"Have you been carded?"

I have several stories from my session at the Venetian today. Sometimes I mash them all together into one multi-part post, but today I'm going to keep them separate, mainly (1) for ease of finding them later (I've discovered that I have more trouble finding an old story when I need it if it's one part of a big post), and (2) so that the comments threads stay more coherent.

At the table was a young man who was appeared to be of borderline age to be legal in a casino. When a new dealer came into the box, she asked him, "Have you been carded?" He said yes.

Wow. What an effective security measure! Yep. There's no way on earth that anybody could slip past that kind of scrutiny. Why, in order for an underage person to keep playing in that situation, he would have to tell an untruth! At a poker table!

If she has concerns about his age, she is supposed to check his ID herself, or have her supervisor do it--not just ask him whether anybody else has checked it. That's just laughably stupid and ineffective. It's no better than ignoring the issue entirely. Her question will only catch people who are so dense as to answer no, which won't include anybody who knows that his only ID shows him to be a minor.

Compounding the silliness, the dealer said that if he showed up in the system as having a player's card, she wouldn't have asked him, but he was just "guest." There's more of that steel-trap brain of hers at work. After all, nobody could ever hand his undersage pal a player's card and have him sign in with it. Nope. That has never happened in the history of the world. A player's card is watertight proof of legal age.

It's certainly true that nobody likes to harass players by being, say, the 15th employee of the day to ask to see ID, but that's why casinos have readily available wristbands that announce that the person's ID has been verified, so that he can be left in peace thereafter. If she had arranged for him to get one, she would have saved him future repeat questioning and would have actually been doing her job, all at the same time. What a concept!

I'm reminded of something from my youth. My brother was the eldest in the family, so he tended to get stricter discipline. For example, when he was in high school, dating and driving, he had curfews. My parents would set an alarm clock in the hall outside their bedroom. If he didn't get home by the appointed hour, it would wake them up, and he'd be in trouble. By the time I got to the same age, as the third child, things had gotten a tad more lax. Rather than the alarm clock thing, they would just ask me the next morning, "What time did you get home last night?"

Which approach do you think was more effective at enforcing the rule?

I suspect this dealer would go with the question method, and not realize it opened any loopholes.*



*Obviously, the morning-after question is not completely toothless. After all, it's always possible that a parent would wake up for some reason past the deadline and find that the wayward child was not in the home, in which case an untruthful answer the next morning would have repercussions beyond having been out too late. However, it is important to note that I never, ever violated curfew, and thus I never, ever had the slightest reason to lie about it. The reason this is important to make explicit is that my father reads this blog faithfully, and I wouldn't want to risk being grounded for past hypothetical transgressions.