When you play slots, and have your card inserted, data is generally captured with precision. How much did you wager? How much were you paid out on those wagers? What’s the house edge of the slot you’re playing? And therefore, how much theoretically should they have won off you, and how much they actually did.
Tables are a different beast. It wasn’t that long ago they were still keeping track of your estimated play with paper and pen. And we say estimated because unlike slots, the method of tracking your play was via observation rather than cold hard data from the slot machine.
This means it won’t be as precise. It’s very easy for players to get rated higher or lower than their actual play. This leads to a comment from a player who was recently weighing in on a post around casino secrets:
Be nice to the pit bosses. They can control how many players points you get.
Pam P.
Even with the computer screens that are now found at most table games in casinos, or at least within the pits, they are not set up to track every bet and every hand. Instead, they’re working off of averages, based on the average rate of play, and the recorded bets per hand. On some tables like craps, casinos might rate groups of bets, such as pass line vs. middle of the table vs. place/buy bets.
But since there’s that human intervention, there’s also human judgement. We’ve seen scenarios where pit bosses will say they won’t rate bets made because the craps table was hot and people were adding bets and raising bets… but yet that doesn’t really make sense because at the end of the day you’re still putting money on the line.
And on the other end there’s pit bosses who publicly declare they’re bumping up your rating because of how generous you’ve been tipping the dealers.
Which leads to one question we sometimes get – if the dealers are getting paid, and you’re losing money, why should you tip them? Tipping is an individual decision, but when it comes to things like what you get credit for betting on the table, the reality is this is one of those things that a pit boss controls, but a dealer will be able to back up a player.
Let’s say you’re changing up your bets, but the pit boss will be slow to come back around to the table to update things. We have seen dealers back up a player that they were betting higher for awhile, which to Pam’s point can mean credit for more bets, and therefore more tier credits and comps on the other side of the session.
So it can help to get along and take care of the team. And for those casinos that still let pit posses give discretionary comps, it could mean an opportunity to get a free dinner as well.
