Transcript of interview with Amber Allan by David Schwartz, December 21, 2016

i An Interview with Amber Allan An Oral History Conducted by David G. Schwartz Slot Operations Oral History Project Center for Gaming Research Special Collections Oral History Research Center University Libraries University of Nevada, Las Vegas ii ©Slot Operations Oral History Project University of Nevada, Las Vegas, 2017 Produced by: UNLV Center for Gaming Research Editors: David G. Schwartz, Joseph A. Belmonte Transcriber: Joseph A. Belmonte Interviewer and Project Manager: David G. Schwartz iii The Oral History Research Center (OHRC) was formally established by the Board of Regents of the University of Nevada System in September 2003 as an entity of the UNLV University Libraries’ Special Collections Division. The OHRC conducts oral interviews with individuals who are selected for their ability to provide first-hand observations on a variety of historical topics in Las Vegas and Southern Nevada. The recorded interview and transcript have been made possible through the generosity of the UNLV University Libraries Advisory Board. The Oral History Research Center enables students and staff to work together with community members to generate this selection of first-person narratives. The participants in this project thank the university for the support given that allowed an idea the opportunity to flourish. In 2016, the Center for Gaming Research undertook a series of interviews with slot managers in order to capture the complexity and history of this position. This interview is part of that series. It has received editing, such as the elimination of fragments, false starts, and repetitions in order to enhance the reader's understanding of the material. All measures have been taken to preserve the style and language of the narrator. The interviewee/narrator was involved in the editing process. David G. Schwartz Director, Center for Gaming Research University Libraries University of Nevada, Las Vegas iv Preface Amber Allan grew up in West Virginia and moved to Las Vegas at the age of 16. She entered the gaming industry in 2000 as a change person at Arizona Charlie’s Boulder where she later held the positions of floorperson and assistant shift manager. Allan would eventually move to Santa Fe Station in 2005 as relief shift manager, later to the Texas Station as a shift manager, and then to Palace Station in 2008 into the slot operations and technical manager role. She then returned to Texas Station at the end of 2008 as director of slot operations and then moved to Aliante Station into the same role in 2009. Allan started at Konami Gaming, Inc. in 2012 where she has worked as an analyst, product specialist, and, currently, as technical sales executive. The interview with Allan begins with her discussion of moving to Las Vegas and the experiences and roles she held as she started in the gaming industry. She discusses the various responsibilities she had in those roles, the types of skills required for them, and the kinds of disputes that are handled in certain supervisory positions. Allan also mentions and discusses the topic of hold percentage as it relates to slot and video poker players. She later describes her philosophy on what makes a good slot floor and also what customers are looking for in slots. Allan then provides the details of her move to the manufacturing side of the slot industry, and she gives her thoughts on what makes both a good and bad slot manager. The interview then shifts to the discussion of free slot play; ticket-in, ticket-out; changes in slot management; and the future of slot machines. The interview concludes with Allan’s discussion of her personal gambling as well as her advice for young people who want to go into the slot industry. 1 We are rolling. Today is December 21st, 2016. I am at UNLV’s Special Collections with Amber Allan. We are talking about her career in slot operations and slot manufacturing. So, Amber tell me a little bit about your background. Where are you from? I originally grew up in West Virginia, and I moved here with my mom when I was 16. I had an opportunity to leave West Virginia; I said, “You’re not going without me; I wanna go to Las Vegas, see what it’s like.” It was totally different. We took the Greyhound across the country. My first impression of Vegas was getting out of the Greyhound bus station, and in the car my aunt picked us up, and the roads just seemed so wide. I thought, “Oh my gosh; this is a huge city.” That was my perspective. And we drove down the Strip, and I remember seeing Bally and Flamingo and just taking pictures and being amazed at how different it was. But I never really got into casinos or gaming, being interested in it. My mom was a dealer; she was a change person before she had spent a couple summers in Vegas while we were still in West Virginia. Where did she deal? As a change person, she was at Caesars Palace, and she sent us pictures or she brought them home, and she would bring home token and chips, and I always thought that was kind of cool, but I never associated the two; you had to gamble to get those things—I was just a kid. But when we moved back out here, she went to dealing school and started dealing at Poker Palace, I think, was her first job, and then Barcelona, so real dives, right? Yeah. Break-in houses. We ended up getting our own place, finally, and she did her dealing thing for a long