4/10/2022»»Sunday

How Much Do Las Vegas Casino Dealers Make

4/10/2022

Answer 1 of 9: From Aug. 23rd Las Vegas Review Journal newspaper: 'Wynn Las Vegas dealers are the highest- paid dealers in the city, averaging about $100,000 per year in salary and tip earnings. But the employees supervising dealers average about $60,000 a.

How prosperous Las Vegas casinos really are?

Range $6,609 - $117,190 How much does a Poker Dealer make in Las Vegas, NV? The average salary for a Poker Dealer is $21,146 in Las Vegas, NV. Salaries estimates are based on 15. Here’s a look at six of Las Vegas’ largest casino operators: MGM Resorts International: 337-to-1 Former MGM CEO Jim Murren earned a total of $13.1 million in 2019, according to a regulatory. So how much can dealers make? On the low end, $30,000-$35,000 per year. On the high end, $80,000 or more. The majority of dealers in Vegas make $50,000 or less.

How much money do Las Vegas casinos make? Source: unsplash.com

Gambling businesses have always been on the shady side of economies. They are treated as high-risk enterprises when applying for a loan or other financial services. Most people stay away from such places, being prudent about their hard-earned money. And yet, Las Vegas casinos seem to defy all the prejudice. They are a symbol of the city, one of its main attractions, and a magnet for betting people from all walks of life.

For sure, people who love to test their luck are numerous. Just to put it into perspective, last year, the American Gaming Association estimated that $150 billion was gambled around the world per year in legal and illegal settings.

So, how prosperous are casinos really? PaySpace Magazine’s team is eager to know that. Are you?

How do casinos make money?

At first sight, the answer seems clear. People place bets in various gambling games. When they lose, the money bid goes to the casino. However, bets also often pay off for the gamblers. One may think that casino owners are betting people too, putting the success of their business at stake. However, it’s not true. As Nico Zographos, dealer-extraordinaire for the ‘Greek Syndicate’ in Deauville, Cannes, and Monte Carlo in the 1920s observed about casino gaming: “There is no such thing as luck. It is all mathematics.” Well, statistics, to be precise.

The casino usually wins in the long run, due to the thoroughly calculated “house edge”. It’s also known as the casino advantage. That edge exists on every table game, lotto, or slot in a casino online or on land. The stats don’t depend on the casino establishment, these are purely mathematical odds of the game itself. The house edges for the most popular games vary from 0,5% to 40%.

In addition, individual casinos get more income when they find a method of increasing their house edge, the amount of time on each game and the average bet size. Therefore, the minimum amount is required in most table games. The maths is simple, the casino expects to make a certain amount of money for each round. The higher the limits, the better probability of attracting wealthy gamblers who like to play big. Players may be also encouraged to bet more by special offers called ‘comps’. Comps are gifts such as airline tickets or tickets to shows or even a certain extra percentage of the total winnings. They can be obtained by participating in a kind of “loyalty program” of a certain casino. Gamblers who receive a club card must meet certain requirements like spending a particular amount of time on a game, reaching a certain number of stakes, etc. This strategy is also advantageous to the casino despite the seemingly extra costs.

Moreover, betting itself is actually only a small part of the total casinos’ revenues. Non-gaming income comes from selling food and drinks, guests visiting in-house entertainment venues or spa facilities, renting rooms for overnight stays, paid parking lots, etc.

The average Las Vegas casino visitor spent $434.70 per night. Source: unsplash.com

In fact, since 1999, revenue generated by non-gaming amenities has exceeded casino revenue in Nevada. By 2013, the direct gaming income constituted only one-third of the total profits made by Las Vegas casinos.

Research conducted by David Schwartz, the former director of UNLV’s Center for Gaming Research, showed that in 2018, the average Las Vegas casino visitor spent $434.70 per night with $285.41 going to non-gaming attractions and only $149.29 placed on gambling.

Furthermore, the share of people who visit casinos without gambling at all, for the sake of fun and new experience seems to grow with every generation. During the 2014 survey, 51% of the responding US Millennials vs 15% of Matures admitted they had visited a casino and not gambled but spent money on non-gaming amenities such as food and beverages.

Revenues and stats

Now that you understand the full picture, let’s get down to the exact numbers.

That’s how much major Las Vegas casinos earn annually:

  • The owner of MGM Grand Las Vegas, MGM Resorts International had its consolidated net revenues increase 10% to $12.9 billion in 2019, with $5.8 billion attributed to Las Vegas Strip Resorts.
  • Caesars Entertainment that stands behind the famous Caesars Palace generated approximately $4.45 billion in revenue from its casinos in 2019 with $4 more billion coming from non-gaming sources.
  • Casino and entertainment resort company Wynn Resorts generated approximately $6.61 billion in revenue in 2019.
  • Circus Circus Casinos, Inc. has a comparably modest approximate annual revenue of $115.91 million.
  • Las Vegas Sands, the owner of The Venetian, reported Consolidated Net Revenue of $13.74 billion in 2019; whereas its operating income decreased 1.4% to $3.70 billion.

