The average Dealer salary in the United States is $17,436 as of November 25, 2020, but the range typically falls between $15,045 and $20,459. Salary ranges can vary widely depending on many important factors, including education, certifications, additional skills, the number of years you have spent in your profession. With more online, real. We used to go to Winstar 4 to 5 times a year, but since Choctaw remodeled, we enjoy it much more and it's closer. So last month my wife gets a mailer from Winstar with 4 coupons, $50 free play, 2 free buffet's, 10 tickets for some drawing, and free hotel stay. Decided to fight I35 traffic and drove up last night. Salary; Table Games Dealer salaries - 4 salaries reported: Thackerville, OK: $8 / hr Clerk salaries - 3 salaries reported: Thackerville, OK: $12 / hr Blackjack Dealer salaries - 3 salaries reported: Thackerville, OK: $8 / hr Casino Host salaries - 2 salaries reported: Thackerville, OK: $0 / yr Blackjack Dealer salaries - 2 salaries reported. The base salary for Blackjack Dealer ranges from $16,152 to $19,599 with the average base salary of $17,788. The total cash compensation, which includes base, and annual incentives, can vary anywhere from $18,757 to $23,155 with the average total cash compensation of $20,512. Blackjack Dealer (Former Employee) - Thackerville, OK - April 16, 2020 Working for a casino is an amazing job and you make great money. Especially winstar casino.
Do you love the casino scene?
Does being a casino dealer seem like the perfect blend of glamour, excitement, and fun?
At first glance, being a dealer at a casino might seem like the perfect job. After all, you probably already enjoy the games you’ll be playing. And you will be getting paid to play them.
You don’t even have to risk losing any money while you play. The casino is banking all the action.
As a casino dealer, the amount you win for the house has no bearing on your pay, though. You get an hourly wage plus tips.
Compared to some jobs, being a casino dealer might be a great deal. As casino gambling continues to grow across the nation, more jobs become available, and fewer potential employees are out there to fill those jobs. This means wages are climbing, too.
This post examines how much you can expect to make as a casino dealer, tips and all.
Your average wage as a casino dealer isn’t impressive at all. It’s a service industry, so when you calculate how much you’ll make, you need to take the same kind of mindset that waitresses and bartenders take:
How much money you make is based more on tips than on your hourly wage.
And the better you serve your customers, the more they’ll tip.
In other words, if you’re not a people person, becoming a casino dealer might not be a great idea.
The hourly wages for casino dealers don’t vary based on the game, either. Blackjack dealers make the same kind of money as baccarat dealers, who make the same kind of money as poker dealers or roulette dealers (or croupiers, as they’re called).
The starting pay for an average casino dealer is between $8 and $10 per hour. Some of that is based on experience, too.
If you’re able to get 40 hours a week, which is unusual, you’re looking at $16,000 to $20,000 per year. Most casino dealers, especially starting out, don’t get 40 hours a week, though.
That’s barely enough to pay the rent if you have a roommate and live in a cheap apartment.
Depending on the casino and the stakes of the games you’re dealing, you can expect to make anywhere from $15 per hour in tips to $50 per hour in tips, on average.
That $50 per hour figure, by the way, is an outlier statistic. This assumes you’re working at a high-end casino dealing the higher-limit casino games to the high rollers.
Even then, some high rollers don’t tip — or if they tip, they don’t tip well at all.
Poker dealers make the most money from tips on the most consistent basis, but a lot of this depends on people skills. In some casinos, the dealers are required to pool their tips.
I once played at a casino in Las Vegas with an older poker dealer named Boris. He got mad at me for saying the words “Carpe diem” at the table. He said that I was only allowed to speak English at the table.
Being a friendly guy, I smiled and explained to everyone at the table that the phrase is Latin for “seize the day.”
Boris didn’t think that was helpful, either. He was surly and rude.
As a result, I didn’t tip him.
I shared the story with a professional poker player friend of mine, and he told me that he would have raised hell with the cardroom manager until Boris had been fired.
And the thing is… I don’t mind a little correction. In fact, I’m a humble guy. Had he been reasonably friendly and polite about it, I would have continued to tip him. So it goes.
Also, just because you’re dealing a higher-stakes poker game doesn’t mean you’ll make more in tips. Some of the high-rolling poker players are notorious cheapskates. If you’re dealing high-roller blackjack, craps, or roulette, you’ll do a lot better than if you’re dealing high-limit hold’em.
According to Glassdoor, the average wages for dealers and related jobs are all over the place. They suggest that the average dealer makes $40,000 a year. They also suggest that an average poker dealer only makes $20,000 a year.
