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When you talk to TJ Tejeda, his speech is sprinkled with sayings and terms like “Slots are movies and table games are theater,” “Dragons and Pandas,” “Clash of the Titans,” and “You don’t fall in love with numbers.”
All colorful phrases to help illustrate his deep understanding of multiple cultures and how he applied that knowledge to changing Baccarat, a game that has been around seemingly forever.
Francisco “T.J.” Tejeda is a founding principal of the Talisman Group, creators of EZ Baccarat, the most successful brand in baccarat with over 700 tables in more than 140 casinos in the U.S. and Canada.
Too much Hemmingway
TJ Tejeda was born in Yuma, Arizona and quickly moved to Guadalajara, Mexico.
“I was kind of an accidental American by birth because I was born in Yuma, Arizona; but when I first woke up, I was in Mexico. My dad was a doctor, so we had a pretty good life.
“The Vietnam War was just getting hot. So, I made a plan that was inspired by my reading of Hemingway’s stories and participation in the Spanish Civil War with the International Brigade in 1936. I would come to the United States, having never been here since I was born, and I would volunteer for Vietnam. In my mind at the time, it was very clear a good guys/bad guys war.
“I was 17 at the time. That was 58 years ago. I volunteered with the Air Force in Phoenix for the ride of my life. I finally made it to Vietnam in my third year. I was there for one tour of duty in the Central Highlands. In 1970, I was discharged in Seattle. I was 22 years old and a year later I landed in Reno.
During this time, I ended up falling in love with this country and its people. My four years turned out to be a lifetime. At 76, I’m happily still here,” Tejeda recalled.
Meeting Bill Harrah
“In Reno, I applied to Harrah’s, and I was hired. I started out as a nickel-slot attendant, the lowest position in the casino. I thought it was a great time. In a few months, I finally made it into craps school and became a dealer. It was as if I was a fish and I found water—perfect. Bill Harrah was still alive and used to walk the corridors of slots late at night. At two or three o’clock in the morning, as a 22-year-old kid, I was talking to Bill Harrah!. It was a wonderful experience.
“In 1974, they needed baccarat dealers for the Harrah’s Lake Tahoe property, which was their premier casino. And that was my casino experience to that point,” Tejeda recounted.
International marketing
Years later while working in San Francisco, Tejeda ran into his old scheduling manager at Harrah’s, Larry Wolf, who was now the executive VP at Caesars Atlantic City, who offered Tejeda a job as Director of Latin American Marketing.
“When I arrived in Atlantic City in 1983, the Latin American marketing department was one small desk with a chair. That was my start in international marketing. Of course, my ticket for that was that I find cultures and people very interesting, and I spoke Spanish,” Tejeda said.
In 1987, he was recruited by the Trump Organization by a famous executive that is not with us anymore, Steven Hyde. His position was VP, International Marketing Worldwide. This was where Tejeda’s fascination with Asian culture and marketing coalesced—something he would later apply when he reimagined baccarat.
“I made the leap from Latin America to worldwide and I started traveling all over the world, but mainly to Asia. I began learning more about Asian players and found they were mostly baccarat players. I tried to learn as much as I could from the culture. I traveled to Taiwan, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Singapore, and more,” Tejeda said.
MGM and Baccarat
Recruited again by Larry Wolf, Tejeda became the Director of Baccarat at the MGM Grand Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas. At opening, he was managing one of the largest baccarat rooms in the U.S., where 82 percent of the action was from Asian players.
In 1995, Tejeda left MGM and later formed a consulting company, The Talisman Group, with partner Robin Powell.
“We left MGM and formed a consulting company, and we were working internationally for a few years. This idea for an improved baccarat game came to Robin and me because he was also a baccarat dealer. Robin was born in Kenya and started dealing baccarat when he was 18 years old. We always thought that baccarat was a wonderful game and an up-and-coming game. It had become the darling of Asian markets, which are the most powerful gaming markets in the world by sheer numbers.
“But as much as we loved baccarat, we thought that the game itself was very difficult to deal because baccarat had one single glitch that is called the commission. There are only two bets, the banker and the player; and every time the bank wins, you have to take 5% commission from that batch. So, for $100 you would pay $95. You can imagine if you have 10 players and they all have different bets, getting 5% out of those bets is very difficult and very time consuming.
Tejeda and Powell went on to create a branded baccarat game called EZ Baccarat that was similar to traditional baccarat but eliminated the commission through a clever twist.
What makes EZ Baccarat different?
EZ Baccarat is played the same way as traditional Baccarat. The drawing rules have not been changed.
However, EZ Baccarat eliminates the taking of the 5% commission after every winning Bank hand without modifying any of the existing drawing rules of the standard game.
Instead of taking the commission when the Bank wins with a total of 7 consisting of 3 cards – the Bank hand is a “push” or “barred”. The Player hand and Tie bets lose, as normal.
There is a single rule that makes the commission disappear: when the Bank hand wins with a 3-card 7 the Player, the Panda 8 and the Tie lose; the Bank pushes and the Dragon 7 bet wins.
Developing EZ Baccarat
“We put some money into a pot and said, ‘Let’s go after this project.’ We hired a very good mathematician out of the University of Colorado. His name was Bob Hannum. He is the co-author of the book “Practical Casino Math”. He was the guru of gaming mathematics. So, we asked him to give us all the thousands of combinations that would lead us to a solution.
“With the knowledge that we had, our job was to pick the one hand, the one number, which would be the equivalent of the 5% commission without touching the bet,” Tejeda said.
“You don’t fall in love with numbers”
Tejeda explained the thought process behind EZ Baccarat that used a mathematical solution combined with Asian cultural elements to become a hit gaming product.
