Jambo's right...

Casino openings are for the young, and I'm not young anymore.

Up sides? I'm getting lots of expereince in poker, and working the poker room is way more fun than I would have thought. The poker manager is a competent (if somewhat young) person with tons of common sense and a great personality for managing the nasty sort of people that typically fill a poker room. I'm surrounded by peers that either have NO experience (newly promoted dealers who've never floored before) or experienced people who aren't any good at their jobs... either way, I look like a super-star because the others look like idiots or break-ins.

We are starting to work out the kinks that never should have been there in the first place, too. For example (and this is for those that know the business... the rest will have to pardon my "shop talk"), the manner by which a table was closed was so convoluted and complicated that it could take upwards of 50 minutes to secure a lid on a game... and if you are waiting on that lid to go home, you know how important that is. Now, they seem to have realized their mistakes and are streamlining the process by which the job is done, so that far fewer names need go on the closer and the right people are doing the paperwork.

Down sides are that there is a real disconnect between the front-line and the shift bosses. The guys calling the shots seem to want to leave all the minute-to-minute decision making calls to the pit bosses, but they are looking for guidance from the shifts, and things are left undone or undecided because of it. I'm no fan of "micromanaging" by any means, but someone has to make a call once in a while, and no one at this house (right now, anyway) is making them. Not every pit in the place is good at his or her job, and those that aren't good are not being told the right way to do it (and they haven't been fired yet), so I am left to assume that the shifts are also not doing their jobs in over-seeing the operation from on high.

Another example: We do all ratings on computer, and all table inventories are processed on computer (Bally's Table View system). This means the only drop tracked is rated drop... and we are rating perhaps 20-30% of the play. What does that mean? It means about 60% of our drop is missing from the call, and none (I mean NONE) of the pits are adding grind to the pad. We under-called our first week's cash by 52% (over $2 million on one day alone)... and I know it is always better to undercall than it is to overcall... but that has to piss the bean counters off something fierce. Imagine what the GM thought when he saw the daily call for tables when we undercalled the drop by $2 million... I'd have had heads on my desk, if it had been me.

So, I'm off to the showers for another 12-hour day. Don't wait on me to post... keep things going here and I'll do my best to keep up.