Question of the Day - 26 April 2025

We answered a similar question around three years ago: "You pick the casino. How many decks of cards does it use every year?" 

We responded, "Thanks for letting us pick. And for not asking us to figure out how many decks of cards all the casinos in Nevada use annually."

At least your question limits it to Las Vegas.  

At the time of the original question, our inside source Andrew Uyal, author of The Blackjack Insiders and floor supervisor at the Cromwell, supplied the number of decks for his casino and explained his calculation.

He first pointed out that the number of decks of cards in any casino depends on how many tables it has and what types of games are played at those tables. Some use cards, others don't. Mainly, however, the total depends on the card-change procedures, meaning how often used decks get taken out of circulation and replaced by new decks. 

At the Cromwell, one of the smaller casinos on the Strip with 29 table games at the time, his estimate was about 60 single-packaged decks on an average day. That adds up to a little less than 22,000 decks per year. 

He cautioned, "The reality is probably a little higher. We use more on the weekend for added games. The yearly number of decks is probably somewhere between to 23,000 and 27,000."

He noted that what they call "bricks," or eight-deck pre-shuffled boxes of cards, are different than single decks. Bricks require far less maintenance and don't need to be changed out nearly as often. So that skews also the count a bit.  

Most Strip casinos have many more table games than the Cromwell. We estimated that the MGM Grand, with 160 tables and perhaps 140 that use playing cards, needs nearly four times as many decks, or roughly 100,000 per year. 

The Strip has 25 other megajoints, though none has 160 table games. So let's estimate an average of 80,000 decks per year per casino, adding up to two million decks. Then add in the smaller Strip casinos, all the downtown casinos, and all the locals casinos, a total of nearly 50 more. How about an average close to the Cromwell's, say, 20,000 decks per year? That's another million annually.

Put it all together and you're looking at three-million-plus decks of cards cycled through Las Vegas casinos every year. That's a lot -- 156 million individual playing cards.