In Martin Scorsese’s 1995 film Casino, Ace Rothstein (Robert De Niro) notices two men at two different blackjack tables who don’t appear to know each other. They’re wired under their clothes, and one is tapping his leg to tell the other what the dealer’s hole card is. Security jabs the cheat with a stun gun, calls for medical attention, and hurries him, in Roger Ebert’s words, “to a little room where they pound on his fingers with a mallet.”
That sequence is easy to take as reporting, and parts of it may well be. It’s also the casino movie in miniature. On screen, a table exists so that an incident can happen at it: somebody cheats or counts, and somebody gets hauled off.
Actual tables run on the stuff an editor trims: waiting, and written procedure carried out in front of strangers. So I sat down with a state rulebook, a patent and a stack of old reviews. I wanted to know what the movies get wrong about a table with a living dealer behind it, and which scene gets closest.
A full blackjack table gets through about 55 rounds an hour
Start with the clock, because movies don’t have one. A deal on screen lasts as long as the scene needs, often a few seconds between two lines of dialogue. The Daily Herald’s gambling column put a number on the real thing in March 2008: “A seven-handed blackjack game moves along at an average pace of about 55 rounds per hour.”
Do the division and a round at a crowded table lasts a little over a minute, and for most of it you’re watching six other people make up their minds. The same column reckoned that a player alone with the dealer could get in 220 hands in that hour. Same game, four times the speed, and the only variable is company.
Filmmakers know the gap is there. Robert Luketic’s 21 handled its counting scenes with close-ups of chips and a voice-over giving the count. The reviewer at The Tech, MIT’s campus paper, admired the trick, “given how boring watching someone count cards in reality must be.” As a description of the work, it was fair.
Speed has a price as well, and no film I know mentions it. The columnist noted that even players who had basic strategy down cold were still at about a half-percent disadvantage, one that builds by the hand and not by the hour. The house takes its edge once a round, so a faster game costs more per hour and a slower one less. Either way, the average hour is a losing one.
The dealer works from a script no screenwriter wrote
Movie dealers tend to come in two kinds: a pair of anonymous hands, or a character who sizes up the hero and seems to have a say in how the night goes. Pennsylvania’s blackjack regulations, which I read this week, describe a third kind. The dealer in those pages is a performer with a tightly written part and nothing to add to it.
The rules say which hand does what. Each card comes out of the shoe “with the hand of the dealer that is closest to the dealing shoe” and goes onto the layout “with the opposite hand.” They fix the order too. One card goes face up to each betting box, starting at the dealer’s far left and moving clockwise, then one face up to the dealer. The second pass repeats the trip, except that the dealer’s second card lands face down.
There’s even blocking for a cast change. “Each new dealer who comes to the table shall also remove one card and place it in the discard rack before dealing any cards to the players,” the same section says. Elsewhere the code requires the decks at a shoe table to be changed at least once every 24 hours. I can’t recall a casino picture pausing for a relief dealer to burn a card, and I understand why. No plot hangs on it.
The dealer’s own hand is scripted as well, and that’s the part films bend furthest. In Pennsylvania “the dealer shall draw additional cards until he has a hard or soft total of 17, 18, 19, 20 or 21.” There’s no choice in it. A screen dealer who appears to settle the hero’s fate with a look is doing something the real one can’t. The real one turns cards over and announces the total.
Seven betting spots, and the camera only wants one
The standard blackjack shot is a two-hander: the hero, the dealer and a rack of chips between them. The Pennsylvania rules describe a wider picture. Their table has “betting positions for no more than seven players on one side of the table and a place for the dealer on the opposite side of the table.”
Seven people in a row change what a hand is. Under that dealing order every player’s cards land face up, so the whole rail can read your 16 as easily as you can. Nobody needs to cup anything or peek at a corner. A decision that plays on screen as a private agony gets made in front of strangers who are waiting for their turn.
The Daily Herald column counted what that looks like from a seat. Play alone with the dealer and you’ll see “only five or six cards in a round.” Sit at a full table and there are “20 or more cards laid out in plain view” in front of you. Real blackjack is a wide shot, and directors keep framing it as a close-up.
