On a recent trip, while staying at the Fremont I was advised by a dealer to wash my hands before and after bathroom breaks. This made me wonder if casinos do anything to clean or disinfect chips?
This is something we get asked from time to time, so we're happy to re-run a previous -- collaborative -- answer, where a former dealer gave his spin on how it was in his day; a professional poker player shared his two-cents; the intrepid research department at LVA placed some investigative phone calls; and then a bunch of readers wrote in with their experiences. Here's our collective wisdom on the subject, starting from the point of view of a former casino employee.
"When I was a dealer, we never washed or cleaned the 'value checks' and this is still the case. Like you, I was curious why a casino would accept the fact that most of the checks are so filthy that they all have a black or brown tinge to them, so I asked a respected casino shift manager and here’s what I was told, verbatim: 'Why don’t you just shut up and deal, or at least brush down your table?'
"Unsatisfied with his reply, I asked a different shift manager (a lifer and highly educated in the business). His reply was a joke -- not a very funny one, though it’s considered casino humor: 'So many people spill their drinks into the float (the dealer’s chip tray) that no germ would stand a chance.' (When someone does spill a drink into the float, the checks are dried and put back into commission.)
"Today, there’s still no policy of cleaning casino checks. The color cameras that have replaced the old black-and-whites don’t need to be able to distinguish the grime-obscured designs to ID them properly, although the checks still have that 'hidden' design that (usually) only surveillance people notice. For example, a black check has four distinctive half-diamonds pointing inward at the 12, 3, 6, and 9 o'clock locations. The $5,000 checks (at most casinos) have a pyramid design (triangle) that covers the surface of the entire disk."
The LVA research department called a couple of Strip casinos, just to make sure that nothing had changed since this dealer's days. The Wynn couldn't comment, so we tried Bally's instead (which is typically very helpful). The shift supervisor on duty confirmed that they have no policy for cleaning chips unless some mishap occurs, like a customer spilling Coke all over them, 'in which case they'll get wiped down.'
At that point Blair Rodman, co-author of Kill Phil, happened to wander through the Huntington Press office. In a former life, Blair dealt cards and craps in a number of casinos and related a particularly savory tale from his early days at the now-defunct Silver Slipper, where he was told about a crap dealer who apparently had little concern for (the lack of) cleanliness in his modus operandi for stealing $100 checks. The method of pilfering? Every break/shift change he'd put one in his mouth, then pass it to his girlfriend with a kiss. Eeeuuuwww. Blair added that he'd also worked at a now recently remodeled downtown casino that used to have a reputation for being particularly grungy, and confirmed that in his day that property never washed anything at all!
Blair also suggested we put in a call to Ron Saccavino, and industry veteran who puts out the The Dealer's News newsletter. Ron confirmed that in his 38 years in the gaming biz, he had never seen or heard of anyone washing, disinfecting, or in any way sanitizing checks, aside from the aforementioned spillage scenario. He did, however recall, as did Anthony Curtis, that some casinos washed playing cards when they were of the reusable plastic variety.
Now, as for the non-value chips (employed at the poker and roulette tables), these do get cleaned. They’re not stamped or marked with a dollar amount to show their value and, back when surveillance had only black-and-white cameras, our former dealer recalled how dirty chips played havoc with the poor surveillance observer required to do a review due to a complaint, misdeal, theft, etc. These chips are cleaned with soda water. That’s it, nothing else. The floor supervisor summons a cocktail waitress and asks for a cup of seltzer, just water and carbonation, and the dealer, on a dead game, wipes down each and every chip with it. The same cleaning method is typically used for the pai gow tiles.
In the course of our own research, we came across a poker-chip hygiene survey study conducted by Bluff magazine back in 2007, for which they enlisted the help of a team of scientists from UNLV. Click here for the results of their "Dirty Vegas: How Safe Are Your Chips?" survey, which makes for some interesting reading.
Finally, here's the reader feedback we received; if you have something you'd like to add, please feel free to write to us via the Submit a Question link.
"The machine was custom built, delivered and set up. Turns out it would only clean 80 cheques at a time, the cleaning fluid was $70 per gallon and it was slow, very slow.
"80 cheques isn't even a full rack. No idea where the cheque washer is now but the manager who's idea it was is long gone.
"Recently when a player spilled his cola on a rack of cheques, the cashiers gave him clean cheques and used the hand sanitizer they keep on the cashier cage counter to clean those cheques off."
A reader writes: "Looking at the reader comments, it looks like the company that made the Chip Washer that Suzo-Happ had been selling stopped making the device in the 2nd quarter of 2009, due to a lack of demand for the product. "According to the 2009 annual report from Elixir Gaming, the company who manufactured the Chip Washer that was sold by Suzo-Happ, Elixir took a huge loss on production of the device and finally gave up on it. See the last bullet point and the paragraph after it on page 18 (labeled as page 8) of the following .pdf file: http://tinyurl.com/4bpd47w "Bottom line: apparently casinos have no interest in spending money on cleaning their chips."
