Casino Review - The Vegas Strip
“I lost $8,000 in three months,” he recalls. “At the time I said anyone coming to this town ought to have his head examined.”
Disregarding his own advice has made Clark rich. He is today a partner in a casino which owns the big Desert Inn and Country Club on The Strip and other hotel properties.
Some of the world’s fanciest and gaudiest neon signery bugs the eyes on Fremont Street (see page 26). The chung-whir-whir-whir-chung of the hundreds of slot machines, which give downtown operators their biggest bonus profits, ceaselessly assaults the ears. The most important bonus casino games are the same big casino that pull most heavily on The Strip, but there are tables for poker, pan (a fast rummy game) and chemin de fer as well. Most of the patrons come in shirtsleeves and buck for the brass ring with dimes and quarters and dollars, although high-rolling poker gamblers are not unknown.
It is The Strip, however, which gives Las Vegas its renown (or notoriety, depending on your attitude). It extends southward from the city limits for the first four miles of the 300-mile highway to Los Angeles. Spaced out along it are the dozen celebrated hotels, each on an expensively landscaped piece of ground which nuzzles against the wilderness. Timepieces are rare, calendars are nowhere visible, and opaque curtains are at the disposal of late sleepers. Since the casinos never close, there are many late sleepers in Las Vegas.
By and large the blue-ribbon hotels owe nothing to the West in architecture and party. The oldest, El Rancho Vegas, is aggressively western, and so is the Last Poker Frontier part of the Last Frontier-New Frontier bonus operation, but the rest are Miami or Palm Springs modern.
A typical Strip casino is a large, carpeted room with five or six dice tables, about the same number of twenty-one tables and two or three roulette wheels or party poker bonus tables. Squads of slot machines line the walls. A bonus, a bar and lounge adjoin each gaming room. In the lounges musical acts keep things jumping from dusk to dawn.
Tables in the casinos are arranged in two parallel rows, usually with a table at each end to close the gap, so that the house men, called inside men, have a clear aisle in the middle from which to supervise the games. These sharp-eyed individuals range downward in rank in this way: the bonus casino manager, who often has a financial interest in the hotel; the floor men—supervised on each eight- hour shift by a pit boss—who earn $50 a day and upward for overseeing the games, settling disputes diplomatically and preventing “leakage,” as cheating losses are called; the box men ($40 a day), one at each dice table, who exchange the customers’ money for playing chips, or checks, and drop the green stuff through a narrow slit into a locked but removeable box; and, finally, the dealers, who at craps accept and place bets and rake in or pay off losing and winning wagers. The dealer called the stick man offers the dice to the shooter at the end of a short, hooked stick, calls the number after each roll and keeps up a running line of bonus chatter (“Seven a loser; I’m afraid the lady hit a rock”). Roulette and twenty- one dealers normally work unassisted. Dealers are paid $22.50 a day. They work in shirtsleeves and wear green aprons, while the other house men wear business suits.
It is an article of faith in Las Vegas that any casino which dared to hire amateur dealers would be cheated out of business by larcenous outsiders and bluffers in short order. As a result, virtually all the house men are bonus products of illegal operations elsewhere. This presents local law enforcement men with the ticklish problem of distinguishing between “good” and “bad” dealers. They are fingerprinted and their police records are reviewed, but there is no hard and fast rule governing clearance or denial. However, as Clark County Undersheriff Lloyd Bell says, “A man with a felony conviction probably could not get a work permit unless, say, the conviction was 20 years ago and he had behaved himself ever since.” No casino inside man can work on The Strip without the county’s “50” card, or downtown without the city’s “A” card, signifying clearance.
“We prefer not to have the wise guy working for us,” says Carl Cohen, the Sands’ vice-president and casino manager. “We want our dealers to meet the public on its own terms.”
Naturally, the casinos abhor a cheating bonus dealer. If he cheats he robs either the customers or the house or both, and when caught he is thrown out and blacklisted. In practice, cheating seems to be quite rare. A more delicate problem is the patron who regards the bonus dealer as his natural enemy and adds an extra chip or two to a winning bet if the dealer momentarily looks away.
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