LAS VEGAS, April 2 (UPI) -- Las Vegas has the reputation as the most wide-open gambling town in the world, but is that really true?
Some of the games of chance you will not find in Las Vegas, for example, are faro, monte, lansquenette, Rouge et Noir, rondo, Chinese Fan-tan, Red White and Blue, Diana, and ziginette, all of which are legal, all of which are specifically authorized by statute, and many of which are still played in foreign gambling halls.
Faro and Chinese Fan-tan were the most popular saloon games of the 19th century, to such an extent that Nevada Gov. Henry Blasdel, knowing his veto of the 1869 wide-open gambling bill was about to be overridden, begged lawmakers to reconsider and at least outlaw faro, the "most dangerous" game of all. I was told that there are still four faro games being offered somewhere in Nevada, but was unable to find them. All the other games -- 90 per cent of the games once offered in casinos in the Old West and Europe -- are gone.
"The casino is the most commodifiable element in the whole theme entertainment package," says Glenn Schaefer, president of Mandalay Bay.
I stop him as he's about to spit out 70 more statistics. "What did you just say?"
"All casinos look alike!"
He's right, but how did that happen?
It happened when casino cheating was eliminated from the
equation. In 1962, 29-year-old mathematics professor Edward O. Thorp of MIT traveled to Las Vegas to try out the blackjack system he had worked out on an IBM 704 computer. Even though card counters were unknown at the time (because Thorp was the first), and even though he was a man of remarkable memory with a $10,000 bankroll, his winnings after nine days of gambling at 18 casinos (including four in Reno) were only $317 -- not enough to cover expenses.
The reason is that, as soon as he started to win any substantial sum of money, various cheating methods were used against him -- the crooked deal called a "high-low pickup," the "anchor man" shill, a false shuffle called the "Kentucky step up," and plain old marked cards.
He was able to spot most of the cheating because of his confederate Mickey McDougall, a card expert and gambling columnist for the McClure Syndicate, who stood by each table and signaled Thorp when the mechanic or anchor man was put into play. Only one casino, the Tropicana, continued to deal a straight game throughout Thorp's stay there.
I tell this story to make this point: Up to a certain time, all casinos cheated. It wasn't because they didn't know the house odds were in their favor. It was because the casino brahmins of the 1950s and 1960s all had run illegal operations in the thirties in which rigged roulette wheels and "owned" dealers were the rule. (Some of these illegal gambling houses, like the Vapors casino in Hot Springs, Arkansas, survived well into the 1960s.)
It wasn't until the 1970s that the idea of running a 100 percent honest house gained any currency, mostly because the Nevada Gaming Control Board was finally doing its job. But even then it was not uncommon for card counters to get roughed up and robbed when they left the building with too much cash. Eventually computers became the casino's friend, allowing the odds to be precisely weighed and betting limits to be set in such a way that no one could develop any long-term advantage over the house.
But what really created the "commodifiable" look-alike Uber-Casino was the 1976 legalization of gambling in Atlantic City.
"Atlantic City is the first time people saw the impact of gambling in an urban area," says Rob Goldstein, president of The Venetian. "Atlantic City just dwarfed Las Vegas in cash flow.
"Resorts was the first casino there, and when it opened, it was in an old building. Everyone said, 'Oh, it won't work because it's in a ghetto.' But on the first day people are lining up around the block. Every night of the year in Atlantic City was like the win rate on New Year's Eve in Vegas. There were casino executives flying in just to see the crowds and try to understand it. The reason for it was simple, though. The area was accessible. There were 30 million people within one gas tank of Atlantic City."
But these people were different not just in numbers, but in type. These people didn't look, act or talk like real gamblers. And they loved the slot machines, which for three-quarters of a century had been regarded in Nevada as little more than a novelty.
"In Las Vegas," says Goldstein, "we regarded slot machines as something for ladies to do while their husbands gambled. Overnight, in Atlantic City, slots became very important. All of a sudden, you had all this money in cash. It fueled the cash flow. Steve Wynn saw those crowds and just went nuts. Resorts stock went from 2 to 250. Atlantic City was the real emergence of mass gambling. It opened the floodgates."
What happened next in Las Vegas amounted to panic.
Why would anyone come to the desert anymore when legalized gambling seemed destined for crowded cities? Every major Vegas hotel launched plans to open a hotel in Atlantic City. But the average cost of a simple gaming license was about $250,000 -- you had to pay for the state's investigation of your background, plus complete 300 pages of fine-print applications -- and the state of New Jersey was requiring at least 500 hotel rooms per casino and creating other restrictions to keep out small-timers. So it appeared that hotels on the Boardwalk were going to be even bigger and more expensive than the two most elaborate in Vegas, the International (now the Hilton) and the original MGM Grand (now Bally's), prestige properties built in the late 1960s and early 1970s by Kirk Kerkorian.
"It was obvious that you were going to need hundreds of millions," says Goldstein, "and you couldn't get the capital from the usual sources -- the Teamsters -- because New Jersey had determined to really enforce the licensing laws. So everyone needed Wall Street access. That's when everything changed over to public companies and public debt, and it was great for this industry."