time. She’s still a dealer; she’s been a dealer for over 20 years now, all in pretty small places. But I never wanted to work in the casino, and I don’t know if that was because she 2 worked in the casino, and then I was working at one of the personalized souvenir shops on Fremont Street. That must’ve been fun. Tell me about that job. It was interesting. So, I had my oldest daughter when I was pretty young. I was 19, my husband ended up quitting job because he got mad at the boss or something, and just said, “You know what, I don’t wanna work here anymore. Is it okay if I just quit?” And I’m thinking, okay, what are we going to do to support the baby? And my sister said, “Come work with me,” and it was this literal sweat shop on Fremont Street, but it was a job the next day, so I started. And they do all the little personalized souvenirs for the gift shops around town. It was pretty interesting working there; I learned things that don’t really apply to my life. Really? Like what? I was doing the domed keychains where it has your name on it and you put some epoxy or something on it—resin, and cure it. And the one thing I did like, because I was doing art in high school, I ended up doing the screen printing, like making the screen prints and then using those. That was the only part that I really liked. And then doing personalized mugs—very exciting stuff. But I started doing the sand art, and the sand art was cool. At least it was something creative. Tell me about the sand art. So you know you have to, they had margarita glasses, glass boots, all these different types of glass containers—shot glasses. And they just taught me, like, “This is how you make a mountain, this if how you make a cactus, and this is how you make little clouds.” And you just did those and you ended up pouring wax on top, and they became candles. So after I was there for about nine months or a year, my mother-in-law’s boyfriend—he was a bartender at The Western—and 3 he said, “There’s this new casino opening up on Boulder Highway; just go apply for any of the jobs.” I said, “Which job should I apply for? I don’t have any background in casinos.” And he said, “Just apply as a change person. You’ll make good money, you’ll make tips.” So that’s what I did; I went and I applied there without really thinking I wanted to work in the casino, and the lady that interviewed me was Linda Ludwig. She worked at Vacation Village, and they were coming over to open up the property. There were a lot of Vacation Village people that started at Arizona Charlie’s on Boulder Highway. It was Arizona Charlie’s East at the time. I interviewed with her for a change person; I had just turned 21 that year. I said, “I know I don’t have any experience,” but I think my personally must’ve shown through in the interview. (Laughs) And I got her number I ended up calling her every single day after the interview, because she said, “ I think my boss will be okay with hiring somebody with no experience.” I called her every day, “Have you heard yet? Have you heard yet?” And probably she was tired of talking to me, so she said, “Okay, fine, yeah, come in again.” So that was my first job in gaming, and I worked in that position for a year-and-a-half or so. And the floor people kept telling me, “Coin’s going away; they’re going to go to ticket-in, ticket-out. That’s coming, it’s the way of the future.” I don’t even know if there was a casino out at that time that had it on the floor. When was this? I started there in 2000, so 2001 or so is when the rumors started that the change people were going to go away. So I started putting my name on the list for all the floor people positions that kept posting. It was early 2000 or 2001, because when I finally got the floor person position, it was right before 9/11, and when 9/11 hit, they ended up laying off all of the change people, and they ended up having to reapply for their jobs. It was really bad. And they reapplied for their 4 jobs, and then some of them became this glorified floor person position where you carried money and did the jackpots and things like that. So that really changed the job and made it very boring at that point. I really liked doing the fills. I liked working on the hoppers and all of that as a floor person, but when we went to the full ticket-in, ticket-out, it changed the dynamics. It went from being some place that was exciting with all the jackpots hitting to only paying out the jackpots a thousand dollars and above. And then after a couple years, I think, that’s when I got the role as assistant shift manager on graveyard. So, tell me about that. Tell me about moving up into assistant shift manager. That was a really great learning experience. I started going to the University of Phoenix at the same time that I got promoted to assistant shift manager. I was working on graveyard, I was going through a divorce—like, it was a really tough time at the time, but I was learning so much just being in that supervisor role, and they told me, to prep me for the interview, one of the other supervisors said, “It’s just babysitting, it’s just glorified babysitting. All you’re doing is making sure that people do their jobs, they all complained about each other, they don’t want to take their breaks or come back on time—it’s just glorified babysitting.” And it was so true. A lot of it was, but it was also fun. It was fun making it more interesting to work on graveyard. I was on graveyard for two years in that role, and I ended up meeting somebody at school that worked at Texas Station. That’s when I started learning more about Excel and getting into working on the computer—a little bit about the numbers, but still not really understanding it. I remember seeing the sign in the office that said there was a day where there was one million dollars in slot coin-in, and I had no idea what that really meant, because it was something that wasn’t discussed to everybody else, and it wasn’t something that drove the floor people or the change people—even the assistant supervisors of, “This is our goal, to have a lot of coin-in and (unintelligible-8:54).” 