In fiscal 2017, 24 casinos in the Las Vegas Strip area produced gaming revenue of more than $72 million. The average daily revenue of a single casino made up $1.8 million with $634.5 thousand coming from the gaming bets.

169 large casinos in Las Vegas reported total revenues of nearly $22 billion. Source: unsplash.com

In the 2019 fiscal year, 169 large casinos in Las Vegas reported total revenues of nearly $22 billion. Their aggregate net income almost reached $2 billion.

At the same time, casinos in the state of Nevada generated $8.76 billion in revenue from gaming.

Coronavirus impact

The woes of the 2020 pandemic brought sad outcomes to the gambling sites. Being non-essential businesses, nearly all gambling venues and resorts were closed for a long time. Therefore, the losses of casinos are colossal.

Thus, MGM Resorts posted a 91% decline in quarterly revenue for the Q2 2020. The company also had an operating loss of $1 billion compared with operating income of $371 million a year earlier.

Las Vegas Sands announced net revenue of $98 million, a decrease of 97.1% from the prior year quarter. Operating loss was $922 million, compared to operating income of $894 million in the same period of 2019.

Though the casino operators speak about the reopening and recovery processes with hopefulness, their usual revenue levels may not be reached too quickly. Experts believe that a complete recovery to 2019 levels may not occur until 2022 or possibly 2023. Unlike many regional gambling markets, Vegas is heavily reliant on air travel, which is still pretty restricted. The number of international tourists and business travelers who are drawn to the wonders of illuminated casino buildings will be significantly smaller in the upcoming seasons.

Furthermore, the state’s “Road Map to Recovery” limits casino operations to 50 percent occupancy. That is another factor for the revenue decrease in the foreseeable future.

Per

SunTrust Robinson gaming analyst Barry Jonas believes Las Vegas needs to return to its “gaming roots” to survive the pandemic crisis:

Today’s gaming market has essentially morphed back 30-plus years in time to when the main focus was recession-resistant gambling, as non-gaming amenities take a back seat.

SEE ALSO:


If you’re entertaining dreams of owning your own casino one day, you’ll need anywhere from a few thousand dollars to a few billion.

The casino business is so lucrative that every time a new casino opens as “the most expensive casino ever built,” investors pop champagne bottles and raise a toast. It wasn’t always that way. Only a few decades ago, casino operators built on slim budgets.

Steve Wynn gambled big in the late ‘80s when he opened The Mirage in Las Vegas. Wynn and his backers invested an unheard-of $630 million in the new casino. At the time, industry analysts calculated the casino would have to turn an average daily profit of at least $1 million to meet its financial obligations.

The Mirage was supposed to pay for itself over seven years. Wynn paid off the debt in less than two years. That works out to more than $4 million profit per day.

In 2019 dollars, that isn’t so bad. If a casino has only 1,000 gaming machines, it can turn a $5 million daily profit just by retaining an average $1000 per machine.

According to a 2015 Las Vegas Sun article, about 40 million people visited Las Vegas on an annual basis at that time. That works out to nearly 110,000 visitors to Las Vegas daily. There are just over 100 casinos in Las Vegas.

In 2017, it was then reported that annual visitors had climbed to more than 42 million.

If each visitor loses only an average of $100 per day, Las Vegas is raking in $11 million in casino earnings every day. The reality is much more startling.

In 2013, the University of Nevada, Las Vegas published a study on the daily revenues of the 23 big casinos on the Strip. To be included in the study, a casino had to produce gaming revenue at least $72 million a year. The average for each of the big 23 turned out to be over $230 million per year.

That’s a far cry since The Mirage opened in 1989, but competition has changed the city’s gaming industry. Here is a deeper look at what it costs to build a casino.

Location, Location, Location

If you want to build a casino for as little as possible, buy cheap land. Where that wicket becomes sticky is in finding the right land. Not only do you need favorable laws allowing gambling and zoning for casinos, but you also need at least a good nearby highway.

Las Vegas is a hub for three Interstate highways and several US highways. The city is also home to McCarran International Airport. About 40 million passengers pass through the airport every year.

Considering AmTrak carries passengers to the city as well, tourists visit the city by car, bus, train, and plane.

If you decide to build your own casino, lacking the transportation channels that Las Vegas boasts means your location will attract fewer annual visitors. This probably explains why few cities dominate the casino industry. The casinos need both good zoning and access to transportation to attract visitors.

