Anyone else surprised (dismayed?) by Las Vegas?

Cafe Society
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We were in Vegas for two nights in October; my daughter got married in Zion, and after the celebration we spent a little time in Vegas before flying back out. It was our first time there.

We walked much of The Strip on a Saturday night, and one of my favorite memories involves those hooker cards. We never saw anyone passing them out, but in a few areas a number of those cards were on the sidewalk, obviously discarded by folks. A group of people were walking toward us, including what looked to be a 12-year-old boy. A few steps away from us, he suddenly bent down and picked up one of those cards, surreptitiously putting it into his pocket. My wife and looked at each other and started laughing. She said, “Well, HE’S got big plans later this evening.”

Vegas was both more intimidating and somehow less exciting than I thought it would be. The most interesting part was our GPS system telling us the Courtyard Inn we were staying at was in the middle of the Tropicana. It’s not a great feeling when you roll into Vegas in a rental car at 6 p.m. on a Friday and you realize you have no idea where your hotel is.

We wandered through a couple of casinos for a bit, and I too was taken aback by the number of electronic games. It makes sense, but my image of Vegas was based on the Ocean’s 11 and Ocean’s 13 movies, and it was jarring to see almost no games with actual humans running them.

We took in a show, and at at Tom Colicchio’s Craft Steak, both of which were very good.

I’m not completely opposed to going back, but it’s not going to be one of the top 50 vacation destinations for me, either.

142

They don’t call it Lost Wages for nuthin’. But, yeah, I don’t gamble, and I have sympathy for those whose addiction it is.

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I’ve been a couple of times, but just overnight, and didn’t mind it. Set myself a limit of a hundred or so bucks to lose, got a bit of a rush from playing blackjack, saw Wayne Newton in concert, admired the architecture of the Luxor…I wouldn’t mind going back for a weekend someday.

As for the Atlantic City comparisons, Drew Carey wrote in his book (he was quoting someone else, I think), that in comparing the two, experiencing Vegas was like being robbed by a glamorous call girl, and AC was like being mugged by a crack whore. I’ve never been to AC, but it strikes me as more Trump-y than the one in the desert.

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Table limits are used by the casinos to stop Martingale betting systems – when you lose, double your bet until you finally win. In a proposition like you relate, the dealer would ask permission of the pit boss who might or might not decide on a case by case basis. Like you said, once the proposition is accepted and the cards are dealt, the bet stands.

In a similar vein, back in the coin days all the slot machines had a sign saying to ensure all coins had registered before pulling the handle. When I was a mechanic, a number of times I would point to that when someone complained that they didn’t get the expected payout when a big one hit and they hadn’t ‘coined up.’

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Just a thought about expectation on Vegas, as in how Brits (or indeed most countries outside the US view it)… We’ve already got gambling. Plenty of it. Different versions, and the sadness of it, so we’re often not in Vegas to actually gamble, or not in the same way, and the type of desperate gamblers we’d know, wouldn’t make it Vegas…

In the UK there are betting shops EVERYWHERE. There’s one besides my local chinese takeaway, in a small chunk of shops, and there’s three takeaways and a betting shop which will open till 10.

It’s not quite the modern british betting triangle, which consists of a betting shop across from a pub and a secondhand/pawn shop on the other side. You have your drink, lapse your judgement, lose your money, selling your items, then either go back to the pub to comiserate, or back to bookies to lose more.

We’ve got casinos too. Not many. They’re really not popular. And rarely open during the day, and even were one way to bypass the strict alcohol licensing laws, but since those were relaxed, they were even less used. I’ve not been in a British casino since the 80s.

Other countries have their own version. Germany has a lot of these places, and often they’ve got bars which are packed full of betting machines (they were/sometimes still are in British pubs, but usually about one). Some betting shops double as late night drinking establishments. The novelty isn’t there for betting sadness. We have plenty of that. German too in their own way.

So we’re not quite fished so easily, or have seen so much of it we are immune to it. So we take Vegas for the spectacle, rather than the betting, but kind of understand the former is caused by the latter.

I realise nowadays that the US has changed a lot of its betting laws too, often via the lottery, which became a kind of bypass. We visited a bar in Richland, Washington, last year, where most of the patrons sitting at the bar were playing some sort of scratchcard lottery ticket game, where they’d throw the losing tickets on the floor, and there was a kind of sadness to having such massive piles of losing tickets all around the floor. I didn’t even think it unusual, until I remembered that gambling was “illegal” in the US in a loose sense.

Is this now “legal betting” in the US because it’s government/state sponsored? (our lottery tends to be).

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Many state lotteries are indeed supported by state governments; the revenue they generate helps to fund things like public schools (or, at least, they are supposed to; actual results may vary). Many states have also legalized casino gambling, particularly in the last several decades. Here in Texas, we are very much an outlier when it comes to casino gambling; I believe that every state that borders us has legalized casinos of some form or another.

