Detroit MGM casino president is a gaming industry gamer

Becky Yerak

Monday, March 6, 2000 | 11:18 a.m.

DETROIT -- MGM Grand Detroit Casino's blackjack dealers have come a long way.

When the casino opened in July, they dealt at such a snail's pace that management didn't even bother tracking how many hands each dealer doled out hourly. By September, though, their pace had quickened to an average of 200 hands an hour, and now they're in the neighborhood of 320.

Close, but no cigar yet. The industry benchmark, after all, is 350.

To narrow the gap, MGM is mulling investing in a certain type of card shuffler; problem is, the device is detested by some fervent blackjack players.

So what's a casino to do to balance greater employee productivity with customer satisfaction?

At MGM Grand Detroit these days, those sorts of decisions are falling to Scott Snow, the new president of Detroit's first casino. He replaces Lyn Baxter, who announced his departure in November.

It's the fifth time in his 10-year casino career that he has been dispatched to a property on the heels of its opening. Before Detroit, the troubleshooter was treasurer at MGM Grand Inc.'s New York-New York casino, joining that establishment three weeks after its opening.

In baseball terms, does that make the Utah native sort of an early relief pitcher?

"I'm more like, 'OK, they died at the gate, so come on in and let's get it going,' " mused Snow, more of a pragmatic, numbers-oriented straight-shooter than the bigger-picture Baxter.

His agenda includes continuing to oversee the training of workers and to improve guest services, as well as attracting customers from the suburbs and beyond.

MGM Grand Detroit is pulling in more than $1 million a day in business.

Four of MGM Grand Detroit's 12 original executives have already left and with apparently no other jobs lined up. High turnover at new casinos isn't unusual, Snow said.

"It's a 24-hour-a-day, seven-days-a-week business. It's not atypical for me to get five phone calls a week between 2 a.m. and 6 a.m. A phenomenal amount of time goes into opening a property. You've got a couple hundred people for two to six months before opening and for months afterward working seven days a week, 14, 16, 18 hours a day, with maybe one day off a month. At some point, everyone says, 'What am I doing here?'

"The answer is one of two: 'I don't know, so I'm leaving.' Or, 'I still have a reason to be here and want to be here so I continue.' "