Other related jobs include the floor supervisor, with an average salary of $53,000 a year, a casino host, with an average salary of $35,000 a year, and a casino shift manager, with an average salary of $27,000 a year.
The site also lists salaries by company, and it looks like Caesars is the best place to be a dealer, with a salary of $42,000.
Indeed.com has more survey results and suggests an average of $15/hour, which equates to $30,000 a year. They had a listing for a dealer position in Black Hawk, Colorado, where the starting pay was $38/hour. That’s $76,000 a year.
ZipRecruiter suggests that top dealers make $400,000 a year, but I can’t imagine that’s accurate. The rest of their averages are in line with what I saw on the other sites mentioned.
If you know anything about the service business, you probably know that dealing with the customers can be the biggest perk and the biggest drawback to your job. This is especially true in the casino business, though, because emotions tend to be amped up when money is on the line.
You’ll probably spend a lot of time on your feet if you’re dealing table games in the casino. If you’re dealing poker in the cardroom, you’ll probably need to bring a pillow for some extra cushioning at your chair.
One of the other drawbacks of being a casino dealer is that it turns what used to be a leisure activity into a work activity. Playing blackjack is great when you get to do it a couple of times a year for a few hours at a time.
But after dealing blackjack for 30 hours a week for six weeks straight, it becomes drudgery.
In most casinos, smoking is still allowed. That might or might not bother you. I’ve spent enough time in bars and AA meetings that cigarette smoke doesn’t bother me at all, but I’m not like most people.
One of the perks of dealing casino games is that it doesn’t require a degree. You can go to a vocational school to become a dealer, though, but the time and financial commitments are smaller than with other careers. You can usually be qualified to be a casino dealer after a couple of months and an investment of $1,000.
If you’re a night owl, or if you’re looking for a second job — we used to call it “moonlighting” — casino dealing might be perfect for you. After all, most casinos are open 24/7. And guess which shifts are the hardest ones for the managers to cover.
Most casinos are owned by large companies with human resources departments. This means that you’ll probably be eligible for a benefits package. These can include health insurance and retirement benefits, as well as paid time off.
Breaks are longer for casino dealers than you’ll see at other jobs. At most casinos, you work for 90 minutes and then take a 30-minute break. During an eight-hour shift, you get a total of two hours of break time.
If you like having stories to tell, being a casino dealer puts you in a position to have lots of anecdotes. Heck, I have quite a reputation as a raconteur just from the stories I have to tell by being a player. And believe me, I haven’t spent THAT much time gambling in casinos — not compared to someone who deals for a living, anyway.
Think of the dealer as the host for a specific game. The dealer shuffles and deals the cards, or spins the roulette wheel, or directs the action at the craps table. The dealer also trades chips for money.
If you’re a poker dealer, you’re responsible for collecting the rake. It’s your job to make sure the players post their blinds.
If you’re dealing a casino game, you collect the players’ losses and pay out their winnings in chips.
It’s traditional to start your career dealing blackjack because that’s the most popular table game.
But in Europe, it’s more likely that you’ll start as a croupier — that’s the fancy name for the dealer running the roulette game.
The dice table is the toughest table game to be a dealer. Even after writing about craps for years, I still have to look things up. The action is fast, there are lots of bets on the table, and there’s just a lot to keep up with. Craps is the last game most dealers learn.
You’re responsible for maintaining your own gambling license, too. It’s similar to having a driver’s license if you’re going to drive for a company or a food handler’s permit if you’re going to cook for people.
If you have lousy credit and/or a criminal record, you might run into trouble getting your license.
By the way, I have a lady friend who dealt blackjack for years. She’s clueless when it comes to basic strategy. You’re not required to learn the correct strategies for the games you deal.
My advice to prospective dealers is to avoid giving advice to players. That’s a no-win situation because the players are going to lose their money in the long run because of the nature of the games. If they followed your advice, they’ll just blame you for this.
Who needs that kind of headache?
If you like people, enjoy casino games, and don’t mind cigarette smoke, becoming a casino dealer might be the career for you. You don’t get to keep the money the players lose, but they’ll often tip you when they’re winning, so you’ll get to root for them.
You’ll make at least $15,000 a year dealing casino games, but you might make as much as $100,000 a year. I’ve seen reports of dealers who made more, but I’m skeptical, and you should be, too.
Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus.On Sunday night, I took a date to the Winstar Casino in Oklahoma to do some gambling. I’ve never really done much gambling there besides playing poker. We didn’t have much fun at the slots, which seemed tight, so we decided to try the table games.