5 So I applied for Station Casinos after meeting this guy from school and actually applied for a role that was a little over what I was qualified for. It was two steps up; I should’ve been applying for a shift manager role, but I was applying for an ops manager role, but the guy that interviewed me—he’s still my friend today, great guy, Jim Ward—ever since that interview, we’ve stayed in contact. It’s nice being able, like, he’s watched my career, and (unintelligible-9:54) other people that we all worked together. But he interviewed me and he said, “I really like you, but this role is really for another step, so let me talk to one of the corporate guys and see if there’s another position.” And Dan Roy and Jay Fennel—they were the corporate slot guys at the time—they ended up interviewing me for a position at Santa Fe as a relief shift manager. So that was my first role at Station Casinos, and that was about nine months. Right before Red Rock opened, a couple of the shift managers from Texas transferred to Red Rock. So Jim took that opportunity to bring me to Texas Station. So I was dayshift at Texas Station for two years working for Mike Sullivan and Ken McMillan—a really great team where Mike was the ops manager, Ken was the tech manager—and that’s where I learned the most. So, the two years there, I worked really closely with the ops manager; we communicated every day, pretty much. I would do special projects. That was when slot dispatch wasn’t too popular, and we didn’t really have a dispatch system at Stations. And one of the things was getting the change lights down and everything, so we had IGT, and we would use IGT to monitor the floor and call out alerts and things like that, so we started doing that at Texas Station on dayshift, and it just helped, it worked out. And it ended up spreading; the whole company, kind of at the same time, started implementing this person watching over slots and dispatching. 6 So, can you tell me a little bit about the interview process in slots? If you were going to be giving advice to a student who was coming up at their first job at their first interview, what should they expect? For an entry-level position? Any—as you go up the ladder, what should you expect in the interview? For the floor people, entry-level positions, it’s definitely just about customer service, guest service, making sure they’re outgoing, having examples of how they’re able to resolve conflicts on their own and take care of people. It really is a job that doesn’t require skills that can’t be taught. At the end of my time at Stations, it was really about personality and how they would fit it on the team more than anything. And at a higher level, an assistant shift manager or shift managers, it becomes more important about your people skills and how you would be able to manage conflict within a team and not be an island, because it’s really important to be able to work together. And some of the skills, if there are a little bit of computer skills, it’s still not as important to have them. Again, it’s stuff that you can learn on the job if it really becomes important. I’ve seen a lot of great people in all of those roles where they might have very little education or technology background. It’s more important about how they are going to be working in a team and helping customers. Nice. So, back to where we were—Texas Station. So what were some of the other things that you learned there that you were able to learn? That was the position where I really started interacting with the other departments. Okay. So tell me about that. How does slots interact with those departments? The biggest one, of course, it food & beverage—you get a lot of cocktail complaints—well the biggest is, of course, marketing promotions—but the cocktail service, it’s always a constant 7 battle in slots, saying, “This customer wants a drink.” But we don’t really understand the rules that are put forth on the food & beverage side, whether or not they’re allowed to serve, like how often their rounds are supposed to be, so working together with them was always interesting. And marketing and promotions—we had a big push of doing the signups, helping out with getting new people to sign up for the players club, helping with the promotions, a lot of questions about, “How many drawing tickets do I have?” So promotions get really busy on those days, and you have to help people with how to active their entries. They complain they didn’t get their free play—you just have to work through those kinds of problems. So what I’m interested in is, could you walk me through, at every level, the kind of disputes that you’re going to be resolving? So, at entry-level, what are the players coming at you with? It was always funny