A pair of sister Fremont Street Experience casinos in Vegas are letting their dealers keep their own tips. [Image: Shutterstock.com]

Tip policy boost

A change in the tip-out policy of two downtown Las Vegas casinos has, according to their parent company TLC Casino Enterprises, seen its dealers almost triple what they earn in a day. 

allows its dealers to keep tips instead of pooling them

According to the Las Vegas Review-Journal on Tuesday, Binion’s Gambling Hall & Hotel, and Four Queens Hotel and Casino have made a policy change that allows its dealers to keep tips instead of pooling them. 

Binion’s and Four Queens’ Director of Casino Operations Glenn Casale stated that dealers “who used to average $50-$60 a day were now averaging $150 on the swing shift,” following the change.

The decision by TLC to allow its dealers to “go for their own” as it’s known in the industry, sets both Binion’s and Four Queens apart from most other Vegas casinos that traditionally practice tip pooling. 

Tangible benefits

Casale told the LVR-J that Binion’s has been running the tip-keeping policy for around three months while its sister casino Four Queens will start the policy on October 28. The casino executive stated TLC went for the change because its two properties along the Fremont Street Experience found casino dealers would earn more. 

The increased earning power wasn’t to everyone’s liking, Casale said, with about 10% of dealers leaving Binion’s because they preferred the tip pooling scheme. Rather than the job losses hurting the TLC venue, however, it instead allowed Binion’s casino managers to fully staff their most active daily shift, known as the swing shift.

Casale stated that Binion’s went from being 30-40% below optimum swing shift staffing to now having “enough dealers over everything.” The reason the exec gives is that the tip-retention policy has “attracted a lot of dealers from other casinos.”

dealers need to be familiar with all games available

A must for the strategy to work is that the dealers need to be familiar with all games available at the TLC casino pit “so they can rotate every 30 minutes.” While this has required months of dealer training, Casale said that now: “No one dealer gets stuck on any one game.” 

“So if it’s a bad game or a dead game — like they don’t make a lot of money on Pai Gow for example, so you don’t stay on Pai Gow all day,” he explained. 

The flip side

With such an ingrained practice in Vegas, not everyone likes the idea of tip retention. Seasoned Wynn casino dealer and union member Kanie Kastroll said an advantage of tip pooling is the reduction of favoritism, which could see a popular dealer given more assignments to high-limit games, instead of unpopular tables.

“The benefit of the pool is even if you have awesome skills and you’re a five-star dealer […] you can still have fluctuations,” Kastroll said. 

“Tip pooling makes it less volatile,” she explained. 

Another flip side to TLC’s new policy is that its dealers must now, at the end of each shift, report how much they earned in tips so the detail can get added to their payroll for tax purposes.

According to media reports, tip pooling is common at casinos partly because of an IRS program that encourages casinos and staff to set “average tip rates for consistency among all types of tipped casino workers.”