Vegas: Carnival Games, and Others
The gambling machines are the first things you see and hear as you enter. Eight or nine feet high, curved towards you at the top, gaudy in red and yellow. Often they stand in threes, realistic images of buffalo or mustangs moving across from one headscreen to another as well as prancing and snorting around the dials below. A pandemonium of music and sound effects quickly induces that fairground disorientation. They are so high and so numerous that after a few steps it is easy to get lost and you need the overhead signs to find the restroom or your hotel tower.
Naturally you will want to sit down and have a drink to gather yourself. The bar counter is inlaid with more gaming displays, poker or bingo; free beer while you are playing, typically Heineken. There are plenty optics and bottles for the harder drinker. Another bar offers draught Guinness! Though this is where you find out that US pints are sixteen ounces, not twenty; and a twenty per cent tip is, as always here, the done thing. If you wish to wander about with a drink in your hand it will have to be a plastic tumbler; I’ve been pursued to make me decant the porter into a safer vessel.
The traditional Vegas clatter of coins is long gone; you won’t need your hat. Today the machines take banknotes and issue winnings as a printed slip to feed into another, or convert at a nearby dispenser-cum-notebreaker or the main cashiers. If there is an arm on the bandit it is purely for old times’ sake: the spinning reels are CGI animations - you can’t lean against them to trap a winning combination for further goes, as once I saw in an English pub.
My brother heads for some shorter, humbler machines, each offering a selection of games. He inserts his gambler’s card, issued by the casino; the central computer tracks all interactions and may lead to special offers in exchange for all that valuable data. The game he chooses is Deuces Wild Bonus Poker. As with a car you can decide what gear to play in - how many units to bet at a time; the more, the higher the payouts but the faster the more likely burnout. Still, though the odds are with the house that doesn’t decide what kind of session you will have; this time it’s a winner. ‘Twos, gimme twos,’ he mutters during play.
Eventually I decide to join in and shortly I’m twenty-five dollars up, so I quit, determined to be a man that walked away with a profit. But another time I am tempted to follow my brother’s example again, and lose my advantage; Vegas now owes me forty bucks.
We tried manned games, too. A lucky few minutes at craps - I still don’t understand the betting - had my brother walk away with several hundred.
Roulette is one we missed out. In '‘Diamonds Are Forever,’ James Bond uses the stake MI6 gave him to quadruple it on his own account, betting twice on even-chance options. Actually the chances of his succeeding are even less than one in four, because of the zero on the wheel that gives the house a 2.7% edge. In the US version it’s far worse, because they have a second zero; my brother tells me he’s seen the casinos go even further, adding a third - and the crowd wandered past a European wheel to get to the more familiar kind.
They sell hope here, he says, relying on the gamblers who trust that their luck is better than average. He’s often watched people not only raid their bank accounts via the ATM but borrow on their credit cards to keep going until they win, as surely, surely they must sometime if only the finances hold out. My brother, a mathematician, knows how it really goes - ups and downs, sometimes with extended periods on one side, but in the long run a losing trend, averagely gentle if you pick the right games and know what you’re doing. He aims to enjoy the ride and meet interesting people.
There are legendary winners and losers. They tell of a man who got to retirement, sold his house, cashed in his savings and pension, came to Vegas and blew it all in one night; supposedly he wound up as a street bum. Yet another fellow entered a casino with a quarter million, got the management’s permission to stake all on a single fifty-fifty bet, doubled his money and left.
One went both ways. ‘Shoeless Joe’ shuffled barefoot into the Treasure Island nearly thirty years ago to gamble his $400 social security cheque at the blackjack table. He was utterly clueless in his strategies but in a week-long streak - during which the casino gave him a luxury suite and ferried him about in a stretch limo - his balance rose to $1.6 million dollars before the goddess tired of him and he lost the lot, probably turbocharging the house’s profits by drawing in bigger crowds. He sold the film rights to his story for $10,000 but soon got through that.
Back to the tables. Many of the dealers here are ethnic east Asians; so are some of the punters, who like Bond favour baccarat but are also keen on a poker variant called Pai Gow. In this game, players are dealt seven cards and have to make two hands, a pair and a set of five. You can hope to beat the dealer with either or both and there are side bets on other eventualities. One uses a counter labelled ENVY, entitling you to a percentage if somebody else wins.
Rain Man’s card-counting would have no edge in Pai Gow: the whole deck, 53 cards including a wild-card joker, is mechanically shuffled beneath the table. The dispenser spits out seven hands of seven regardless of the number actually playing; there is a pause like grace before dinner as the last four come out one by one; and the game begins. It’s all cool and friendly; the dealer will help re-arrange a hand for an inexperienced punter, because odds favour the house in the long run anyhow.
There is an electronic display at each desk showing the value of the jackpot, scrolling up a few dollars each round - reaching the six-figure mark when I was there. The odds against are 676,066:1 but someone got it at the Flamingo in January 2023 and scored $6.4 million. It’s not clear whether anyone else had an ENVY disc out that time.
On the weekend it can be roaring fun around us: ‘I’m gonna win a chicken dinner’ yells somebody doing well at a neighbouring table. That’s the way to do it.
Poker is the king of games, involving maths and psychology. There is a high-stakes room further round the corner, but we headed for the run-of-the-mill crowd behind the machines. I’m strictly out of this - don’t understand the rules, can’t remember the cards played, couldn’t bluff the cat. But my brother is a veteran who plays back home as well as here. So I stand and watch, which spooks the player next him who gathers his chips and vacates; sorry, mate, didn’t mean to. One woman at the table pushes her stack forward, trying to buy the pot, but sadly for her nobody is fooled as they’ve all figured out she can’t be holding a winner. You really can get through your money fast if you don’t know what you’re doing and lack discipline.
Then, what with the eight-hour jet lag still on me and being a lark not an owl, I start to fade and retire, as my brother gets into his late-night stride. I have to ask next morning how he did: not so well this time; still, he takes the long view.
And enjoyed the ride.