Poor judgment in a casino always involves money. Depending on how well you can keep your head straight will be the determining factor on how you come out at the end of the night. You can make small mistakes, but learn from them and actually do yourself some good. If you're going to play the tables, you're inevitably going to make some mistakes and your only friend in those situations is going to be the dealer. I've written about these things before but now I'm going to put it into one column.

The first thing you need to consider is communication with your dealer. There's a basic question as to whether you can clearly communicate with them. I know I can communicate with most dealers that speak clear English. And I also know I cannot communicate with a dealer that doesn't speak clear and concise English. It's going to be important also that not only does the person speak English but then they have to USE the fucking language once in a while.

That means you have to establish a relationship with the dealer and vice-versa, and you need to do is as quickly as possible. The more time you waste, the more it's going to cost you. The more time you spend trying to "beat the dealer" the more time and money you're going to waste frivolously trying to get over the house when, in fact, that dealer is really self-employed. They have no interest in seeing anyone win but themselves, PERIOD.

So, the sooner you establish a friendship based on the simple four letter principle that has worked in Las Vegas since the inception of tipping: CASH, the better. It speaks volumes. It tells the dealer immediately that you're on his side as well as your own and that through a little common communication you could put a couple of percentage points of luck back in your favor.

Recently, a player started out with a $25 bet. After the second win he put a nickel up for me and won the bet. A few hands later he had a soft 16 against my 6 with a $50 bet. He gestured for a hit and I suggested he might want to double down since I had been watching the cards and most of the big cards had already come out and there were lots and lots of small cards. All I said after he motioned for a card was, "Did you want to just hit that?" and he asked, "Why, should I double down?"

Which meant, "YEP, Double down." He caught the 4 for $100 and we were off. He realized that I knew what a hit sign looked like and wouldn't stop and ask that question if I didn't have a better suggestion. Now he was putting up a nickel every couple of hands and we were doing great. He started to lose back a couple hundred and I suggested he take a walk with the $600 he was ahead.

"Buy yourself and your wife dinner somewhere nice." Which is what he did. They dined at the Bellagio on his winnings. I probably dropped $200 in tokes. Those are the kind of relationships you want to form with the dealers.

But communication with the dealers isn't always enough. Many times the floor will put a certain amount of heat on the dealers for hustling tokes. Just simple talk is fine until you start winning serious money then they want the dealers to shut up and deal. So it's harder to communicate. You either have to find another way of "talking" or just evacuate the table altogether. Usually if the dealer's under any heat to dummy up and deal, they'll just shut it down and you'll know it. The feeling of the whole game will change and it's time to pack it up and move on.

Dealers break every 20 minutes, at the top of the hour, then another group breaks at twenty after and another group at forty after, so that dealer will eventually get a break within the hour and return 20 minutes later, either to the same game or in a rotation so you can look for him or her an hour later, probably on a different table and maybe in another floor person's section and you can continue the play.

But it's important to know "Don't push the dealer" Which means not to put him in a position where he could get into trouble with his floor man or boss for overdoing the advice or the toke hustling, so it's better to just leave them alone. If you're a big winner, depending on the casino you're playing at, the floor will notice if you come back to the same dealer either at the same table or at another table. They constantly think of dealers working in cahoots with players to cheat the house so know that. If you feel that they're watching you then they probably are.

Don't feel self-righteous; that you can play wherever and whenever you want. It's a private casino and they have a lot of leeway as to what they can do to you. This includes not just throwing you out but they can have you arrested if they think it's outright cheating. They can demand their money back if they think you're working with the dealer. Remember this is a private house, so they can pretty much do whatever they want; telling you to cash out your chips and leave isn't unusual.

This would only happen if they really had some solid evidence that you were actually cheating and not just asking for advice in return for tipping the dealer or even what they might think as over-tipping the dealer for some sort of inside information like the dealer revealing his hole card. In the poker games like Let-It-Ride and Three-Card Poker they're running into problems with dealers showing their inside cards with a little slight-of-hand, which on those games doesn't take much practice.

It took years for the management to identify the problem of revealing the hole card when dealers used to physically look under 10s and Aces. It wasn't until the late '90s that all the casinos went to the mirror that only shows 10s or Aces. I remember when I broke in I couldn't help but cheat a little when I had a toke up for myself and someone needed to do the opposite of what they asked to do. But all dealers did it whether consciously or sub-consciously.

The other games will come around to the problems. As the tokes go down and the house's hold goes up and up, due to the poorer gambling techniques of the newer gamers, the dealers are going to feel more and more pressure to help the poorer players to give them a chance to win so to give the dealers a chance to make tips.

