Question of the Day - 20 June 2019

[Editor's Note: For this answer, we turned to Andrew Uyal, former dealer and advantage player and current floor supervisor at a Strip casino. His book, Blackjack Insiders -- How Two Pit Bosses Beat the Casinos at Their Own Game, is now available.]

This is a tough question to answer for two reasons: 1) There's a wide range of incomes for dealers in Vegas and around the country; and 2) there are a lot of different ways dealers get paid.

The short straight answer is that if you walked into every casino in the country and asked all the dealers what they make, the answer you’d probably hear most often is right about $45,000 per year.

Where it gets complicated is the range. I’ve seen dealers make as low as $30,000 a year or even less. But the lucky ones make $90,000, and even up to $120,000 a year. You might think this would be at the Cosmopolitan or Wynn. But surprisingly, the highest incomes I’ve heard of have come from high-volume casinos at Native American casinos in southern California and even Arizona. Those are the top-tier incomes I’ve come across. At these types of places, dealers typically keep their own tips and they work very hard for them.

The second tier of incomes I’ve come across is the $70k-$90k range at places like I mentioned above: Cosmopolitan, Wynn, Caesars Palace, and other marquee Strip casinos. The incomes here will vary depending on hours worked and days off. Not all shift are eight hours and the dealers here split their tokes over a 24-hour period. So not everyone will be working when that huge tipper comes in and leaves them $50k over the course of the day.

The dealers at the average Strip casino in Vegas make $50k-$60k. The average off-the-Strip dealers make $35k-$45k. I believe the average dealer outside of Vegas will fall somewhere in the middle, about $45k-$55k.

There are also lots of different ways dealers get their tip money. Most of us know they either keep their own or pool. But there’s lots of different types of pools.

When I started dealing, we split our tips over a seven-day work week and got a cash envelope at the end of the week for how many hours we worked. At the casino up the street, they got cash envelopes every day after a 24-hour split. The most common thing now, though, is for the casino to hold the tip money and put it on the dealers’ paychecks. Most places count and split the tokes every day over a 24-hour period. However, lots of variations still exist.

The one constant, though, is that dealers almost always make minimum wage, or less if the state allows tipped employees to be paid less. Tips are the prime source of income for dealers.