“Robin thought we need this 3-card 7 and that we ought to make it a side bet—and that’s how the Dragon 7 came to be. The other breakthrough was that this side bet became the first time an avatar was used on a baccarat table.
“The Dragon 7 was the embodiment of luck and players fell in love with it. It’s clear, players don’t fall in love with numbers.
“And a few years later, we thought that the Dragon 7 should have an adversary and so we created the Panda 8 side bet. Just like the Ying has the Yang, we thought of the two sides of everything: day and night, good and evil. So, we gave the Dragon 7 an antagonist, an opponent, like all good stories. Superman has Lex Luthor and Batman has the Joker. It’s the Clash of the Titans that gives everyone a champion to root for.
“That made the game a lot more fun for the players. Some of them adopted the avatars and made t-shirts, running around California with Dragon 7s and Panda 8s. The customers did it themselves. They became two armies, the Dragon army and the Panda army. People took sides and made the game a lot more fun.
“That came from 6,000 years of Asian lore. And in there, we found the inspiration to come up with symbolisms for this game. It was the first game ever anywhere designed specifically to appeal to a set of cultural beliefs. This game was tailor made for the Asian player. Nobody had done this before. We took a shot and it worked. But not right away,” Tejeda mused.
Ten years to overnight success
“We contracted two tables from a distributor downtown. We rented a suite in a not very expensive motel. We hired the crews, the dealers, players, supervisors and we gave them same exact script, and a protocol to follow. Then we ran both tables at the same time.
“And we were right. It turned out that this new game was like 40% faster than the traditional game. In casinos, hands per hour is the most important single factor in any game. I remember the dealers saying, ‘We don’t have to do commission anymore?’ Nobody could believe it,” Tejeda stated.
Armed with an exciting new game and a patent, Tejeda and Powell set out to sell EZ Baccarat.
“With this knowledge, we go out to sell it. I’ve been in the casino business since 1973. Everybody that I knew who was still in the business had some authority; some were casino managers and so on. However, not a single person that I knew since I was a dealer all those years ago would give me a break. And 10 years later we were still out there trying to push this game that nobody wanted.
“One of the big reasons the sale was so difficult was baccarat existed in the public domain and there were no fees attached to running the traditional game. Tejeda found himself selling a version of baccarat with a fee attached. His friends in the casino business told him no one would ever pay for what was already free.”
A break from Barona
“Robin got a phone call from the Barona Casino Resort, Lakeside, CA., and the casino manager was on the phone. He said to Robin ‘You guys own EZ Baccarat?’ And Robin said ‘Yes, we do.’ And he says, ‘Okay, I’d like to take two games.’ Robin said, ‘Say that again.’ This is no kidding. I think it was three times until, Patterson was his name, said ‘I don’t know how to tell you this, I want to have your games.’ After 10 years, we just couldn’t believe it.
“We put two games in Barona, and they were an instant success. Three months later, Steve Miller from Pechanga Resort Casino, Temecula, CA, called and said ‘Come over and give a demonstration of your game. We saw it at Barona.’ I went over there and walked out with a contract for six tables. This was in 2008 and from then on, we sold almost 90 tables a year,” Tejeda recalled.
Tribal success
Tejeda attributes the success of EZ Baccarat to acceptance by tribal casinos.
“Tribal casinos have always been outside the mainstream; and they are more willing to try new things. To this day, they continue doing so and that’s where we found our first customers and where we started selling like crazy. Pretty soon the big corporate houses started paying attention,” he stated.
One-price policy
One of the unique aspects of EZ Baccarat is the one-price policy.
EZ Baccarat is the only table game in the industry with a one-price policy (OPP); and that has proved to be foundational to its success.
“With EZ Baccarat, there’s a single, flat fee per table $20 a day ($600 a month). And everyone pays the same.” According to Tejeda, this is unheard of in the industry. “The OPP takes price off the table – and this single fact has turned the gaming industry on its head.”.
“If you are a mom-and-pop operation, you pay one price, and if you’re a giant gaming corporation with 100 tables, you pay the same price. EZ Baccarat has been the same price – $600 per-table-per-month since day one.
“The amount seemed reasonable–the price of two margaritas. Which means that everybody, no matter how many games they have, no matter how big the company, everyone pays the same. This was particularly appealing to tribal operations because they are often smaller and they never get same deal as the big gaming powerhouses,” Tejeda said.
Losing patent protection
EZ Baccarat lost its patent protection 10 years ago (2013) and its methodology became part of the public domain. Yet, it has continued to gain market share. EZ Baccarat credits its brand for earning and retaining the loyalty of its customers.
“We wanted to not just have this game, we needed to create a brand. To make a brand you need it to be different. You need it to offer things that other games didn’t have long range. A brand is a promise to perform,” Tejeda stated.
Every moderately successful non-commission game in the U.S. uses the exact the same math that we came up with in 1998. “Imitation is the sincerest form …” he quipped.
EZ Baccarat 2.0
I asked Tejeda what was next for EZ Baccarat and their new distributor, Galaxy Gaming.
“We’re always looking for opportunities to change the game for the better. We take the pulse of what’s happening out in the market. What do the casinos want? Most important, what do the players want?” he said. “We are working hard to bring enhancements to the brand that we plan to bring out this year.”
Success secrets
“The reason I have been successful is my inexhaustible curiosity about people, cultures and a love of traveling.”
“It’s that and optimism. I really believe that’s how I came to the United States. I didn’t know anybody. I didn’t have an uncle in the states. I had $80 in my pocket. What I wanted to do was very clear, and I knew people would understand and help me get there. And that’s exactly what happened,” Tejeda said.
A new twist
Today, Tejeda and his partner Powell continue to innovate the most successful proprietary baccarat game. Through optimism and cultural knowledge, he beat the odds to bring a new twist to a very old game.