Mike Allgeier experienced more of Vegas than most. The inner workings of El Cortez, Bally’s and Caesars Palace gave him small-, medium- and major-market insight. Thirty years of Las Vegas helped him bridge the eras of wise guys, corporate takeovers, a booming population and the revolutionized Strip. No wonder he was tapped last year to become general manager of Buffalo Thunder Casino in Santa Fe, New Mexico. It’s a Las Vegas-style casino with open spaces that bring back memories of his first gaming days.

“All properties are run similarly in the sense that everybody looks at the bottom line,” Allgeier said. “But the difference is that if you build one for $60 million and you have another one for $500 million, the interest on that payment puts intense pressure on you to increase cash flow.”

The age of expansion also shows the contrast between classic original operators and modern-day bean counters.

“The old-timers are dying off, but they brought such a great insight to the business,” said Allgeier, who broke into the business as an El Cortez dealer in the 1970s. “It was not so much their management style, which may have been a little rough, but their knowledge of the games that was tremendous, especially in the area of finding out who was cheating the casinos. They gave me a lot of mentoring. One of them liked the fact that I listened to everything he said, which to him was rare for a kid.”

Allgeier listened, learned and later went through a metamorphosis at Bally’s. As a pit manager, he actually had to guide his workforce through the strains of bankruptcy in the early 1990s. The casino remained open, but times were bleak.

“It becomes one of the best things for you,” the New York native said. “It teaches you how to spend money. We had to cut back on marketing expenses, on operations, and we had to make things last longer. We cut back contributions to 401(k) plans, but at the same time, instead of laying people off, we found a way to generate more customers and keep people working.”

Allgeier practiced a form of Russian roulette to maintain employment ranks. A squeeze here, a saved shift there—it all added up.

“If you look around and see a couple dead games, that’s one thing, but if you see five of them, that’s a concern,” he said. “You would tell somebody that if they were sick, or if they wanted a couple days, to go ahead and take them. You might even force people to take a day off now and then, but you rotate it, so it doesn’t fall on the same person all the time. As a result, you avoid laying people off. I’d rather stretch the process out over six days and keep somebody working than have to make a cut.”

Leadership, he discovered, meant treating the company’s financial future like it was his own. It also centered upon enforcing company policy, no matter what.

“A box person calls in sick one day,” he said, laughing now. “Says he won’t be in, but now we’re watching the basketball game from Phoenix on the big screen and there he is—at the game!—right on television. He comes back a couple of days later, and they suspended him. Then he objects. Now I had to go to the casino manager with this and ask him to define ‘sick.’ The guy had followed our regulations; he had called in sick, and we’d gotten somebody on the shift. It was his bad fortune that he went to the basketball game. The manager used a few choice words for me... but in our rules, he was protected. They overturned the suspension.”

Allgeier discovered that improvement occurred in baby steps, multiplied over long periods of time.

“If you want to get taller, put one piece of paper in your shoe every day for six months and watch how you grow,” he said. “A little bit at a time makes a big difference. For instance, all the games are mathematical equations. If a dealer is getting 20 hands per hour, you will make a lot more over time if you can get that to 30. Maybe the person just has to hustle more between hands. Holding people accountable and making them more efficient is a way both to increase the efficiency of the casino and let their toke rates go up. Everybody wins.”

By the time he left Bally’s, Allgeier was a casino administrator. He became vice president of gaming operations both at the Hilton and at Caesars. After leaving in 2001, he consulted for several gaming properties before Buffalo Thunder beckoned in 2007.

By Casino Connection Staff