A report that circulates around the casinos is a weekly toke report. I can't tell you who does this or where they get the information, but I checked out the numbers and they were right on. And the report is telling us that tokes are down dramatically in many casinos. The local casinos are affected the most, since the direct earning capacity of the city reflects in the dealers tokes because the less the dealers make, the less they can spend. Las Vegas is still unique in that the gaming community is directly tied into the economy. If you took the dealers out of Las Vegas, and say, replaced them with blackjack and roulette and crap video machines, the town would literally collapse in a few months. The bars would shut down; the restaurants, the gas stations, etc. would all close. House payments couldn't be made, car payments wouldn't be met, and utilities couldn't be paid. The 6,000-plus people moving into town each month would have to stay put and one by one businesses would shut down. New homes would remain empty, builders, contractors, suppliers, etc. - everyone down the food chain - would be affected.

I recall a trip I took to Chicago some years ago. One of my favorite places to spend my weekends when I was a kid was the sand dunes in Indiana. But driving to the dunes would take you through Gary, Indiana, which is a steel mill town just past the outskirts of Chicago's' tough south side bordering Lake Michigan. From miles away you could smell the rotten egg odor of the sulfur spewing from the huge smoke stacks. But this time there was no smell. I noticed it right away and the next thing I noticed was the 100-foot high red brick smoke stacks standing silent like sentinels standing in defiance against time. When I asked my friend about it I was told the steel mills had shut down a few years earlier. "It's great, no more pollution, no more stinking smell. Gary was a dirty smelly city that no one ever wanted to even drive through."

I was pretty shocked by the statement. It was like saying they took some crappy TV show off the air, but never took into account that it wasn't just the rich actors that lost a job, but the makeup people, the writers and the prop guys, among others. Many people were affected but most people were shortsighted and couldn't see beyond they're own opinions.

Driving through Gary was like a trip through Hiroshima after the bomb fell, but without destroying the buildings. There was no traffic on the streets. The windows and doors of the now-closed businesses were boarded up. There were apartment buildings with no cars in the parking lot. Only Rod Serling could have written a script for this scene from the Twilight Zone. This was what Las Vegas would look like if you took live gaming out of the equation.

Sure, we'd still have the slots but no one would get on a plane or in a car and spend serious money to play slot machines when they could go to their nearest riverboat or Indian casino for that. So it's up to us, the dealers, to help make better gamblers out of the people playing now as well as the new players. And the players have a duty to see to it that we're tipped well enough so we can afford to keep living here and doing the jobs we're doing. That way, we can keep you guys up on the latest games, the latest odds, and the best ways to play the games. In the years since I began dealing I've continued to improve my outlook on how to play these games and win. Certainly it's more likely you'll lose, but if you can get a good start where you don't have to play catch-up most of the night, you WILL be able to leave with more than you started with. I don't care if you start with $20 and leave with $30, you can and will show some profit. Ten bucks is nothing, but I can get to work for most of the week on $10. I can buy dinner, a drink and a tip for $10. So it's really a matter of keeping your head into the game. Limit the time per table greatly, since the biggest problem people have is spending too much time at the tables. Leave the table with more than you started with by maintaining two stacks of chips, the buy-in stack, and the profit stack. Don't bet more when you're losing, don't wait too long to raise your bet when you're winning since losing streaks last much longer than winning streaks. Put an hour limit on a table regardless of weather you're winning or not. Put a max. loss of whatever your buy-in is. If you buy in $100 don't buy back in again if you lose the hundred just walk. Put a limit on your per-day money you can lose and DON'T GO PAST THAT LIMIT. I don't care if you have to lock yourself in your room, I don't care if the night started at 8 and is over at 8:15. Just go home; no I'm sorry, I didn't say that right...JUST GO HOME!! Leave the table with a 50% to 100% profit. If you buy in for $100 be willing to leave with $150, if you can get it up to $200 without going under $150 than be willing to leave with the $200. Then keep going that way, if you get over $200 than be willing to leave if you lose back to $200 and so on. Make small limits and stick to those limits. If you get to $220 and lose the $20 just get up. Don't say "Well, I'll go down to $150 like I said I would before." Just leave after you lose the $20. Take the $100 profit and DO SOMETHING WITH THE MONEY.

That means take $25 or whatever and take yourself out to a good meal. Maybe stop in one of those expensive casino clothing stores and buy a pair of shoes or a nice shirt. Buy some new sunglasses or a new CD. Then later on if you still want to play, you can start over with the $100 you started with and try it again. If worse comes to worse and you lose the hundred at least you had a good dinner, bought a few CDs, or you have a nice shirt to wear that night. But at least you'll have something solid, something physical, something you can wrap your hands (or your teeth) around and say you got something for the money you lost. It's unbelievable how many players go home with NOTHING. And they've gone without eating anything better than McDonalds or usually worse.

The most important thing is, like I said at the beginning; establish a good rapport with the dealer. Just a couple of bucks will go a long way. And don't just wait for a few wins in a row to put a buck up for them. They'll go way out of their way if you put a toke up at the very beginning, or even better, if you lose a couple of hands, put a tip up. That really impresses a dealer. We would expect a tip when you win, but not when you're losing, and when someone puts a toke up when they're losing they're telling me that they have class, that they want to see ME make a buck because I'm nice and I treated them well, whether or not they make money, and to me that's classy, and class comes with attitude in most places, but in Vegas, class comes with CASH!!

-Ken Pearlman