We started with roulette and went on to play blackjack. I knew in a vague way that the Winstar (like other Oklahoma casinos) charges an ante when you place a bet. But this was the first time I’d spent much time at the tables paying that ante on every hand of blackjack and every spin of the roulette wheel.
Being a gambling writer who’s especially interested in the math behind the games, I started thinking about how to quantify what this ante does to the house edge.
I had a math teacher in high school who insisted that I “show my work.”
That’s what I intend to do in this post. Calculate the house edge for the table games I played at the Winstar Casino, accounting for the antes.
An ante is a forced bet, usually in poker, that drives action to the game. In the Native American casinos in Oklahoma, it’s an amount you put up in addition to your bet that the house keeps whether you win, lose, or push.
It would be more accurate to describe this so-called “ante” as a fee for playing a hand of blackjack or for betting on a spin of the roulette wheel. The casinos love to use euphemisms to make a bad deal seem slightly better, and using the word “ante” instead of “fee” is just an example of this.
This has the obvious effect of costing you the amount of the fee multiplied by the number of bets you make. Even if you’re winning, the fees add up. They could easily be the difference between a winning session and a losing session.
The first weird thing about playing roulette at the Winstar Casino is that they don’t have an actual roulette wheel. There’s an animated roulette wheel that drives the results. That wasn’t THAT weird for me; I’ve played at plenty of online casinos that did the same thing.
But the online casinos use a random number generator program to produce their roulette results. That’s a computer program that generates thousands of numbers per second. When you hit the “spin” or “bet” button at an online casino, the RNG stops on whatever number it’s “thinking of” at that millisecond.
The roulette games at the Winstar Casino don’t work that way. They have a dealer with a deck of cards. The dealer scans the playing card into a machine, then the animated roulette wheel spins and lands on the space that corresponds to the card that was dealt.
I have no reason to think that the probability of the underlying game had changed. It was a standard American roulette wheel on the giant TV screen above the table. It had 38 possible results, 2 of which were green (the 0 and the 00). 18 of those results were black, while the other 18 were red, and so on.
The table limits weren’t unusual, either. $5 minimum on the outside bets, with a $500 maximum bet.
But I had to pay a $1 fee (the so-called “ante”) every time they spun the wheel.
I didn’t even realize that was the case until the dealer told me to put up the extra dollar.
How did that affect the house edge?
Let’s start by assuming that we’re going to “spin the wheel” 38 times, and we’re going to get statistically perfect results. We’ll also assume that I bet on black every time.
This means that I’ll win $5 on 18 spins, and I’ll lose $5 on 20 spins.
On top of that, I’m going to lose $1 on each of the 38 spins.
I have $90 in winnings, and $100 in losses on the spins. Add $38 to my losses, and I wind up with a net loss of $48 over 38 spins.
That’s an average loss of about $1.26 per spin.
Since I’m basically putting $6 into action on every spin, an average loss of $1.26 per spin equates to an average loss of 21% of my bet.
That’s a lot higher than a 5.26% loss per spin.
In fact, that’s TERRIBLE.
Here’s the thing:
I’m a low roller. (As you can imagine, gambling writers don’t make that much money.)
But if you have a bigger bankroll than I do, you can lower the house edge by betting more each time they spin the wheel.
The fee for the roulette games (and the craps games, for that matter) at the Winstar Casino remains $1 regardless of whether you’re betting $5 per spin or $500 per spin.
What does that change the house edge to?
You do the math the same way, but the average losses as a percentage of the money you’re putting into action drop as you raise the size of your bets, as follows:
This means the house edge at each of these levels is:
Notice how at $500 per spin, the house edge is almost normal–normal being 5.26%.
But your sole goal shouldn’t be to get the house edge as low as possible. You should also consider your average cost of playing per hour.
The roulette games moved along at the Winstar at a good clip–about 50 spins per hour.
To calculate your average loss per hour, you multiply the number of bets per hour by the average size of your bet, and then you multiply that by the house edge.
For a $5 bettor, this means you’re putting $6 into action 50 times per hour, for $300 per hour in total action. With a house edge of 21%, you can expect to lose $63/hour.
For a $100 bettor, you’re putting $101 into action 50 times per hour, for $5050 in total action. With a house edge of 6.2%, you can expect to lose $313.10/hour.
For a $500 bettor, you’re putting $501 into action 50 times per hour, for $25,050 in total action. With a house edge of 5.45%, you can expect to lose $1365.23/hour.
