Question of the Day - 12 November 2019

from 1996 to 2011, WinStar was a frequent destination, much closer than Shreveport. During that period it grew and grew, and at one point it was said to be the biggest casino in the world in terms of square feet. They had several areas with tacky decorations representing London, Paris, Madrid, Beijing, etc. The only even remotely playable VP was in the waiting area just outside the poker room.
The Blackjack ante or surcharge appeared around 2000-2001. It was collected with special chips, fifty cents per hand: win, lose. or push.
Obviously if you make larger bets, the ante is a lower percentage. Still, up to about $25, it's worse than six-to-five, which only adds about 1.5% to the house edge. After a few years, they doubled the ante to $1.00 for bets over a certain size. Even before that, our visits fell off a bit and when we went, it was for poker or BJ tournaments where the ante didn't apply.  
Winstar was also the only casino I ever saw with fried chicken gizzards at the buffet. 

We stopped at the Hard Rock Tulsa on a cross-country road trip in 2012.  The casino was run by a Native American tribe but I don't remember which one.  It is right off the interstate.  I gave the blackjack dealer a $100 bill and while getting the chips she gave me some quarters.  I asked what the coins were for and she said there was a 25c fee collected per hand.  Around this time a few of the Atlantic City casinos collected 25c per hand but only on low wagers ($1 or $2 per hand) and I asked what the minimum was to not pay the fee.  The dealer told me that every casino in Oklahoma charges a fee to play blackjack (I never verified the authenticity of this statement) and there was no minimum to get out of the fee.  I then politely asked to color up.  When the dealer asked why I stated that I wasn't paying a fee to play a game where the house already had and advantage and I would play elsewhere.

I ran into this 50 cent per hand fee when I visited an Oklahoma casino years ago. We had gone there for a concert and afterwards I sat down at a blackjack table. Right away the dealer started positioning these special chips off to the side but near my hand to keep track of the fee. He would wait until it amounted to a few dollars before collecting it from me instead of charging me 50 cents for each hand. Usually when I won a hand he took the accumulated fee from my winnings at that time. As soon as I figured on what was going on I left the table. As someone else has said, I couldn't believe a casino would charge me to play a game that they already had the edge on. I've always been leery of Indian casinos, they have their own regulators and rules, don't have to answer to any state authorities. I've even read about them denying a slot machine jackpot to someone, said it was a "malfunction" of the machine and they didn't have to pay. I don't have a good opinion of those places.

probably a holdover from the old days, Blackjack wasn't legal but the casino could host a private game and the players paid a fee kinda like poker. 

The Vegas Strip casinos are already considering imposing dice rental fees (you have to pay $5 to be the shooter), card wear fees (the decks have to be periodically replaced, so the players pay $1 each when that happens), and slot chair rental fees ($10/hr, and you can't play standing up). I fear some Vegas casino exec will visit Oklahoma and be inspired.

This just goes to show what Vegas casinos have already found out: people will gamble, even if they're being horribly ripped off. I suppose if you live on the beefy expanses of the southern Great Plains, you'll do anything for amusement...but, Jesus! 

I thought I understood that table games in Oklahoma are taxed at 10% and slots are taxed at 4%.So for every 5$ bet on the table games there is a 50 cent ante or tax. Some Casinos here wave the ante at table games, craps and slots because they are making enough off of the slots. The Casinos are making enough that they could take the 10% off of the take each night instead of charging the player on top of his losses. They certainly don't charge a 4% tax on the slot player on each pull. It all comes down to greed on the part of the Casinos. I believe that the pacts will come up for renegotiation sometime soon, but generally its not the player that they worry about.

Don't they take a slice of our winnings at the horse tracks?  Not as obvious due to the math, the actual odds that the horse goes off at?

