You might be crazy; we don't know. But you're correct about the surveillance tour. We asked our surveillance expert, Arnie Rothstein, for his recollections and here they are.
First, let's get the obligatory disclaimer out of the way (to appease my many gaming- agent friends): No one, other than the assigned surveillance workers, shift managers, and the general manager, are permitted to enter the surveillance room or areas that allow surveillance observers to do their jobs to the best of their ability. Such places include the surveillance room, evidence room, catwalks, and other areas I’m not permitted to mention. These rules have gotten a lot tighter (in other words, they’re actually enforcing them) since 9/11.
The tour you’re speaking of started out, actually, as a mandatory look-see as part of the initiation for all new-hire dealers. The casino believed that if the dealers could personally see that the mirrored tiles above the tables games were actually one-way glass, they'd be less likely to steal. The tour idea caught on to the point where someone said, "Hey, why don’t we offer the same look to the players? It might stop them from trying to make a move."
As far as I can recall, the only place that offered this tour to players was the Sundance (now Fitzgeralds), which opened in 1980. The tour lasted for about a year, until Gaming decided that such information, when gathered correctly, might be more help than hindrance to cheaters. So they nixed the public look at the catwalks.
For a long time in downtown Reno, the Cal-Neva gave a tour of its surveillance room if you paid for a couple hours worth of gambling lessons. It was just a peek into the little room that held the monitors and VCRs, with enough space left over for a single surveillance operator.
When Bellagio opened, the surveillance room's back dividing wall was made out of glass, so that dignitaries, special guests, and friends could "take a tour" without entering the room. The bosses could take big players, writers, movie stars, etc. up to the surveillance room, where they could peer through the glass and watch the backs of the surveillance agents at work. It was kind of like being at a hospital and looking at the newborn babies, or as one friend put it, "It feels like we’re in an aquarium. I want to put a sign up, DO NOT TAP ON THE GLASS, but they won’t let me."
The glass look-see followed the letter of the Gaming Board requirement, but after 9/11, that got banned too.
Today, you'd be hard pressed to find a casino that still uses a catwalk, let alone gives a tour.
