Friday, August 25, 2006

Dealers are Rich

It's been a couple of years since I heard anything about how much dealers make at Las Vegas casinos. The last discussion I can remember having about it was with recent WPT champion (and "crew" member) Joe Bartholdi, back when he used to deal at Binion's. At the time, he told me he wanted to move to Los Angeles, where Dutch Boyd and other crew members were living, but that his girlfriend was making $100K a year dealing blackjack and was unwilling to leave her job in Vegas to move to L.A. Joe told me he was making about $60K as a poker dealer. Since then, whenever I've been asked how much dealers make, I've said, "I'm not sure, but poker dealers can make over $60,000 I think, and other dealers sometimes make as much as $100,000." Usually, the person who asked dismisses these estimate as being far too high.

Now I have some more evidence. At the Wynn (admittedly, the highest paying casino), the average dealer makes $100,000 a year. I would guess the poker dealers average a bit less. I got the $100K figure from this article about how Steve Wynn is instituting a new tip-sharing policy that's not very popular among the dealers.

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