[Gonso]

Regarding what dealers earn, here are some actual numbers:

I checked up the toke rates in Atlantic City with a couple other houses. Of the 11 casinos in the city, at least three of them had toke rates under $16 per hour this week, the lowest being $15.49 per hour. This reflects the lower end. Caesars and the Borgata are at the top and they fare much better, well into the twenties, maybe thirties at Borgata, but they ask for a lot of experience there.

In our house (a 'middle' house in terms of toke rate), poker dealers keep their own tokes and don't pool in with the table games, and I compared with two other fairly experienced dealers on the way out. We averaged out to around $19/hr each + base tonight, which is around normal for us (we fare a little better than our table games). Two of us left 1 hour and one person 2 hours early (as business slows down this happens a lot), so on average a little over 6 and a half hours out of 8. All this is pretty standard and normal to our industry.

Now based on all of that, you can see how people spouting that typical dealers make $35-$50 hour don't have any idea what they're talking about, and their error is even greater when they prorate that rate it over 40 hour weeks.

A few dealers do well (or even exceptionally well), but they tend to deal higher limit games - which are relative rarity in AC.