how, at the entry-level, you get them at their angriest. The customer said they should have $5 free play on their card—it’s not there. Like, even back in the change days, you couldn’t really do anything but call somebody. You didn’t have the ability to handle any conflicts at that point, but the floor person level back in the hopper days, you could pay out up to $10 on your own just from the hopper. You’d write it on the meal card and give up to $10 based on what the dispute was, which was nice at those times, but then when it went to ticket-in, ticket-out, they lost their ability to handle those disputes also. I think some properties might let them process a manual dispute or something, but not really. A lot of it was just about being shorted, the payout not being correct. That would be one of the most common ones—or a dropped card. In Vegas, a lot of poker play, they would complain about a dropped card. Meaning what? 8 They would get a Jack and an Ace, and they would hold the Ace and then the rest of the Royal would come up, and they would say, “I meant to hold the Jack.” “No, you didn’t, you’re playing Double Double,” right? “And you wanted your Aces.” So you would do disputes for dropped cards. At the floor person level, you would have to get the shift manager involved. The bonus round—like, not understanding the payout on a game, handling those. The bill validator eating their $5, $20, or they say they put in a $20, and it was only a $5. So, can you open up the validator and check that out? No. To do those kinds of disputes, if you were actually going to go to that detail of checking the can, you would have to get security involved to come in to get the can open, which we would do those for ones where you’re really not sure if you want to pay somebody out, but a lot of those types of resolutions, you would look at, what kind of player is it? What kind of history can you pull up on the slot machine or in the system to see, what was the last bill that went in? Sometimes you would just pay it out because they’re worth it, right, for the complaint. But there would be times, busy on a Friday night, that there’s no way you’re going to just give somebody $100; you’re going to have to get security and check the can and see what actually went in last, which isn’t fun. And then, once TITO came around, a lot of “Somebody stole my ticket.” So, researching, where did that ticket go? Was it already redeemed? If it’s redeemed, then there’s a lot of trying to figure out who stole it and are they still in the casino? Can we recover any of that money? That’s probably the most common dispute that we see even now. And then people wanting comps, trying to get something because they waited too long for a jackpot payout, even though they’re getting money, you’d think they would be happy, but things like that. As you go up the food chain, so if somebody is at the shift manager level, what’s going to rise up to their level? 9 Those are going to be more the disputes that take a lot more research to find out what happened, or the level of what an assistant shift manager or a floor person can handle. Usually, an assistant shift manager can handle up to $100 and they have to contact the shift manager after that—it would still be along the lines of a dropped card, depending on if it was a big payout or just weird circumstances. You never know what’s going to come up. One that I had at the director level was, there was a malfunction with the system, and it wasn’t caught. And so, after this guy won so much money, he was just getting unlimited free play or something, and every bet he made, it was just getting reimbursed. He was from Hawaii, I think. This was at Aliante. So, he stayed there forever on this machine. Nobody realized what was going on. And when it was finally noticed, we took whatever money he had at that point and wouldn’t give it to him until we were able to research and find out what was going on. This guy was livid that we were holding any of his money even though there was a malfunction on the machine, and every slot machine says, “Malfunction voids all pays.” And that was one that was really interesting, trying to satisfy him, even though he really got one over on the casino. He was very upset about what he wanted in return. He basically wanted all of his money, which, there was no way that was going to happen. He wasn’t invested that much to begin with, and then he wanted thousands of dollars back. And he already walked away with a lot of that money. We were just trying to keep the rest of it. So, those types of things, you just never know what’s going to happen. So how long were you at Texas for? Two years the first time, as the dayshift manager, and then I went to Palace Station as the slot operations manager and tech manager, which was really interesting, because my only experience on the tech side at that point was fixing hoppers and changing paper and lightbulbs and the button panels, things like that. So I really enjoyed that role because I got to see the other side of 10 what the techs do and understand a little more about their jobs because there was always this rivalry between the tech side and operations side, where the tech side, they’re viewed as lazy, like, they don’t do anything, they can just be hiding back in the shop—that’s from the operations perspective. And then on the ops side, I don’t know how the techs—they think they’re lazy, too, because the