Finding your way on the floor

You are through the doors of a casino for the first time, and nobody is going to show you around. What do you look for first?

Mayaformer floor supervisor · manners, money and breaks

I spent years on the other side of this room, and what makes a first visit uncomfortable is almost never the games. It is not knowing who you are allowed to ask, or what you are allowed to ask them about. So we do the room first and the games later.

Three questions, worked through

The machine freezes in the middle of a game

You are halfway through a game on a machine, the screen stops moving, and your money is still on the screen. Where do you go?

Mayaformer floor supervisor · manners, money and breaks

Nowhere, and that surprises people. Stay in the seat and press the button on the machine that calls staff over — the same button you press when you want change. Walking away is the instinct, and walking away is what costs you: the machine keeps your game whether you are in front of it or not.

• Walk to the cashierThe cashier counts money over a counter, so you get sent back — and you left the frozen machine standing there to make the walk.
• Move to another machineWhatever was on the frozen machine is still on the frozen machine, and now you are two seats away from it.
• Press the service buttonA member of staff walks over to the machine you are sitting at. The same button is how you ask for change.

Every poker table is full

You want a seat in a poker game tonight, every table is taken, and you have found the poker room. What happens next?

Mayaformer floor supervisor · manners, money and breaks

Poker is the one game on this floor where you play the other people at the table rather than the casino, so it gets a room of its own and a desk at the door of that room. You give your name at the desk. Now you tell me what the desk does with your name.

You: puts my name on a list, and calls me when a seat comes free.

Mayaformer floor supervisor · manners, money and breaks

That is it, and the list is not kept secret: at Casino de Montréal the list goes up on a screen beside the room, so you can watch your own name move up that screen. You are in a queue for the stakes you asked for, not holding one particular chair.

1. Ring ahead if the casino takes names that way. Casino Niagara does, up to ninety minutes before you arrive.
2. Check in at the poker desk when you walk in, even if you rang and your name is already down.
3. Wait where you like. Great Canadian Toronto hands you a pager, so you can wait away from the desk and still be told.
4. Be back when your name comes up. Ten minutes away from the desk at Great Canadian Toronto and your name comes off the list again.

One thing to ask that desk before you agree to anything is the stakes of the game the desk is putting you into. The stakes of a poker game are written as two amounts rather than one, and those two amounts are the blinds (the two forced bets that start a poker hand, and the two amounts a game is named by). A room with several games running has a different pair of amounts for each game, so ask the desk which pair you are joining.

The casino is open and its tables are not

The casino’s front page says it is open, the doors are open, you have come for blackjack at eleven in the morning. Your turn.

You: check whether the tables are open, not just the building.

Mayaformer floor supervisor · manners, money and breaks

Yes, and that is the mistake people make most often, because the word on the front page sounds like it covers everything behind the door. The machines are usually the part that runs longest; the tables, the poker room and the bingo hall each keep a timetable of their own, and plenty of tables do not start until the afternoon.

The floor is a few zones, not one room

Each zone has its own staff and its own job, so who you ask depends on where you are standing.

The machines take most of the floor

Rows of screens are most of what you see from the door, and it is not a close thing: about 32 machines stand on the floor for every live table. The person who comes when the button on a machine calls is a slot attendant (the staff member who looks after the machines and pays out what the machine cannot). At some casinos the attendants walk the floor all evening, so the nearest attendant can be asked about a machine without pressing anything at all.

A live table is run by a person, and that person answers questions

The live tables stand together, and at every live table there is a dealer (the person who runs the game at the table). The dealer is the person to ask how the game works — between rounds rather than in the middle of a round, which is our advice, not a rule anyone publishes. The person standing back and watching a group of tables at once, instead of dealing at a table, is a supervisor (the staff member responsible for several tables, who settles anything the dealer cannot).

The poker room is walled off from the rest of the floor, and the list of who wants a seat is kept at a desk rather than at a table. A telephone number for that desk is published by 12 of the casinos we list, and Casino Niagara publishes its own number as the way to get a name on the waiting list before you arrive. Where the list is kept is not the same at every casino, and neither is whether the casino has a poker room at all.

• At the poker room doorA desk stands at the door, takes your name and works down the list as seats come free. That is what Casino de Montréal publishes about its own room.
• At Guest ServicesCasino Nanaimo publishes one instruction for a poker seat, and it sends you to Guest Services to register rather than to the room.
• Nowhere: no poker at allFallsview Casino Resort says on its own FAQ that poker is not available there, so there is no room and no list to join.

