Years ago, new management at the Union Plaza in downtown Las Vegas tried a grand experiment: they liberalized the blackjack rules and raised the limits. The chip design was modernized, and the cage gracefully handled bigger cashouts with no questions asked. As part of the marketing of this new philosophy (as if “bet more, win more” were some clever, new idea), they held a high-stakes poker tournament and even got some TV crews in there. The goal was to bring some big action back to downtown Vegas. Their experiment worked! Heh heh.<\/p>\n
In what must have been the climax of the circus, one night I saw three hole-card crews playing three different dealers. I can’t imagine what the crusty old bosses were thinking to have three tables simultaneously entertaining $2000 table-max flatbettors. This is The Plaza, remember!<\/p>\n
Operating in the same pit along with two other max-betting crews was itself a bizarre experience. It was the way I imagine it would be to film a porn video, only to show up at the set to see two other crews filming their own porn videos next to you. Bullet and I thought we had the best girl, but from time to time we’d cast a voyeuristic glance across the pit, thinking, “Are those guys betting table max on that<\/strong><\/em> dealer? She’s not even that good.”<\/p>\n In a previous era, those sweaty bosses probably would have chased us all out in a heartbeat (wasn’t it The Plaza where a boss chased Stalker and Jimbo out, while baiting them with, “Blackjack’s not as fun when you’re not getting the dealer’s hole card, is it?”). But, management wanted to entice big action, and here it was! Since big action was the goal of the new directives, the bosses just watched with bemusement.<\/p>\n Obviously the situation was not sustainable, and we worried about some of the little indicators of heat, but we all knew that the experiment was doomed to failure anyway. The debacle would probably be blamed on the naivete of the new managers\u2014what audacity to think you could bring big action here. This ain’t the Bellagio! So we crossed our fingers, hoping that the circus would end with no backoffs. Let’s all just shrug our shoulders and move on, agreed?<\/p>\n And so it was. One day we walked into The Plaza and saw something no one had ever seen, or even imagined, in downtown Vegas\u2014all of the blackjack games, including single- and double-deck, were being dealt from shoes. There was not a single pitch game being offered at the Union Plaza. We dubbed it “The Plaza Solution.”<\/p>\n If you think about the context of downtown Vegas, this really was a major innovation. It took years before any<\/strong><\/em> table in downtown Vegas was dealt from a shoe. In the mid-1990’s, the Horseshoe still had about 50 single-deck pitch tables. So the Solution was a very strong message: “We figured out what you guys were doing, and we fixed it.” On the other hand, it was a somewhat shocking admission on the part of the casino. To me it said, “Our staff is incapable<\/strong><\/em> of dealing a secure game, so our only option is a time-wasting, embarrassing, procedural fix.” The old-school dealers were indeed embarrassed to deal single- and double-deck games from the shoe, and could no longer take pride in their pitching style.<\/p>\n I had to give The Plaza credit, though. It is important for any team to understand the limitations of its personnel. Many of the dealers at The Plaza were only one notch above break-in, so the solution was realistic.<\/p>\n It didn’t take long for The Plaza Solution to spread to the El Cortez, the Western, and the Golden Gate. I think it took a few years before some of the casinos reverted to offering some pitch games, probably in order to offer some necessary skills training to the break-in dealers. Downtown Vegas has experienced so many other major changes (Zip-lining?! Go-go dancers at the Golden Gate!?! A shark tank?!), so you might not have noticed those fossils that tell the story of a unique chapter in Vegas’s AP history, but now you know.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Years ago, new management at the Union Plaza in downtown Las Vegas tried a grand experiment: they liberalized the blackjack rules and raised the limits. The chip design was modernized, and the cage gracefully handled bigger cashouts with no questions asked. As part of the marketing of this new philosophy (as if “bet more, win […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[558],"tags":[1193,1194,1195,1196,1197,1198,853,1199,1200,1201,1130,1202,1203,1132,1204,574,837,1205,1206,1162,1207,1208,1209,1210,599,1211,1212],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/shop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/840353"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/shop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/shop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/shop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/22"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/shop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=840353"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/shop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/840353\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/shop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=840353"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/shop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=840353"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/shop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=840353"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}