The Gus Greenbaums and Moe Dalitzes were replaced by efficient young graduates of the Wharton School of Finance. And that's why a casino today might have the appearance of a gambler's Valhalla, but it's really the same five or six games repeatedly endlessly, a retail outlet that's as carefully ordered as a convenience store, with no lowball holdovers like faro or Chinese Fan-Tan cluttering up the available sales space.
There were some games too popular to get rid of -- blackjack, for example, in which the house edge is so low that some Strip hotels now routinely enforce a $25 minimum betting limit on crowded weekends. (Pai Gow Poker, Caribbean Stud, and "Let It Ride" are all more lucrative table games invented by casinos to draw customers away from blackjack, and to a small extent the strategy is working. When the blackjack tables are full, bettors will go to the riskier games.)
Sports betting, pioneered at the Stardust in the 1970s by Lefty Rosenthal (the Robert DeNiro character in "Casino"), is another low-margin pursuit that remains in casinos mainly because of big sports weekends that trap fans in the casino for the duration of the game. (Horse racing, on the other hand, has always been a big profit center, going back to the horse parlors established by Bugsy Siegel on Fremont Street when he first came to Vegas in 1941.)
Poker rooms are a thorn in the casino's side. You're not a real casino without poker, and many high rollers like the game, yet there's no good way to maximize returns without alienating the poker heads. (Normally the house takes a "rake" from every pot. In high stakes games they rent the table by the hour.) "Poker is a space-eater," gripes one Casino Man.
Today the real cash goose of every casino is not the raucous convivial craps table but the loneliest game in town: the slot machine. From a half block away, long before you walk through the door, you can hear that peculiar lulling sound, a cross between a coffee percolator and a furious set of windchimes, the audible omnipresent reminder of Las Vegans' principle source of income. (No doubt some gaming theorist has calculated the precise pitches and frequencies for the ambient slot noise, because after a few days you accept it as more natural than Muzak.)
Slot machines now account for 90 percent of the take in Atlantic City, and sometimes even more than that in the so-called "riverboat states" of Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Missouri, Louisiana and Mississippi. (Video poker is also considered a form of slot machine. In small casinos in the western states, video poker has become so ubiquitous that it's affectionately referred to as "video crack.") In Las Vegas, where people still go in search of high-stakes table games, slot machines account for only about 50 percent of all casino income, but that number goes up each year as the machines become more elaborate, more sophisticated, and more like state-of-the-art video games.
Fortunately for those of us who love table games, there are still a few Casino Men out there determined to hold the line against a future world in which casinos are all slots, all the time. In the early 1990s, a game called Caribbean Stud Poker showed up, and it's remained popular despite an astounding high house advantage of better than 5 percent. The game was invented on cruise ships where captive audiences can't complain too much about the odds, and the result is that people will play the game without much regard for the long-term negative outcome.
The only new table game that serious gamblers have embraced is Pai Gow Poker, first introduced in 1986 in California card rooms and now available almost everywhere. It basically takes the Chinese game of pai gow, with its confusing tiles and strategy that takes eons of study, and simplifies it into a poker-style game. It's mostly popular among Asians, although many people like the fact that it's slower than blackjack. The house edge is 2.5 per cent.
But the fastest-growing new game at this point is Three Card Poker, which was being played at the Atlantis Casino in the Bahamas in the late 1980s but for some reason really took off in the year 2001. It's another simplified version of poker that, played perfectly, can reduce the house odds to as little as 2.02 per cent.
The rest of the new games don't appear to have much staying power. Casino War, for example, is a version of the game every kid plays at home. If the dealer's card is higher, you lose. If your card is higher, you win. It's fast and it's boring, and so far it's not catching on.
Red Dog seems to be vanishing quickly as well, except in a few Canadian casinos. This is the casino version of the old "acey-deucy" -- guessing whether the value of a card will fall within the range of two other cards -- and the overall house advantage is almost 4 per cent.
Sic Bo, the casino version of the ancient Chinese game, is a three-die game with a nifty complicated layout that will eat you up oddswise the more bets you make, and which is just plain confusing.
The ideal game from the player's point of view is made up of more strategy than chance, a house edge around 1 percent, and plenty of ways to increase your bet when the table turns in your favor. Over a year ago I discovered one at the Sahara called Seven Card Thrill that was both fun, convivial, and had a 1.81 per cent house edge. For some reason -- either because the casino wasn't making enough money or the players didn't like it -- it hasn't really made much headway.
Hence the slot machine has become the casino's most efficient investment. It's low maintenance, takes up minimal space, and returns a guaranteed percentage that's higher than most traditional table games. It's not hard to see why the casinos don't have much stake in ratcheting up the table game business. What I don't understand, though, is why the typical gambler doesn't insist on it.
(Email Joe Bob Briggs, "The Vegas Guy," at [email protected] or visit Joe Bob's website at joebobbriggs.com. Snail-mail: P.O. Box 2002, Dallas, TX 75221.)
