Nate,

As you know, Kerry Packer is a very generous man. Also, unlike most casinos, Caesars dealers are still divided by department, they do not all share tokes (tips). Baccarat keeps theirs, dice keeps theirs, and '21' keeps theirs.

Mr P. was playing in the Palace Court and tipped a large amount of money. Don't know the amount, but probably several hundred thousand dollars, as is his style. He specifically asked the dealers if ALL the dealers would share in the money, and they knowingly lied to him and told him yes. He found at that the small group of baccarat dealers were actually the ones keepng it. (I don't know how he found out. I heard once, but I can't remember!) Another quirk about Caesars is that, in baccarat, the floor supervisors, pit managers, and above (how far, I don't know) share in the tokes. At least they used to, I think it has changed in the last year. So it wasn't just the dealers lying to him, but management representatives as well. At any rate, it ticked him off enough to leave.

I've heard a couple of variations of the story. One is that he toked the baccarat dealers and asked about the '21' dealers. The other is that their was a '21' table open for him to play during the baccarat shuffle and it was staffed with a baccarat dealer who told him that '21' dealers were included.

Interestingly enough, when I was a '21' dealer there a few years ago, a very similar thing happened. For whatever reason, we had a baccarat dealer dealing a mini-baccarat game located in the '21' pit. He was toked around $10,000 and put the money in his pocket (as all CP dealers do). When he got off the game, he was supposed to drop the money in the '21' box, but he walked upstairs into the baccarat pit and dropped it in their box. Of course, the s**t hit the fan, and after a lot of politics (similar to Florida right now) the shift boss came back to us with this message: They said to "Give em back their f**king $10,000 dollars!" We accepted it with a smile! :)

-Tyrus