Dear Mark,
On your Hooked on Winning tapes, you said you worked in the soft and hard count
rooms of a casino. What are they and what’s the difference?
Tom G.
Hard = coins. Soft = paper. There’s the distinction, Tom.
When I worked hard count, I removed and collected coin drop buckets from slot
machines, transported them to a hard count room, machine-counted the change
from the drop buckets, wrapped the coins, then prepared them for either bank
drops or a quick trip back to the gaming floor.
As a soft count team member, I worked in a separate, tightly secured room with
paper or "soft" currency from the table games. We all know what happens
to the gobbled-up coins we play on a slot machine — insert coins, yank handle,
insert more coins — so allow me, Tom, to take you on a step-by-step tour from
the moment you pull out your Ben Franklin at a blackjack table to when it becomes
gaming revenue.
You sit down at a blackjack table, pull out a crispy $100 bill, and get chips
in exchange. The dealer then stuffs the $100 bill into a slotted box located
underneath the table. Say bye-bye to Ben, Tom.
At the end of the shift, a drop team (which usually includes the drop team
leader and one or two security guards) exchanges the drop box containing Tom’s
$100 bill for an empty drop box to be used by the next shift. Tom’s box
is then taken to the "soft count room" and is locked up until a count
team (as a rule different from the drop team) comes in, coffee in hand, in the
morning.
After the java fix and the morning gossip briefing, the soft count team empties
the drop box that contains Tom’s $100 bill in the center of the count
table. One member of the team then sorts all the currency by denomination. The
stacks of currency are then counted and recorded and documented by a second
count team member — call her the recorder. The count is then recorded on the
count sheet and then a third count team member counts the currency and compares
the result to the figures on the soft count sheet. If the two amounts correspond,
the amount from that drop box and table is recorded on a table summary sheet.
The money is then turned over to the casino’s cage, and the table games
summary sheet is given to the accounting department where it is examined, then
entered into the system as gaming revenue.
Dear Mark,
A pit boss brought eight new decks to fill the shoe on a blackjack table. Before
the dealer shuffled them, she spread each deck across the table to see that
each card was there. Then she laid all the cards face down on the table and
start swishing them around, sort of like we use to do when we were kids and
played the game of fish. Because this was the first time I have ever seen this
happen, I am curious as to the reasoning behind doing it. Jenny T.
Card shuffling procedure can differ from casino to casino when new cards enter
the game. With shoe games, which use multiple decks of cards (4, 6 or 8 decks),
each casino uses some combination of mixing techniques to achieve a high degree
of randomization. What you described in your question is called “washing,”
a card-shuffling technique in which the dealer spreads the cards face down on
the table and then proceeds to mix them up, flat-handed, in a washing-like action,
before performing a standard shuffle. Card washing, Jenny, is intended to remove
any residual sequencing of cards that new decks of cards have.
In the years that I pitched cardboard, no casino that I worked in had us wash
the cards when dealing blackjack. Depending on the casino, we spread 'em
for inspection, then shuffled each deck between three and seven times. An exception
was when I dealt baccarat in one joint, where we always washed the cards, old
or new, between shuffles. Also, Jenny, you’ll find in many poker rooms
the cards are washed after every hand before they are given a more conventional
shuffling.
Gambling quote of the week: “Never mix cards and whiskey unless you
were weaned on Irish poteen.” Margaret Mitchell, Gone With the Wind
(1936)