Casino is one of the few films I can think of that put the crowd to work. Its cheats needed two tables and an accomplice in another chair, which is the only reason Rothstein had anything to notice. Most casino pictures write the other six players out, and with them goes how public a real table is.
Image by Ezra Montaño
Real counters lose to a cover card, a machine and a quiet word
Then there’s the trope the genre can’t quit: the clever player caught and punished. In 21, Jim Sturgess played Ben Campbell, an MIT math whiz recruited by his professor (Kevin Spacey) to count cards in Las Vegas. Then he ran into what The Tech called “back room brawls with the very scary Laurence Fishburne.” The same review cautioned that the film “is not a historical representation of the events that occurred.”
Look at what the movies did there. The man in Casino used a wire and an accomplice. Ben Campbell used arithmetic. Both stories ended in the same back room, because a beating is easier to film than the things the record shows casinos doing about counters, which are quieter and involve more equipment.
Film Threat covered the quiet part back in 2012, in its review of the documentary Holy Rollers, about a crew of predominantly Christian card counters. The casinos in that film stay “ever-vigilant,” and their weapon is “backing off” players from the table. And it takes very little, the reviewer wrote: “a casino employee with a hunch that you may be a card counter.”
The equipment is duller still. Pennsylvania has the dealer set the cover card “at least 1/4 of the way in from the bottom of the stack,” so roughly the last quarter of the shoe, or more, never gets dealt. A floor supervisor may also order a reshuffle after any round. The code doesn’t say why, but cards that stay in the shoe are cards nobody gets to count. A continuous-shuffler patent granted in 2001 did state a purpose for its machine: the continuous-shuffling feature “not only speeds the game, but protects casinos against players” who count cards. No mallet required.
The streamed table is the one that keeps time
Which brings me back to the clock. A pit table moves at the speed of the people sitting at it. A newer kind of table, the live-dealer studio, is a working table that is also literally a set, with a human dealer playing to cameras for an audience at home. And there, going by one operator’s description, the timing is set in advance.
On its page for people playing live casino real money games, the online casino Shuffle says each table keeps a fixed rhythm. Bets, by its account, stay open for a set number of seconds, then comes the deal or the spin, then the settling up. Blackjack, the page says, comes “either at a seated table or in an unlimited-seat format where every player plays the same dealer hand.”
If you’re in the US, read that purely as description, because Shuffle’s terms exclude you. I’m citing the page the way I’d cite a call sheet.
Take the description at face value and two movie staples disappear. A countdown, and no longer the slowest person in the row, decides when the cards come out. And an unlimited-seat game has no seven-spot rail and no hero’s chair. Everybody is up against the same dealer hand at once, which is how a film audience watches a scene.
None of it changes the arithmetic. A timer doesn’t touch the house edge, chance still writes each night’s result, and a fixed rhythm mostly means the edge arrives on schedule.
The truest scene has everybody watching somebody
So which film gets closest? I’d give it to Casino, though for a different passage than the mallet. Ebert wrote that the film’s first hour “plays like a documentary,” and the part I’d single out is the one that explains who watches whom. It’s a rare casino sequence about routine.
Scorsese told American Cinematographer in 1995 what he was after. “The casino manager is watching the pit boss, the pit boss is watching the shift boss, the dealers are watching the players, and the electronic eye in the sky is watching everybody.” That’s the Pennsylvania rulebook as a tracking shot. All that business about which hand touches the shoe reads to me like choreography written to be checked from above.
He shot it in the right place, too. A good chunk of the picture was filmed inside the Riviera, a working casino, during off-hours, with the crew starting at 10 or 11 at night. For six weeks, Friday through Sunday nights excepted, the production had plenty of blackjack tables to itself. The stated interest was in “showing how things operated around the tables.” Around them, and not at them.
As for the mallet, I can’t tell you how much of that was ever true, and Scorsese himself framed the film as a view of “running a casino back in the Seventies.” The next casino movie will still need a wire, a count or a back room, since nobody buys a ticket to watch 55 rounds an hour. But the scene that holds up has no winner in it, only a room full of people doing their jobs and keeping an eye on each other.
