Casino Enterprise Management

Bryan deLugo has an impressive resume, having opened Station Casinos properties all over the country, consulting, and currently serving as the vice president of slot operations at northern California’s Red Hawk Casino. But if it hadn’t been for one fateful video poker game played in 1993, he may have never even become a part of the industry.

DeLugo had recently graduated from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where he had been studying communications, computer science and business. His original goal for his career was leaning toward something behind the scenes of the television world. “I never wanted to be in front of the camera, but I enjoyed being behind it,” deLugo said. “I thought maybe I was going to produce TV shows or edit commercials or something like that … maybe make documentaries.” He even landed an internship with The Jenny Jones Show, but discovered there that he wasn’t a huge fan of the celebrity-focused “Hollywood mentality.” And while he didn’t end up continuing in that direction, deLugo did gain something very important from his communication major, as he met his wife Joey in a class for the campus’ news program.

One night, deLugo and his wife visited a casino near where she worked in downtown Vegas. It was there that he hit a sequential royal flush on a video poker machine, though at the time, he didn’t know much about playing cards, let alone what a royal flush even was. That stroke of beginner’s luck won him a $15,000 jackpot on a quarter machine, and opened up a new world for deLugo. “I was just so excited about how that had happened, and wondered, how could I continue to do that?” deLugo said.

When the property’s slot technician came over to verify the win, deLugo peppered him with questions, asking what type of training he had for his job. “He made a comment, something to the effect that I was a college boy, and I wouldn’t be able to do real work like he did,” deLugo remembered. “That kind of stuck. I thought about it all night long. Why would he say that? So between winning a jackpot and somebody telling me there was something I couldn’t do, I looked up the school the next day … and I enrolled—just because I wanted to see how slot machines work.” Now, understandably, his favorite casino game is double double bonus poker.

DeLugo completed the slot machine repair program at the Las Vegas Gaming and Technical School in 1993, and immediately began a position as a slot tech at Palace Station Casinos. When the operator opened its second property, Casino St. Charles, he made the trip out to Missouri to work, assisting in slot tech training. “Then I came back and opened Boulder Station, and then pretty much opened up all of their properties that they had, with the exception of the Kansas City Station,” deLugo said. “About every two years we’d open a new property, and I’d go and help train the team and open it. And then it was time to move on to a new property.” He opened his last Station Casinos property at Thunder Valley in 2003, and stayed there for seven years.

After close to two decades with the same company, opening similar properties throughout the country, deLugo decided that he was ready for a new challenge: consulting. “I wanted to see if I could look at someone else’s floor, that someone else did, and see if I could produce incremental revenue and improve the overall slot experience for customers,” he explained. “It was a blast. I had a really good time doing that.”

Now at the Red Hawk Casino, deLugo has already made major strides in improving the customer experience, implementing more liberal payouts, which is more beneficial to the player in this locals market. “We had to give a better deal because we wanted to see our customers more often,” he explained. “[They] would come three to four times a week, sometimes seven days a week, but they wouldn’t come back if we didn’t consistently exceed their expectations.”

He also pays close attention to player feedback and metrics (having confessed a love for spreadsheets) in order to find the best way to manage his slot floor. Because sometimes even the smallest details like lighting or temperature can affect the success of a floor plan. DeLugo said: “I try to go out there and talk to the customers every Saturday night and ask, ‘Why do you play this game? Why do you like this one versus that one?’ You can run reports all day long, but I’ve got to talk to the customer to put it all together and fully understand it all. It’s just setting games up differently and measuring the performance. Did it do what you wanted it to do? How can we tweak it a little bit more to make it a little bit better? If we tweaked it too much and it didn’t do what we thought it would do, how do we back up? That, to me, is what keeps it fresh and fun.”

And while that constant player contact and analysis is an important part of his job, it is also one of the job’s challenges. “Our busiest time at work is when most people are spending time with their families,” deLugo said. So he makes sure to take the time away from work when he can for a much-needed family vacation. In fact, he lists travel as his favorite hobby. Along with his wife and 14-year-old son, Tristan, deLugo has trekked “all over the world.” They’ve visited London, Aruba and the Bahamas, to name a few, with multiple return trips to favorite locations like Paris and Hawaii. Most recently, they had the chance to explore Italy’s major cities.

And while deLugo enjoys going just about anywhere, his heart remains in the tropics. In fact, it’s in his blood. “I spent my early childhood in the Caribbean—St. Thomas, in the Virgin Islands—so I just love the tropical environment, oceans, beaches,” he said. DeLugo’s father grew up on the island, and his grandfather was the postmaster general in the ‘30s—the post office was even named after him.

DeLugo enjoys the relaxation of vacation and getting the opportunity to tune out from work, for at least some of the time. “I can never get away from work even when I’m on vacation—it drives my wife crazy,” he said. But in an industry where new technology has recently boomed, and is improving exponentially every quarter, it’s important to keep your eyes peeled. The customer has even begun to expect these new innovations.

“We are getting better in our industry at allowing new technology,” deLugo said. “The customer is absolutely amazed and they’ve accepted it. When I started, a customer would never play a game if they didn’t know how they got paid. Then the video reels came out, and nobody understood how they worked, but they were playing them. That was kind of a paradigm shift where people would actually play something for entertainment value even though they didn’t understand it. However, now I think they very much understand it.”

One of the biggest challenges to the gaming industry and its solid customer base can also be chalked up to technology, according to deLugo. He sees his son playing Xbox while texting, and working on his laptop at the same time, as a testament to how kids are growing up learning how to multitask, surrounded by technological stimulants. “He’s going to be a customer in the not too distant future,” deLugo realized. “Will slots still be entertaining? They’re going to have to evolve and be something completely different to satisfy the new generation.”

Looking toward the future, deLugo embraces the possibility of change within his career track as well. “Sometime in the not-so-distant future, I would like to be in charge of my own property,” he said. He had a small taste of the position while filling in as an interim general manager on weekends for six months at Thunder Valley, and while very happy doing what he does, could definitely see himself rising to the challenge.

And based on deLugo’s track record, we can see it, too.

Taaren Haak is an Associate Editor for Casino Enterprise Management. She can be reached at (701) 293-7775 or editor4[at]aceme.org.