Pit Bosses
by Mark Evanier
ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED 5/24/96
Comics Buyer's Guide
In Las Vegas casinos, they have these things called "comps" which are not unlike the parting gifts you get just for showing up on a game show. If you gamble long enough, you can usually ask a hotel employee for a freebie: A free meal, a free show, a free t-shirt. If they get to know you as a frequent player/loser, you might be able to achieve an "RFB" comp, the "RFB" standing for "Room-food-beverage."
Let me explain how comps are dispensed. The folks who deal Blackjack (or run the crap games or spin the roulette wheels) work at groups of tables — usually four-to-six — and one low-level exec of the casino keeps an eye on the gaming at those tables and makes whatever decisions have to be made. Dealers never make decisions of any kind about anything.
In most hotels, the execs are officially called Casino Hosts but no one calls them that. They're usually called "Pit Bosses," hearkening back to the days when they were Pit Bosses. The difference between a Casino Host and a Pit Boss is basically the same as the difference between a sanitary maintenance engineer and a janitor.
One of the many responsibilities of a Casino Host is to keep an eye on who's losing and who's winning and to award comps to guests who are giving the hotel a lot of "action." If they start offering you "RFB" comps, it's because they figure to make a lot of money off you if you gamble in their establishment. They are usually not wrong.
Although I am a frequent Vegas visitor, I never ask for comps and I frequently decline those that are offered. Some of this is because when you're gambling hundreds of dollars at Blackjack, it seems somehow petty to spend time discussing a free pass to the buffet ($4.95) or to incur even the slightest feeling of indebtedness to the hotel. One time, I dropped about a thousand dollars at one casino and as I slipped away from the table, the Host offered me a free meal. Caught off guard, I accepted…and suddenly found myself dining at a restaurant I didn't particularly like at a time I wasn't particularly hungry.
I felt uncommonly dumb. In fact, I felt dumber for taking the meal than I did for losing the money. I thought, this bad $9.00 meal is supposed to make me like the people who just took my thousand dollars? (At buffets, you often see losers stuffing themselves to bursting, trying to somehow compensate for what they've dropped at the tables. They're down a few thousand but they're going to get it all back in Prime Rib and mashed potatoes.)
Actually, comps create a strange situation in the fancier Vegas hotel restaurants, at least for those who are dining there and intending to pay. At any given time, most of those eating there are on comps. This means that the eatery has no incentive to price its meals fairly. There is, in fact, every reason to overprice. The higher the listed price of a comped meal, the bigger a "gift" it seems.
There's a story that has made the rounds of the gaming industry: One evening, following a rousing bout of losing at the Hacienda, a high-rolling outta-towner was comped to the dining room. He ordered, as most do, the most expensive item on the menu — a steak-and-lobster combo for $25.00.
A few weeks later, a Hacienda exec called the guy in his home town, inviting him to fly in again — all at the hotel's expense, of course. "We'll fly you in first class, put you up in one of our finest suites, comp all your meals, arrange ringside seats for the show…" (That should give you some idea how much they expected this fellow to lose.)
The high roller thanked him but said he was already flying in soon — as the guest of the Marina, across the street. "But why?" the Hacienda exec asked. "Didn't we treat you right when you were here? Remember that great steak-and-lobster dinner we comped you —?"
"Yes," he said. "But over at the Marina, they comped me to a thirty dollar steak-and-lobster combination."
That afternoon, the story goes, the price of the steak-and-lobster combo at the Hacienda was raised to $32.00. There was no change in the portion. They just raised the price.
I don't know if this is true, nor do I know the names of the hotels involved. I just stuck in the Hacienda and the Marina arbitrarily and because they're both defunct. But that kind of thing goes on with comps and the restaurants that redeem them don't care half as much about paying customers as the non-paying kind.
Recently, several hotels in Vegas have started making deals to lure some of the great restaurants in the world to open branches on their premises. And to get them there, they guarantee them a certain dollar-figure in casino-paid comps — enough to ensure that the restaurant will turn a profit, even if not one person ever walks in and pulls out a wallet.
Casino Hosts usually give you comps for gambling a lot. I may be the only person alive who ever received a comp for getting a Casino Host fired.
It all began with me in a hotel casino, playing alongside three strangers — or, at least, we were all strangers when we first sat down. A bonding experience often takes place around a "21" table…the shared suffering, the eternal frustration when you're confident that your twenty is a winner and then the dealer draws five cards to a sum of twenty-one. It was a friendly table…in stark contrast to its Casino Host.
Rocco (as I'm calling him) was one of those men who looks like he learned tact at the feet of Genghis Khan. I have no idea what, if any, presence Organized Crime ever had in this establishment…but Rocco sure looked like he was marking time until the casting call for Godfather IV.
Our dealer was chatting away, joshing with the players, when he made a mistake. It was an easy, understandable mistake: He dealt out the cards, saw he had an Ace up and peeked at his hole card. That's what they're supposed to do…when the dealer has an Ace showing, he peeks at his other card and if it's a ten or a face card, it means he has Blackjack. The hand is over and all the players who don't have also have Blackjack lose their bets.
But! Before he peeks, he's supposed to ask all the players if they want Insurance. Insurance is a side bet — not a very good one, by the way — in which the player can put up more money to bet that the dealer doesn't have a ten as his hidden (or "hole") card.
I rarely take Insurance but, in this case, I didn't have a choice. The dealer forgot to ask. He peeked at his hole card, saw it was a ten, flipped it over and started collecting everyone's bets. Then he noticed that one lady at our table had a chip in her hand. She'd been about to put it up as an Insurance bet but he hadn't given her the opportunity. The dealer stopped, apologized and turned to Rocco and asked what he should do.
