Question of the Day - 25 September 2022

[Editor's Note: As is our wont, we handed this one off to Andrew Uyal, our "man behind the curtain." And for those lovers of Latin America among you, Andrew has launched a travel website, Flights And Footsteps, with fascinating posts about his travels over the past couple of years to Mexico, Guatemala, and Peru, exploring archaeological sites and finding the best hostels to stay in along the way. It's definitely worth a click and some surfing to check out really cool descriptions and photos of Andy's travel adventures.]

Dealers' tokes are collected and paid in a number of different ways. These include: an 8-hour split, a 24-hour split, a 7-day split, and keep your own.

All of these can be handled with cash in envelopes at the end of the split or rolled into the payroll. In larger jurisdictions and casinos, the money is added to their paychecks. Since tips are counted by cage personnel, the tax reporting is almost always 100%.

With the 8-hour, 24-hour, and 7-day splits, the tokes are gathered at the end of the split period by dealers elected to the "toke committee" and counted under the watchful eye of surveillance and sometimes a cage worker. Toke committees are usually rotating groups of dealers that are voted on a few times a year. They're also in charge of tracking everyone's hours to ensure that each dealer is paid correctly. This additional duty entitles them to an extra bit of money from the toke pool on the days they collect or count the tokes. 

Here's a quick industry-jargon lesson:

"Mucking" means picking up chips that are in an unorganized pile and sorting them by hand, like on the roulette table, or while cutting tokes.

"Cutting tokes" refers to counting the tokes to determine the total amount of the pool and how many hours each dealer worked during the split period.

The tokes are generally gathered from lock boxes that sit on the rail of each table. Sometimes, though, there's one large box in the middle of the pit where dealers drop their tokes when they're tapped off each game, on their way out of the pit. This is a little antiquated, but does still exist. They're then taken to the secure location, dumped out, mucked, and cut into stacks of 20 for easy counting. 

Dealers who keep their own usually have to go through this process every day at the end of their shift. Some keep-your-own places still give cash at the end of the day, but again, in the larger jurisdictions and larger casinos, they're counted and added to the paychecks.

When I was dealing (almost 15 years ago now!), I worked in two different places that gave cash envelopes at the end of a 7-day split. I've also worked a little bit on a 24-hour split where the tokes are added to paychecks. Is one better than the other? It's a personal preference and, I suppose, depends on your gambling habits. People who like to play love getting that cash. I used to see dealers gambling their toke envelopes all the time. I may have been a victim of that on occasion, but of course, that was before I learned the ways of The Force.