Cash placed on a table goes into a locked box beneath it, and the count of that box is the drop. It measures money brought to the game, not money wagered.
Drop and hold together tell a casino how a table is performing: drop is traffic, hold is what stayed. Neither is the house edge, which is a property of the bets rather than the behaviour.
The word survives from a time when the box physically dropped from the table at the end of a shift, escorted to the count room under camera. The procedure is largely unchanged: drop boxes are removed on a fixed schedule, counted by a team rather than an individual, and reconciled against the table's records. Most casino internal controls exist around this single process, because it is the point where money is least supervised.
Related terms in casino floor
- Commission — A percentage charged on winning bets that would otherwise favour the player.
- Push — A tie in which the bet neither wins nor loses and the stake is returned.
- Natural — A hand that wins immediately on the first cards dealt.
- Shoe — The box holding several shuffled decks from which cards are dealt.
- Cut card — A coloured plastic card placed in the shoe to mark where dealing stops.
- Penetration — The proportion of a shoe dealt before the reshuffle.
Where an entry quotes a number, that figure comes from the computed sections of this site rather than from another glossary, so the definition and the derivation cannot drift apart. Each entry links to the page where the number is worked out.