Table Games Manager Talks Jackpots, House Edge, Online Casino

Gambling and storytelling go hand in hand. From big wins and wild spins to bad beats and attempted cheats, if you frequent casinos, you’ve seen it all.

Kevin Lentz, a table games shift manager at Hard Rock Hotel & Casino Biloxi on the Gulf Coast in Mississippi, is in his fourth decade working in the industry. So he’s really seen it all. (Full disclosure: He also writes for websites owned by Better Collective, the parent company of US Bets.)

Add in the fact that he’s worked the 6 p.m. to 2 a.m. shift for the last several years, and it’s safe to say he’s seen the sort of craziness most people can barely imagine. From a customer setting up shop and trying to sell boxes of women’s shoes along a row of slot machines on the casino floor, to a man who lost his arms throwing dice with his feet, to an angry former NFL player breaking a craps dealer’s hand (he ultimately settled for big money), Lentz has accumulated more than his share of stories.

Last week, he sat down with US Bets for a chat covering the state of the land-based casino business, his anecdotal observations, and his thoughts on the move toward iCasino apps.

US Bets: As a table game manager, what are you seeing these days in terms of the popularity of table games compared to slots?

Kevin Lentz: At the previous casino I worked at, which was a Penn National property, maybe 10 percent of the total revenue was table games. Table games revenue at the Hard Rock is [substantially higher]. But generally, table games have really slipped. Although I saw an article saying that at online casinos in Pennsylvania, 50 percent of revenue is from live-dealer games. So that would represent a reversal of what we’ve been seeing over the last 20 or 30 years.

Any idea why table games are more popular at your casino specifically?

I think maybe it’s the Hard Rock brand. It draws a younger demographic, and we’ve seen trends of younger demographics heading back toward table games, especially roulette and craps. It’s a lot of younger people out of Atlanta, out of northern Florida — we get a young demographic from across the South, and we have a really good international marketing team. Our baccarat room is a large percentage of our table games business, and a lot of it is younger Asians from all over the world.

Is craps where you witness the most excitement on your shift?

Absolutely. It tends to draw the showman, or the person who likes to play to the crowds — and that counts for drunks or that counts for sober people, or just crazy people.

Are there happy stories that stand out where you witnessed some particularly huge wins?

There was one just recently — it’s a progressive jackpot and it’s part of a blackjack game that has the bonus attached to it, and it grows with every $5 that you bet on it. The progressive grows, and it got up to, I believe, $230,000. And this guy hit that and he cried and cried and cried.

But I can remember a very different jackpot situation at Caesars in the early ‘90s. I was going on break, and a kid was crying like a baby after he hit the jackpot on Wheel of Fortune. And so I went over to congratulate him and he was 19 years old. He was underage. The jackpot was over a million dollars. And he was underage and they weren’t going to be able to pay him.

Recently, actually, we had two underage gaming violation jackpots within 24 hours. One was only $1,800, but the other one was I think almost $3,700. For the $1,800, the girl had somehow gotten by security because her birthday was going to be that day — it was 10:00, and her birthday was at midnight. She was turning 21 in two hours. Anything over $1,200 gets taxed, so we come in to check her ID, and she’s underage, so we have to call gaming enforcement. And then we had to call them again a few hours later about someone else, and they’re mad because they have to come out each time. Sometimes they want to arrest the people. Gaming enforcement, they carry a gun. They take their jobs way too seriously.

Is there a particular game that you’re a big fan of that isn’t as popular as maybe you think it should be? Everyone knows blackjack and craps. But there are countless table-game poker variations. Are there some that you’re surprised haven’t caught on, or some that are maybe secretly very popular?

You know, those carnival games, when I first broke in, in the late ’80s, early ‘90s, they weren’t really there. Those carnival games have such a terrible payback percentage, and it pains me sometimes to see the side bets on top of it, people paying 7 percent house edge to play the 21-plus-three bet, the six-card bet, and they are wildly popular.

The Ultimate Texas hold’em game we have is full all the time. We have two tables, and now we’ve added progressive side bets to them. And I think that side bet is 11 percent house edge. But the tables are constantly full, and yet not 30 yards away, there is a high-limit room where we have double-deck blackjack games that are at 0.2 percent.

With the younger generation, the game that’s on fire right now is roulette. The millennial crowd, they just can’t get enough of roulette. It’s full every night with 22-year-olds. They don’t know any better. We also have these electronic roulette games and they are just constantly full because you can get a $5 table minimum instead of $25. But again, a 5.2% game against a 0.2% game, it just seems irrational to me. Gambling has been something in 35 years I’ve just never wrapped my head around.

It actually lines up with what we’re seeing in sports betting with the parlays. It’s the same sort of mentality of, “Well, I could grind it out, but isn’t it more fun to give up a higher house edge with a chance at winning a big jackpot?” It seems like that mentality we’re seeing with parlay betting spills over to the table games that are popular as well.

That’s absolutely right. And, at one point there in maybe the early 2000s, it really looked like slots was gonna eclipse this. Every year we gave up more and more table space as slots grew and grew because people weren’t interested in even-money blackjack. As much as I hate the side bets and the fact that you can’t find a blackjack table without four different bets on it, they’re what’s driving an increase in table games play. They’re what keeps us able to have a spot in the casino, because, you know, the hold the house has on blackjack is under 1 percent even if you’re just playing a little bit of basic strategy, whereas now I have built-in house edges of 10 or 12 percent.

We have baccarat side bets on every table. I think there are six on each table, and almost all of them are over 10 percent. Here’s a 1 percent game that all of a sudden has a huge hold. It’s crazy, but it has been a blessing.

I’m curious for your take on online casino and the question of whether it’s bad for land-based casino — the whole cannibalization issue. Do you have an opinion on this?

I do think that in the end it will chip away at revenue, but I’m not sure that’s a problem. Personally, I have no problem transitioning over and working for “the dark side,” as it were, with internet casinos, and I don’t know why anyone would. Either way, those live-dealer studios are going to need people watching over them. They’re still going to need dealers.

But, as you see in the numbers in New Jersey and Pennsylvania and Michigan, the land-based casinos are flat. The online casinos are growing. There’s an ease of use. But maybe it just reinvents land-based. I was there in ‘92 when the Mirage opened in Las Vegas and it changed everything. Maybe that’s what’s got to happen to bring people back to land-based casinos.

Maybe there’s a difference in clientele. I know they make the argument a lot that the people that prefer online gaming are not the same folks that prefer land-based gaming. And I could see that, because the dice players, they cannot be the center of attention on an online craps game. It just doesn’t work the same way as it does in a land-based casino.

It’ll be interesting to see how it goes with the Bally’s online casino monopoly in Rhode Island. I think maybe more than Connecticut or Pennsylvania or New Jersey, it will be a telling test case of how one impacts the other. They’ve got the monopoly on the land-based and on the online. I’m anxious to see how they make that work or walk that tightrope.