All Native American (Indian means a person from the country of India, a mistake the original terrorists made)property is a Sovereign Nation and exempt from all Federal taxation, therefore exempt from any State taxation.  The Feds have stolen from Native Americans since the 1800's.  So their position is since the terrorists demand taxes on gambling then it is only fit and proper that the sons and daughters of terrorists should pay it.  After all, it never was your Nation just stolen property from Native Americans.

Several years ago, the casinos along Interstate 10 charged 25 or 50 cents per hand to play blackjack.

if they gave you really good rules and then used the rake to get the edge - kind of like Pai Gow Poker or bank bets in Baccarat.  However, I'm getting from the responses that they have normal rules, in which case I agree it's a bad deal.

Jackie- expand your understanding, definition of Indian from Google-
word - Indian
/ˈindēən/

noun
1. a native or inhabitant of India, or a person of Indian descent.
2. a member of any of the indigenous peoples of North, Central, and South America, especially those of North America.
3. a brand of motorcycle

And none of us are responsible for things done many years ago by ancestors such as atrocities to American Indians or the slavery of Chinese, Negro and others. Those were things done by the people living at that time. If your brother robs a bank or kills someone you are not accountable for it.

I don't think that the fee-per-hand charge will become the norm in Vegas. If it ever began, it would be at Strip casinos. It would be some corporation that owns multiple Strip casinos (Caesars, MGM, whatever) that would be the first to implement this thing. Other corporations would watch what happens. I have an idea that customers would reject this new charge, finding it more irritating than the recent decrease in BJ payouts to 6/5. During the packed weekends, it's possible that a hand for a full table might take more than a minute to play, so if 40 hands per hour were played, your "rake loss" would be $20/hour. During the week, if hands took one minute, it would be $30/hour. I think people would notice this and say "no thanks" and patronize a casino outside the corporation. The reduced patronage would be the end of the experiment.

Horse racing tracks have to take a certain %age out of the money bet on the horses because they have a lot of expenses to pay, and the modest charges for admission and maybe for parking do not cover all those expenses. We all know about this, and accept it. But betting the horses is entirely different from casino gambling. You are effectively betting against the other players instead of against the house, because the odds are determined by how much has been bet on each horse to win/place/show or on each combination of horses on multi-horse wagers. Except for the few bettors who may have come up with some "mechanical" system of betting, you don't grind out a profit at horse racing; if you come out ahead, it's because you got some good hits, usually due to good handicapping (and almost always with a little luck). You can't make a profit of more than 1.5 times your bet in blackjack, but in horse racing, profits of over 1,000-to-1 happen all the time, and even hits of over 10,000-to-1.

I'll make this a simple analogy.
You used the word "Negro".
Can you find a "Negro" today who doesn't believe discrimination against him\her no longer exists?
How about you saying "American Indians", are those people from India who are now American Citizens?
A terrorist is as a terrorist does!
And you boldly state it was "all long ago".

Have you not heard of the United NEGRO College Fund? That's the name of the largest educational funding organization for minorities in the USA. They proudly use the word "Negro". American Indian is someone from North America, European Indian is someone from the country of India. Those that protest racism the loudest are often racist themselves. Buy a dictionary and educate yourself. And take your politics somewhere else, this isn't the forum for that.

My "credentials" I have gambled in all of the above mentioned casinos.  I am top tier card in 5 casinos around Tulsa and northeast Okla.  Right now in the 6 casinos I frequent, 3 never charge an ante, one has free ante three nights a week. and one has free ante on $25 tables.  The term for free ante is "push the ante".  When the ante is pushed, the casino still pays the ante to the state education fund.  They pay it for the player.  The casino does not profit from the ante.    

This ante charge at Winstar essentially makes the game unplayable if one cares about house edge; even with perfect play and basic advantage play techniques, it's a difficult add-on to overcome from the player's EV standpoint. This charge alone costs players somewhere in the neighborhood of $30 - $40 per hr ( eg assuming a moderate 60 - 80 hands dealt per hr.) It's a bad game, as they say, under normal conditions.