operations side could do some of the simple resolutions themselves, but instead of even trying, they would call a tech. So they would both look at each other like, neither one of them wants to do their job, I guess. But that’s when I learned about how to do a conversion on a slot machine and new installs, things like that, hooking up signs, adding games to the system, which was really cool. I liked learning that part. And then on the operations side, that’s when I really got into more of the numbers and actually looking at the bank fig, is what we called it, but basically the slot 90-day, 60-day performance, one-year performance, and you can see it down to the cabinet level, looking at just how each slot machine is doing on the floor and comparing them and things like that. And that’s when I really started understanding what hold percentages were on the slot machines, because before that, I knew that the poker odds were what they are; you could tell by looking at the paytable, but you can’t really tell on the slot side, especially once it got to the video slots. That was around the time when penny slots became super popular, and I remember looking at a bank fig and comparing the penny slots to the video poker and saying, like, “This is unbelievable. How could you have these kinds of hold percentages on these games when their bet”—you know, if you’re paying nickel poker, 25 cents a hand, the hold percentage might be six to eight percent, and then the penny slots, you’re betting 25 cents also—back in those days, that was before 100 lines, you know, a lot of those 40-line games, 50-line games, so 25 lines, 30 lines, maybe the highest would be 50—so, they’re betting at least 50 cents, yet their hold percentage 11 was way higher. It was 10, 12 percent, and I just thought, that’s crazy. Like, “Why would you punish them for playing a penny game, even though they’re betting what you’re giving to nickel people?” That was actually really interesting. I don’t know if it’s meant for the book, but I remember—this is just an anecdotal story—I remember being in one of my first meetings with corporate, so we had corporate slots, corporate VPs, and we had to do a slot review, and I told them this. And you don’t know what you don’t know when you’re young and new, and you don’t know what you’re not supposed to say. So I said this about the hold percentage, and it’s like, “Why is it so high? You seem like you’re punishing ‘em. You have the quarter hold is three to four percent, and the dollar hold for poker is one to two percent, and even if the max bet, or people that are betting average bet of 70 cents or even a dollar—they’re not getting anywhere near what the hold is on those other games.” And everybody knows advantage players gravitate to poker, right? Oh yeah. So they can totally take advantage of those low holds, and you’re punishing the slot people. So I said this in this meeting, and it kind of started a conversation about why the hold percentage is so high, and it ended up where we ended up lowering—I did a test. I was tasked with doing this project of—and it was kind of a failure—but doing this project of, okay, take five slot machines, use a different hold. We went from four, six, eight, ten, twelve on Lotus Flower, and we just set up a bank. And we had volunteers that would play, after work, $20 on each machine. So obviously, that’s not enough coin-in to go through, but we asked them to rate their experience. Did they feel like they were lucky? How much did they cash out? And they were able to keep whatever they cashed out. And were supposed to analyze whether or not they could feel if they were playing a tighter machine or a looser machine, but with $20, you don’t get enough of a 12 cycle to actually tell. So some people would get lucky and they would win a lot, and some people would just lose the $20 right away. But it was controlled where they were supposed to bet just minimum, cover the lines, 20 cents a spin. But the whole company ended up lowering the hold percentages, and it just fluctuates. At that point, the theory was always, lowering the hold percentage is not going to increase the win; the win’s gonna stay the same. It’s just going to inflate the coin-in, and then you’re going to get the questions, why aren’t you holding? You’re holding less—you’re making more coin-in, but you’re winning less. But isn’t it also going to decrease time on device if you raise it? Exactly. Which means the customer’s less satisfied? Right. But that’s not the way casinos think about their customers. Most casinos are not thinking, “Let me give you time on device.” They’re thinking, “Okay, I want 80 percent occupancy on the slot floor all the time, and I want to make sure that that favorite machine is available for the next person to play,” instead of thinking, “Okay, Dave’s happy playing this game. I want him to give me all of his wallet and play as long as he wants to play. I don’t care if it takes him an hour to go through $100, or if it takes him four hours to go through $100—I just want his $100.” That’s not really the thinking of lower holds and then contributing to a better experience, especially in Vegas, because that’s where all of my operations experience is. I could see that the coin-in, just the low coin-in, huge slot floors—you’re not going to get a great experience. It really has to be a busy slot floor, and that’s why participation games are probably more