A Backroom Tour
21 March 2005
By Mark Pilarski
Dear Mark,
On your Hooked on Winning tapes, you said you
worked in the soft and hard count rooms of a
casino. What are they and what’s the difference?
Tom G.
Hard = coins. Soft = Paper. There’s the
distinction, Tom.
When I worked hard count, I removed and
collected coin drop buckets from slot machines,
transported them to a Hard Count room,
machine-counted the change from the drop
buckets, wrapped the coins, then prepared them
for either bank drops or a quick trip back to
the gaming floor.
As a soft count team member, I worked in a
separate, tightly secured room with paper or
"soft" currency from the table games. We all
know what happens to the gobbled-up coins we
play on a slot machine--insert coins, yank
handle, insert more coins -- so allow me, Tom,
to take you on a step-by-step tour from the
moment you pull out your Ben Franklin at a
blackjack table to when it becomes gaming
revenue.
You sit down at a blackjack table, pull out a
crispy $100 bill, and get chips in exchange. The
dealer then stuffs the $100 bill into a slotted
box located underneath the table. Say bye-bye to
Ben, Tom.
At the end of the shift, a drop team (which
usually includes the drop team leader and one or
two security guards) exchanges the drop box
containing Tom’s $100 bill for an empty drop box
to be used by the next shift. Tom’s box is then
taken to the "soft count room" and is locked up
until a count team (as a rule different from the
drop team) comes in, coffee in hand, in the
morning.
After the java fix and the morning gossip
briefing, the soft count team empties the drop
box that contains Tom’s $100 bill in the center
of the count table. One member of the team then
sorts all the currency by denomination. The
stacks of currency are then counted and recorded
and documented by a second count team
member--call her the recorder. The count is then
recorded on the count sheet and then a third
count team member counts the currency and
compares the result to the figures on the soft
count sheet. If the two amounts correspond, the
amount from that drop box and table is recorded
on a table summary sheet. The money is then
turned over to the casino’s cage, and the table
games summary sheet is given to the accounting
department where it is examined, then entered
into the system as gaming revenue.
Dear Mark,
A pit boss brought eight new decks to fill the
shoe on a blackjack table. Before the dealer
shuffled them, she spread each deck across the
table to see that each card was there. Then she
laid all the cards face down on the table and
start swishing them around, sort of like we use
to do when we were kids and played the game of
fish. Because this was the first time I have
ever seen this happen, I am curious as to the
reasoning behind doing it. Jenny T.
Card shuffling procedure can differ from casino
to casino when new cards enter the game. With
shoe games, which use multiple decks of cards
(4, 6, or 8 decks), each casino uses some
combination of mixing techniques to achieve a
high degree of randomization. What you described
in your question is called “washing,” a
card-shuffling technique in which the dealer
spreads the cards face down on the table and
then proceeds to mix them up, flat-handed, in a
washing-like action, before performing a
standard shuffle. Card washing, Jenny, is
intended to remove any residual sequencing of
cards that new decks of cards have.
In the years that I pitched cardboard, no casino
that I worked in had us wash the cards when
dealing blackjack. Depending on the casino, we
spread em’ for inspection, then shuffled each
deck between three and seven times. An exception
was when I dealt baccarat in one joint, where we
always washed the cards, old or new, between
shuffles. Also, Jenny, you’ll find in many poker
rooms the cards are washed after every hand
before they are given a more conventional
shuffling.
Gambling quote of the week: “Never mix cards and
Whisky unless you were weaned on Irish poteen.”
Margaret Mitchell, Gone With the Wind (1936)
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