The counters by the door

Behind the barred windows is the cashier (the cage) (the window where chips and slot tickets become money). Casino Regina writes that its value chips are redeemable at its cashier’s desks, which is the sentence to remember on the way out. Nearer the doors stand two more counters. One counter is Guest Services (the desk near the entrance that answers questions about the building). The other counter is a coat check (the counter that takes your coat, and the bag security asks you to leave). At the doors themselves stands security, and security is who decides whether the bag you walked in with goes over that coat-check counter.

• CashierBehind the barred windows. Chips go back over this counter, and the walk to that counter is the next lesson of the first-visit track.
• Guest ServicesA desk like this is named by 63 of the casinos we list on their own websites.
• Coat checkA counter like this is named by 14 of those same casinos, and a casino without a coat check sometimes says so outright, as Casino New Brunswick does.

The help centre is the zone worth finding first

One room in the building has a job that is you rather than the games: a small room near the entrance, whose staff are there to talk about gambling and about stopping rather than about which game to play next. What that room is called, and whether anybody is sitting in it when you get there, depends on which province the casino is in.

Who to ask, and where

Almost everything a first visit throws up belongs to one desk or one person, and the whole set is short enough to carry in your head.

“Open” is the building, not the tables

The front page of a casino’s website tells you when its doors open, and that is all it is telling you. Behind the doors each area keeps a timetable of its own: the machines are usually the part that runs longest, and at many casinos the tables start hours later in the day than the machines do.

So one minute on the casino’s own page, on the day you set out, is what stands between you and a drive to a room where nobody is dealing. Three things to look at while you are on that page:

1. Name the area you are going for. The tables, the poker room and the bingo hall each publish hours of their own, so hours published for the tables say nothing about when the poker room opens or when the bingo hall does.
2. Look at the day, not only at the hour. A casino that deals live tables on a Friday evening may deal none at all on a Tuesday morning, and the same page usually gives both days.
3. Read that page on the day you set out. Hours change more often than anything else a casino publishes, and a line read last month is a line about last month.

Mayaformer floor supervisor · manners, money and breaks

While you are on that page, look for a plan of the building as well: Casino Niagara puts out a PDF map, and Loto-Québec puts out a virtual tour. Five minutes with a map or a tour, and the room has stopped being a maze before you have set foot in it.

House rules are each casino’s own, and they disagree

No rule covering the whole of Canada tells a casino what to do about photographs, phones or bags. Each casino writes its own, and on photographs two of the casinos quoted here flatly contradict each other:

Our advice, not anybody’s published rule: treat the table, the cashier and another person’s face as out until the casino you are in says otherwise.

Practice plan: where do I go?

The same nine zones, and one task at a time: sort out a machine that has stopped, get a seat in a poker game, ask how a game works. Press the zone you would walk to, and the plan says what is in that zone and where the task belonged, with the sentence the casino published. The lesson is one run: every square on the strip is one moment of this lesson, and all the squares are there from the start. Level 1 names the zones, level 2 takes the names away, level 3 asks the same question at a real casino at an hour that casino publishes; when a level’s squares are full the next level begins by itself.

Check yourself

Mayaformer floor supervisor · manners, money and breaks

Five quick ones. Pick an answer, then check it. No timer, no points: just whether it stuck.

What our casino pages say about the floor

A casino page in our atlas answers the questions in this lesson from that casino’s own website, as far as that casino publishes them — a section it says nothing about is left off rather than filled in:

• On the gaming floor — the areas the casino lists: the poker room, electronic tables, the bingo hall.
• On site — Guest Services, the coat check, the cashier, and what else is in the building.
• Hours — the building, and each area that publishes its own.
• Who to call — the poker desk and the guest-services number, where the casino publishes them.

19+ (18+ in AB, MB, QC) · Play responsibly · the line for your province is at Helplines by province

Before you go

Mayaformer floor supervisor · manners, money and breaks

Two things, and neither is about games. On your way in, walk past the help desk and note where it is. It takes ten seconds, and it means you will never have to look for that room in a hurry.

And watch which way you are walking to the cashier. Going to the cashier to turn chips back into money is the end of an evening. Going to the cashier for more money is a decision to spend more than you decided to spend — make that decision away from the table, with your plan in front of you, in Game plan.

How it’s worked out