The fine folks at Vital Vegas, (it's one guy,) wrote about the loss of table games at another Sin City casino. In this case, the often forgotten Tuscany Casino dumped its modest collection of table games, I learned today.
Shocked I am not.
As I noted a couple of weeks ago, I could find $5 blackjack downtown and at plenty of off-strip casinos just a few years ago. Two decades earlier, $5 blackjack was the standard, with some casinos offering $3 minimums or gimmicky $1 tables to attract low rollers. Times change, and $5 doesn't go as far as it use to, but two years ago it wasn't that hard to find $5 minimums on table games if you were willing to play off the strip.
Given the fact we all presumably earn more per year, due to inflation if nothing else, than we did 20 years ago, and the fact that there are plenty of $10 or $15 players to be had at craps and blackjack tables up and down Fremont Street, what incentive does Main Street Station have to offer a $5 blackjack table when it reopens? In the summer of 2018 I ended up killing an hour on an August Friday night, and I most certainly played $5 blackjack.
Table games are labor intensive. I don't have any inside knowledge about the economics of a blackjack pit, but it doesn't take a math major to know that the house will win more over time if the table minimums are $15 rather than $5.
Casinos had higher minimums for their table games during the pandemic simply because they had fewer seats available at a blackjack table. If you're capped at three seats to a table due to social distancing requirements, you're going to want to increase the minimum for the seats you have, as long as you can still put asses in those seats.
Once the capacity restrictions were lifted, plenty of people made it a priority to return to Vegas. And it didn't take $5 tables to put asses in the seats. So we have a new normal.
Obviously smaller operators with less traffic don't have the luxury of simply raising the table minimums and expecting people to fill those seats.
The Orleans wasn't offering $5 blackjack on a Thursday night last month. If you're a local or a low roller who doesn't want to play at the higher minimums, you go elsewhere. But elsewhere is quickly becoming extinct, it seems.
During last month's trip, I made it a point to visit a handful of odd joints I don't normally visit. My friend/podcast producer was with me, and he has never seen the locals casinos, so we made that part of our experience.
I knew Joker's Wild had removed its table games. That made sense. They are a locals joint that doesn't attract big spenders, so the low roller blackjack tables and the famous $1 minimum craps game weren't going to make meaningful money. Instead of simply closing the tables during the pandemic, they were pulled. As of mid-June, they hadn't been restored.
I wound up inside Casino Royale during my trip, a place I don't visit very often these days. I remember playing Spanish 21 there one night many years ago, when I was still staying and playing on the strip. I had a great time on a Sunday night, and the pit was busy. Not to my surprise, there are no tables at Casino Royale, at least not as of mid-June. Casino Royale is known as one of the last bastions of low rolling on the strip, so perhaps its days of live table games are over.
I had never been inside the sketchy Wild Wild West, despite driving by it many times on my way to The Orleans. Having hyped its sketchiness to my friend, we were compelled to visit on a steamy Sunday afternoon. It was rather empty, not to my surprise, and there were no longer table games to be found. That wasn't a shock, either.
There are still tables to be found at smaller casinos. On our Friday afternoon trek down the Boulder Highway we stopped at Skyline Casino. The tables were there, but they weren't open, not to my surprise. I suspect you can get $5 action there. And we went all the way down to Club Fortune Casino, which I had never been to. Again, they had tables, but they weren't open on a Friday afternoon. I'm guessing they still offer $5 action. But these aren't destinations typical tourists will ever see.
And yes, you can still play $5 blackjack. We had lunch on Saturday at Jerry's Nugget. (More on that another day.) We stayed to play blackjack, as $5 tables were the norm. So was $5 craps. It's a Saturday in Vegas, at a very locals casino, and there were a bunch of people playing low minimum blackjack, roulette and craps. The craps table was pretty full, and offering a $5 minimum. Jerry's Nugget knows how to draw the locals, and was doing so.
We also played a few hands of $3 blackjack prior to lunch at Jerry's Nugget. Real deal blackjack at none other than Poker Palace. This name may not ring a bell to tourists, but it's a small, no frills dump a few miles from downtown. We had been at the big flea market that morning, and after four hours of flea market scouring, we stopped at Poker Palace for a beverage. Turns out they were just getting ready to open their tables, so we sat down for 10 minutes on a Saturday, around the noon hour, to play at Poker Palace. The cards at the table looked like an old deck kept behind the bar at a small town Minnesota bar. And the joint had hardwood flooring. It was so, so weird, but dammit, we played $3 blackjack in Vegas, and somewhere I have one of the Poker Palace silver dollars from the table to prove it.
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| I mistakenly thought we were at Bellagio. |
I've always known that Tuscany has table games, but I've never been there to see it for myself. The casino is still there, but with no tables, I'm not likely to stop in any time soon.
Tuscany isn't as convenient as Ellis Island when it comes to accessing the property from the strip, but it would seem that now, more than ever, the Tuscany tables should have been doing brisk business, offering $5 games not far from the strip. Perhaps it was just far enough that people wouldn't walk over to it, but it isn't that much further away than Ellis Island is, and Ellis Island is doing just fine offering lower minimum table action.
The loss of table games at low roller joints like Joker's Wild, Wild Wild West and Tuscany suggest to me that the days of $5 tables are mostly history. Sure, they could return, and sure, The Orleans could start offering them again after the pent-up demand for burning through cash in Vegas subsides.
But I think the absence of tables at Tuscany is another sign that the days of the $5 tables are about over, even for the locals joints. Stadium gambling, bubble craps and other machines are the new normal for low rollers. On the heels of the pandemic, video gambling that requires less labor is helping usher out the $5 craps and blackjack era. Tuscany is another nail in that coffin.
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