How Much Do Dealers Make In Las Vegas

Hence, you should expect to pay a lot of money for the land.

Size Counts In Every Way

The Mirage currently boasts about 2,000 slot machine games. While that sounds like a lot, the WinStar World Casino in Thackerville, OK has about six times the floor space as The Mirage. The WinStar opened in 2003, making it 14 years younger than The Mirage.

According to their website in 2019, the WinStar holds about 8400 slot machines. They also have a 55-table poker room, all squeezed into 400,000 feet of floor space. If you want to compete with the WinStar, you’ll need a lot of floor space and thousands of more games.

Amazingly, Thackerville only has one Intestate highway passing through it. The nearest international airport is in Dallas, TX. WinStar is competing on size and landscape.

The casino is owned and operated by the Chickasaw Nation, who had plenty of available land for development. That’s an advantage over the average commercial developer. By owning the land as part of their reservation, they were able to invest more in creating a high-quality resort.

You Need a Hotel and Restaurant


One reason why good casinos cost so much to build is the bigger casinos contain or are paired with big hotels. By providing their visitors with safe, comfortable accommodations, they ensure those visitors spend more time in their gaming areas.

On-site entertainment and dining venues enhance the hotel and casino experience. The farther away from Vegas and Atlantic City one gets in the United States, the less extravagant the casinos tend to become.

Only a handful of states and cities allow commercial casinos to congregate in their jurisdictions. The demand for suitable land limits the competition.

Biloxi, MS is North America’s third big commercial casino hub.

In Biloxi, venues like Beau Rivage, Treasure Bay, and Hard Rock offer attractive accommodations and gaming areas.

The Beau Rivage may be the best known of the Biloxi casinos. They only offer about 1800 slot games. Owned by MGM Resorts, Beau Rivage promotes its hotel, entertainment, dining, and nightlife venues equally with the casino.

These are not afterthoughts. They are part and parcel major pieces of the whole package.

According to Fixr.com, the average cost of a hotel in the United States is just over $22 million. A hotel comparable to the resorts at WinStar or Beau Rivage will easily set you back in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

Factor in the Cost of Games

Assuming the hypothetical new casino brings in a lot of slot machines, how much do they cost?

The website HowMuchIsIt.org rounds up a list of price ranges for popular slot machines. Expect to pay at least several thousand dollars per basic game. The enhanced games may run $30,000 or more for the consoles.

Assuming you pay $20,000 for a brand new game and begin with a small investment of 500 machines, expect to finance about $10 million just for the slot machines.

If you can bring enough people in, the games should pay for themselves in only a few months. That’s not so bad.

However, the games will need to be maintained. A new casino must include the cost of hiring qualified staff or for paying authorized service contracts.

How Much Do Las Vegas Casino Dealers Make Per

Plant Operations Are Expensive

Whether you’re building a roadside casino with 100 machines or planning a massive resort with more than a handful of casino games, the buildings will need electricity, water, heating and air systems, sewage, and maintenance areas.

A large resort has a plant facility with workshops, storage rooms, receiving areas, and more. Even a small casino needs a place to service machines and receive products and services.

Assuming a modest 200-room hotel is built on the property, it will have its own plant facility. Ditto for a small restaurant.

This new casino will need tools and equipment no one thinks about when pushing buttons and counting cards. There are lighting systems, sound systems, security systems, communication systems, and staff offices.

Employees will need dressing rooms and lockers, or at least their own break room.

How Much Do Casino Dealers Make In Vegas

Administration will need at least one office, maybe two if there is a dedicated full-time security team.

The cashiers will need a counting room and vault.

How Much Do Las Vegas Casino Dealers MakeHow Much Do Las Vegas Casino Dealers Make

All these facilities must be built out, equipped, and brought online. This is all before you hire your first employee.

Make

Conclusion

How Much Do Dealers Make In Vegas

If the idea of building a new casino seems crazy, it is. This is an industry for billionaires and rich investment fund managers to play in. It’s not for the faint-hearted or small business person.

It’s true there are hundreds of small casinos that do just fine. With only a few dozen to a few hundred games, they cater to local customers. They don’t need big highways, trains, and airports.

Even so, the cost of setting up a small commercial will run into the millions of dollars. Most communities won’t accept commercial casinos. Most states don’t license them. The Native American tribes may contract with casino management companies but only the big ones.

Las Vegas Casino Dealers Jobs

In short, it costs a lot of money to open a casino. Buying one is out of the question for most people. Donald Trump is believed to have lost about $1 billion in investors’ money by trying to buy his way into Atlantic City.

Las Vegas Hotel And Casinos

Short of inheriting a small fortune or casino, this kind of development is one game well beyond the reach of typical investors and small business owners.