended, we went dead. It's been going south for a few months now, but lately it's been just awful.

We had several days last week where tokes were less than a hundred bucks apiece. When I started, the lowest average day was about $125. Now we're in Sam's Town territory, hitting that big $95 stroke on weekdays. So tokes are down, fleas are up, and morale is in the shitter.

On Friday night, we had a great player on Rapid Roulette. Normally, we don't drop shiat in the toke box on that game (Monday there was $6.75 dropped between four dealers all night, just to give you an idea). Anyhow, this player was awesome--the kind of guy you wish was playing every night. I told him which numbers I tend to roll, and he loaded up. Every time we hit one, he'd push the toke button on the screen repeatedly. And that's how we found out that the game is programmed to not allow us to earn more than $30 per player. Once thirty bucks is put in a player's electronic toke box, if they press the button again, it deletes the tips and puts them right back in their playing bankroll.

Talk about a chickenshit thing to do to the dealers. This guy was winning upwards of $500 per spin sometimes and wanted to share the love. Once we figured it out, however, he stopped tapping the tip button once it hit $27. Anyhow, this guy was responsible for putting over $500 in our toke pool that night, on a game that we usually don't make ten bucks on, and we *still* didn't break a hundred dollars for the night.

But that's not all there is to the story.

After he left the table, he left his players card behind and went to play dice. He hinted that he "wanted to take care of me", but I hear that all the time and don't put much stock in it. He'd already given us plenty. Anyhow, I took his players card to him over in the dice pit, and when I did, he slipped me a chip in my hand.

Uh oh.

I cannot accept chips off of a game, and if surveillance were to catch it, that's my ass. So I immediately walked back over to our game and told our manager what had happened. I opened my fist and inside was a $100 black chip.

No worries, we turned it into four green ones and dropped them in the toke box, and I was told that I did the right thing by 1) reporting it and 2) not embarrassing the player by not accepting it and making a big deal about it on his game.

Of course I was never tempted to pocket it--it would be stealing from my co-workers, and good luck with trying to cash it at the cage anyways--but damn, the next day when I saw that we made a big $96 for the night, all I could do was shake my head in disbelief. An extra hundred bucks would've been nice. Especially now.

So what does all this have to do with me being so busy this week? Well, at *my* casino, times are very tough. So back to school I went.

Yep, I'm spending my free time either online looking for jobs, filling out applications, or finding contact info. And I'm also spending several hours a day back at school practicing my poker dealing. Jobs are still scarce, and if worse comes to worse I could get another job dealing dice, but I've got a line on a couple of poker jobs, and I'm hoping they pan out. In the meantime, I'm surrounding myself with contacts and sharpening my skills.

I need the money. February is going to be a very lean month.

So please feel free to hit the tip jar there on the left. Forget about paying for a new computer, right now I'd just like to remain living indoors.

Thanks.

Mikey