popular, because at least they’re cycling through more coin-in, because they attract more of the people that would just throw in $20, $100 to check out this new game. So, how long were you at Palace Station for? 13 It was only nine months. And it really was the biggest learning experience during that short time. It was really exciting, and I remember being at the holiday party; the SVP said, “You know what, I think there’s this position as a director at Texas that I think you would be good for,” and that was my first director job. It was really nice going back to Texas Station because I knew all the people. I was familiar with the floor layout, it wouldn’t have been as much of a challenge trying to relearn the whole casino and the whole team. So that was nice. And I was there for—I can’t remember exactly if it was nine months to a year before they moved me to Aliante. As a director? Yeah. So what was Aliante like? Aliante was a huge challenge. It opened at the crash, the bubble had burst, the housing market stopped. All of the projections for the rooftops that were supposed to be out there—it never came through. It still hasn’t, right? Yeah. But it was a beautiful facility. It was the nicest, other than Red Rock, in the company, in my opinion. It was so beautiful, but there just weren’t enough people out there, so it was really challenging for any coin-in to get through these machines. It opened with 2,500 machines or something. And when I got there, they had gone through a project of stripping down machines throughout the floor, and even then, it was 2,200 or 2,300, which is way too much. And I had proposed, we really need to get down to at least 1,700 or 1,600—that’s how many Palace Station had—at least a smaller floor. There were so many games in the corporate warehouse that they had pulled off the floor, but that was at the beginning of the bankruptcy or the bank talks, and there were limitations on what they were going to be able to do as far as moving those machines 14 to other properties and what had to stay at Aliante on the books to be able to be sold. So we ended up keeping—they wouldn’t let us go below 2,000 machines, and it was really challenging to try to yield anything on that floor, and it was a lot about, how can we change traffic patterns or sightlines to make people more interested in coming to certain areas of the floor? But it was huge—not a lot of main entryways where you could cover the whole floor. There was a showroom that only had activity on the weekends, and it wasn’t like it was really crazy busy. To get people to go play on that side was a challenge. Hotel guests would come because the facility was beautiful—not really to gamble so much—a lot of military people coming through. The team was great, though. The team was probably one of the best teams that I worked with on the slot side. A lot of people went there with the hopes of, “This is the newest property. It’s going to be beautiful, it’s going to be amazing, there are going to be so many tips. It’s going to be great for their pockets.” And it kind of just didn’t happen. It didn’t materialize, so we had people that had 15 years in the company transferring so they could get dayshift, and then the money was terrible. And that was the biggest challenge, because even the hourly rate: they went in at a lower hourly rate, which really hurt them. And it was hard to overcome that on their side. But as far as their attitudes, that was my favorite group of people to work with because they really did try to make the most out of it. It was super challenging just to get past that for them. So all around, many challenges, but the last year that I was there, we were the only property in the portfolio that actually made budget. That’s good. Yes it was. (Laughs) But my favorite thing to do was moving slot machines. Everywhere I went, the slot techs were like, “Oh man, we’re gonna do a lot of moves because”—(Laughs). 15 So what are you trying to do when you’re moving them? What makes a good slot floor, do you think? I like grouping like machines together. So if I’m the type of player that my max line count that I want to play is 20 or 30 lines, I don’t want to have machines next to me that are 50 lines or higher. I just want to be able to move right around that bank. And that’s my philosophy, whether it’s, because you know, like a company would release a suite of games, and they were similar math models, and I like grouping those together. And then, the participation, there are different theories, like, should they be hidden so you have to walk through the casino and hopefully touch other machines along the way, or should they be on Broadway, where everybody’s going to want to play it because it’s in your face and it’s new, but then does it have more occupancy and you can never get on it? So, do you want to put the milk in the back of the store, or do you want it to be that impulse buy at the checkout stand? And then having a good mix—make sure there’s a mix of poker with the video slots. You can’t put all of your mechanical reels in once section, or can you? Who knows what really works or what casino patrons want to experience? It’s definitely a challenge, but you have to look at, do you have other themes on the floor? How did they do in that section? Would it help if I moved it to the same section? Looking at the averages within the different zones on your floor. So what do you think the custom