How Casino Supervisors Keep the Games Moving

Optimizing Game Pace

Game pace is a pretty straightforward term. It refers to how many decisions per hour occur on any gaming table. When most people hear the term game pace, or hands per hour, or decisions per hour, they think of how fast the dealer is dealing. That is indeed an important part of it. Dealers should be as efficient as possible, but there is a lot more to it than that. It’s not just on the shoulders of the dealer to keep the pace of the game up. There is a lot you can do as a supervisor that will increase the hands per hour, and the potential hands per hour, which doesn’t get talked about much, but is just as important.

Let’s start at the beginning, with opening tables. It’s very common for the opening of a table or a section to happen unnecessarily slowly, especially if it’s the beginning of the shift. I urge you not to fall into that trend. You might think that doesn’t matter, because if the game isn’t open yet, and there are no players, there is no game pace to optimize. This is what I was referring to when I said potential hands per hour.

If it takes 20 minutes to open a table when it should take 2 minutes, that’s 18 minutes of hands that can’t possibly be dealt. If you also add in the other tables that are opening, that can add up to huge amounts of money that has no potential of being played.

Opening tables quickly and efficiently greatly increases the potential of decisions per hour, and will make you stand out as an effective floor supervisor.

This habit of performing tasks quickly and efficiently translates to other parts of the job as well, such as changing cards. Changing cards is a sometimes annoying, albeit absolutely necessary part of being a floor supervisor. It’s also a task that directly affects game pace, as there are often players on the table when cards need to be changed.

It will take some trial and error to find the fastest way to do it for you, but doing it as quickly as possible will contribute to a faster game pace, more decisions per hour, and maybe more importantly, the shortest interruption of the guest’s gaming experience.

Speaking of interrupting the guest’s gaming experience, something that does just that is when the dealer has to wait for approval of a buy-in. Some buy-ins will require approval. There is no way around that. But when the dealer has to wait longer than a few seconds, sometimes up to a minute or two, that is a real interruption of their gaming experience, as well as an interruption to the pace of the game.

Approving buy-ins as quickly as possible will keep the game moving and keep guests from waiting unnecessarily.

Alright, let’s move on to talking about fills. Fills are a necessary part of the gaming day, but learning when and how to do them correctly will help you optimize the pace of your games.

There is a widespread tendency in this business to order a bunch of fills at the beginning of your shift. While it is a good idea to check your rack inventories when you start your shift, don’t fall into the trap of ordering a cosmetic fill. A cosmetic fill is a fill which isn’t exactly necessary, but you put it in anyway. Some supervisors do it to make the rack look even. Some do it because they think that while they are ordering fills for other games, they might as well order one for this game too.

This might not seem like a big deal. It might even make sense to you, but let me assure you, it can lead to a direct loss of revenue. When you put in an unnecessary fill on a game, it will lead to a stoppage of play on that game when the fill arrives, while it’s accepted and put into the rack. The casino will lose out on several rounds of play during the time it takes for the fill to be put on, which on blackjack can be as many as 18 decisions! All for a fill that you didn’t even really need in the first place.

Not only is it a wasteful interruption to game pace, it also involves a security officer who has to spend their time picking up this fill, bringing it to the table, putting it on, and returning the papers back to the cage. That could take ten minutes in total, for a completely unnecessary task. Let’s not waste the time of our friends in security.

Keeping a solid game pace involves avoiding these types of fills and remembering that fills are meant to do just that, fill up the rack when it needs to be filled, not to make the rack look even.

There is one more sneaky game pace killer we’ll go over before moving on to our next section, and that is handling disputes. I’m talking about when a player makes a claim on a table that requires us as supervisors to call surveillance and have them review the situation and call us back letting us know if we owe them money or not.

It’s common practice to pull the paddle out of the drop box, and place it on top of the table, indicating to surveillance that the incident happened on the play before that. It gives them a visual marker to work backwards from on their review.

It’s easy to simply sit there and wait for surveillance to call back. The customer may even want to, but it’s certainly not necessary. It’s our job as supervisors to encourage the guests to continue playing and tell them that when surveillance calls, we’ll come over and let them know what the outcome is, and refund them any money that is owed to them. If they’re upset, they may not want to keep playing, but often times they do want to play. That’s what they’re there for after all. Plus, if there are other guests on the table, it’s likely that they’ll want to continue playing and not be forced to wait while someone else’s issue gets resolved.

Keeping the game moving gives everyone that wants to keep playing the opportunity to do so, and also keeps the game moving along.