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Those are called pulltabs. They’re not part of the state lottery and are usually found in bars and independently owned restaurants (I’ve never seen them in a chain restaurant). Think of it as like a slot machine on paper- you pay 25 cents, the bartender hands you a card out of a fishbowl, you peel off the tabs covering the three symbols, and if they match you win cash.

The owner of that establishment probably wasn’t happy about people throwing their losers on the floor, though.

148

When I was just 21, the only legal gaming around was pulltabs and keno. Won the $250 jackpot on pulltabs at the local bar.

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Oh it seemed to very much be a thing for them, and the barstaff didn’t mind, just sweeping them up every so often. It did seem a bit weird, but there was a hell of a lot of them,

150

As someone with 20+ years in the service industry, I guarantee that once they’re on break they gripe amongst themselves about the problem gamblers throwing their damn pulltabs on the floor. :slight_smile:

To get back to your other question in your post, the kinds of gambling that are legal vary from state to state. All but a few states have some form of state lottery, which includes the big-money national games of Powerball and Mega Millions, in addition to state-specific draw games with smaller jackpots but better (but still astronomical) odds, and scratch tickets which range from anywhere from $1 to $50 per ticket with jackpots from the thousands up to a million accordingly (There’s one particular game where jackpot winners get $1,000 per day, every day, for the rest of their life) . Most states allow Indian tribes (Native American is the preferred terminology these days, but the federal government still uses “Indian”) to operate casinos on tribal land which generally allow anything you’d find in Vegas. Some states allow the pulltabs I mentioned above. Some states allow non-tribal cardrooms where you can play poker and some other table games, but there are no slots. In some states, such as Oregon, the state lottery is allowed to operate “Class B slot machines”, which look and act like regular slots but are actually more like an electric scratch ticket where pressing the button results in you getting a draw from a fixed number of possible draws for that particular game. Up until recently, federal law prohibited sports betting aside from a handful of states that were grandfathered in, but the Supreme Court struck down that law in 2018 and many states have legalized it, either generally or only for tribal casinos, since then.

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So the gripe seems to have mainly been on sports betting (which as far as I can tell, and I’m not a sports fan, is one of the main reasons to be a sports fan, apart from befriending people locally to you), and slots? It does seem strange.

As for the tickets being dumped, I kind of get it, there wasn’t anywhere else provided for them to go, apart from in a big heap on the bar. Buckets to dump them in might have stopped people dropping them on the floor, I suppose, but I suppose people might well have just dumped them down anyway. It seemed a high volume, low cost, high waste generating game.

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Hey, don’t ask me to explain America’s weird moral hangups. There’s an entire book to be written on that topic. :slight_smile:

Incidentally, horse racing was never subject to the federal ban, so you were always able to play the ponies even in states where sports betting was otherwise illegal.

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“Tribal land” has become opaque, in that Indian gaming establishments have sprung-up ever closer to, and sometimes conveniently within, urban areas with no recent history of belonging to a Native American reservation. I thought there was some bar to clear to allow a casino like that to be built, like some sort of land swap, but it seems the bar has been lowered recently, and if a tribe wants to build a casino somewhere, it’s just a matter of greasing a few palms on the city council. The tribes are also helped by the Nevada gaming companies directly, such as Bally’s and Harrah’s, to ever expand the gaming footprint.

I’ll also add that only Nevada and New Jersey (only Atlantic City) allow Vegas-style casinos, other than those Indian ones.

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Here in Washington, a considerable chunk of north Tacoma, as well as several neighboring suburbs, is actually part of the Puyallup reservation, even though it’s an urbanized area almost entirely populated by non-Natives. This has allowed the tribe to build two very large casinos right in the middle of the city.

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It would be churlish to complain, it was all “tribal land” about 1500 :slight_smile:

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South of Sacramento in Elk Grove, on the edge of the urban area next to I-5, there is a parcel that once was going to be an outlet mall, and several large buildings were stood-up but never finished, as the developer ran out of money or something. The abandoned shells stood there for years, then someone was going to make it an auto mall, but that fell through, too. A couple years ago a local tribe acquired the property, removed the old shells, and erected a shiny new casino that opened a few months ago. I am skeptical that choice land has any history of recent Native American ownership.

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“Recent” history. Otherewise there would be no limits at all on where they could build a casino.

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Sky River Casino? They appear to be operated by the Wilton Rancheria tribe, which does not have a proper reservation, and the land the casino is on was apparently taken into trust by the federal government some time prior to the casino being built.

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Yep, that’s it. Looks like a land “restoration” for them, conveniently located next to the interstate, with an existing exit both north and southbound to boot.

Correction: the casino is next to Hwy 99, not I-5.

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Hell, they’re expanding internationally. Mohegan Sun purchased the casinos in Niagara Falls, Ontario. The Mohegan tribe is a billions-of-dollars gaming operation with properties all over the place.