The big difference is between the $5 and $100 mark–you’re betting 20 times as much per hand, but the difference in the house edge is so great that your expected losses only go up by a factor of 5.
You’ll need to decide for yourself how much an hour of roulette is worth to you, but keep in mind, too, that these are long term averages anyway. Even if you’re betting $5/hand, you could come out a winner in the short term.
In fact, even though a lot of gambling experts eschew the Martingale System, Michael Bluejay wrote an excellent page about how the system does increase your probability of having a small winning session in the short run. This will, of course, over time, be balanced out by some large losing sessions.
(The Martingale System worked well enough for me Sunday night that I broke even at the roulette tables.)
I’m going to look at the blackjack math a little differently, but I also should point out that the ante rules for the blackjack games are different. The fee changes based on how much you’re betting, as follows:
The first thing I’m going to do when calculating the house edge for the blackjack (including the fee) is to look at the game’s edge based on the rules in place. This also assumes you’re playing with perfect basic strategy.
As it turns out, the rules at the Winstar blackjack tables are excellent:
With these rules in place, if you use perfect basic strategy, the house edge is only 0.56%.
But that’s not taking into account the 50 cent fee.
Here’s how we’re going to get to that number:
Let’s start with an expected hourly loss figure that doesn’t account for the ante.
When I was there, we only had an average of 3 players at the table–me, my lady friend, and usually one other person. (That person kept changing, but we hung in there for quite a while.)
According to the Wizard of Odds, I can expect 105 hands per hour at such a table. At $5 per hand, I’m putting $525 per hour into action.
Since I’m playing according to perfect basic strategy, my expected loss per hour just on the blackjack action (without the fee) is 0.56% of that, or $2.94/hour.
But I’m also losing 50 cents per hand to the fee. With 105 hands/hour, that’s another $52.50 in hourly losses. (I also get to add that to the hourly action.)
So with the fee, I’m wagering $577.50 and losing $55.40 of that.
That’s an effective house edge of 9.59%.
I don’t need to tell you that this has a terrible effect on what would otherwise be a great blackjack game.
If you were paying attention during the roulette section, you probably already realize that if you raise the size of your bets, you can lower that house edge.
Let’s say you’re betting $99/hand instead. Now you’re putting $99 X 105 into action per hour, or $10,395. Your expected loss on that is $58.21.
You’re still paying $52.50 in fees, though, so your expected loss goes up to $110.71.
On total action of $10,447.50 in action, that’s a house edge of 1.1%.
Now that’s more like it. If you have the bankroll to afford this kind of action, it makes a lot of sense to bet $99/hand instead.
But here’s something interesting:
Watch what happens when you start betting $100/hand instead of $99/hand:
Your fee doubles. It’s now a dollar instead of 50 cents, which means that you now have $105 in hourly fees.
Your expected hourly loss besides that doesn’t change much. You’re putting $10,500 into action each hour instead of $10,447.50. Your expected loss on that is $58.80 instead of $58.21.
Add those together, and your hourly loss is $163.80 instead of $110.71.
So the house edge when you’re betting $99 is only 1.1%, but when you’re betting $100, it’s 1.54%.
If you really want to drop the house edge, though, just raise the size of your bets to $999.
$999 X 105 = $104,895
0.56% X $104,895 = $587.41
$587.41 + $105 = $692.41
$692.41/$105,000 = 0.65%
If you have the bankroll to afford that kind of action, it’s worth doing. You’ll find plenty of casinos in Las Vegas which don’t offer a house edge that low.
You might even be able to get an edge at this kind of game with a card counting strategy, although I suspect most people don’t have the bankroll for that. Also, I have a feeling–and I’ve read forum posts suggesting–that the security at the casinos in Oklahoma frown even more on blackjack advantage players than the casinos in Las Vegas do.
The fees (or so-called “antes”) for the roulette games and the blackjack games at the Winstar Casino in Oklahoma have a significant effect on the house edge.
In fact, if you’re a low roller, the best thing you can do is to avoid the roulette game altogether. If you do play roulette, try to avoid betting the minimum. Bet as much as you can comfortably afford, and remember that the house always wins in the long run anyway.
With the blackjack games, be careful with the amount you bet. The house edge can change dramatically between $99 and $100 per bet just because of the rising size of the fee.
You’ll find other posts in forums complaining about the antes at the casinos in Oklahoma. I’ll refrain from any histrionics here. You know what the deal is now, so if you want to play, that’s your business.
It does remind me of the old joke about the guy who plays in this lousy poker game. One of his buddies asks him, if the game’s so bad, why do you keep playing?
Because it’s the only game in town, he replies.