The fairest thing, of course, would be to declare the hand void and not pick up anyone's money. The next-fairest thing would be to collect half of everyone's bet, as if everyone had taken Insurance.
Instead, Rocco said, "Pick up the money." The dealer shrugged and raked in all our wagers.
"Excuse me," I said. "I don't think that's right." Rocco turned back to our table and gave me a look that could have thawed a frozen carp in twenty seconds. Still, I continued: "This woman was about to take Insurance and your dealer here didn't let her. I think she, at least, shouldn't lose her money."
There was a pause…then Rocco said to me in a firm, almost threatening tone, "The dealer had Blackjack…everybody loses."
I said, "Yes, but the dealer is supposed to give people a chance to —"
Again he said, slowly and deliberately: "The dealer had Blackjack…everybody loses."
It was as much his tone as his decision that caused me to pick up my money and hop down off my stool. "Well, I think I'll see if they let you take Insurance over at Harrah's." I walked out and I could see that a few others were doing the same. In protest.
Fade out, fade in. It was later in the evening that a lady friend of mine and I hooked up and she wanted to go play Blackjack. I didn't feel like a long walk so we wound up at the same casino where, in spite of Rocco, I still liked the way they dealt the game. Rocco wasn't on duty, anyway.
No matter how good a Blackjack player you are, there are times when you win and times when you lose. In the past, it had usually been my experience that when a friend was watching me play, I lost. This time, with Sheila at my side, I did uncommonly well and so did Sheila, who was consulting with me as to whether to hit or stand, ignoring most of my advice and winning anyway. I think I was up over a thousand dollars and the Casino Host, an Asian lady, was very chatty.
On a whim, I suddenly decided to pursue the Rocco incident. "Let me ask you a question," I said to her. "I was in another hotel earlier today and a situation occurred." I described the whole matter with Rocco as if it had happened elsewhere and asked her, "What would this hotel have done?"
Without a half-second pause, she said, "We'd have called the hand off and dealt again. We definitely would not have picked up the players' money."
"Well," I said, "you did. It happened in this casino…at that table, in fact." I pointed to the table across the aisle and I described the Pit Boss — excuse me, the Casino Host — who'd made the call. (No, on second thought, he was a Pit Boss.)
"That sounds like Rocco," she said. Our dealer whispered to her that it was, indeed, Rocco. He'd heard about the incident from someone on the earlier shift. "Let me look into this," our Casino Host said and she picked up the phone at her little podium.
Soon after, a casino executive showed up and she asked me to tell him the story all over again, which I did. I remember being impressed with how serious they were about this. (They must have been serious. They took me away from gambling for about ten minutes. In most casinos, if you suddenly needed an emergency blood transfusion, they would do it at the table, in the arm you weren't using for placing your chips.)
Then the exec went off and I guess he made some calls or consulted with someone. When he returned, he told me that Rocco was being terminated. This was apparently not the first time something of the sort had occurred. "Please accept our apologies," the exec said. I later received a full R.F.B. comp from the hotel for my next stay there.
But right that evening, as I decided to quit while I was ahead, the Casino Host asked me, "Would you like to get something to eat?"
I turned to Sheila. "Would we like to get something to eat?"
Sheila gasped. "You mean…for free?"
Sheila had never had a comp before and she thought this was the greatest thing in the whole world. I accepted.
"The only place here open at this hour is the coffee shop," the Casino Host said as she filled out a slip. "This will be good after Midnight." It was 11:45.
Fifteen minutes later, we were seated in the coffee shop and Sheila was grinning and saying over and over, "I can't believe this. You mean, we don't have to pay? We really don't have to pay?"
"Not unless we eat more than $50.00 worth of food, tip not included," I said, scoping out the fine print on the comp slip. Sheila was ecstatic — and it wasn't because she didn't have to pay. After all, I'd paid for dinner…and any other time we ate together. She was just excited that a for-real Las Vegas casino, wherein we'd just won about $1200 between us, was now also buying us a free meal.
"I'll have a steak," she said.
"You had a steak at dinner four hours ago," I said.
"I don't care," Sheila said. "It's the most expensive thing on the menu." I had a feeling that if fried slugs in arsenic sauce had been the most expensive item on the menu, Sheila would have ordered the fried slugs in arsenic sauce. "And I'll have a shrimp cocktail…and salad! And the highest-priced wine, whatever it is, red or white. And I'll get a bacon-and-egg sandwich and take it with me to have for breakfast. Oh, and they have cheesecake. What are you going to have?"
"I'm just going to have a bowl of soup," I said.
Sheila acted like I had just said something sacrilegious. "I'm not really hungry," I said in response to a look of utter disgust.
"Who cares?" she said. "The hotel is paying for it." She started eyeing the paintings on the wall and wondering if they were for sale. Then, she had a thought. "Are you adding all this up? I don't want to go over fifty dollars."
"I can afford a little overage," I told her. "I did okay at the tables."
"No, no," she said. "You don't get it. I don't want you to pay a cent for this meal. I want it to be the hotel's money. Can you add all this up?"
"I don't have to. I have a strange premonition it will come to $49.99."
I was close. When the check came, it was $49.70.
"Don't get upset," I told Sheila. "Maybe they'll have some mints at the cash register and you can spend the last thirty cents."
Sure enough, next to the cash register, there was a little dish of candy mints for a dime apiece. Sheila took three, what a surprise.
As I signed the comp slip, I asked the cashier, "How many other people with a fifty dollar comp manage to eat exactly fifty dollars' worth?"
"Almost all of them," she said — and she opened up a cupboard behind her. It was filled with crates of the dime candies. "Of course," she added. "Some of them have to take twenty or thirty dollars' worth of mints to make it."