Las Vegas

(Cross-posted from our Family Blog because I haven’t updated in awhile and am too worn out to create anything new at the moment.)

Amy & I are back from Las Vegas. The kids stayed with Amy’s folks while we had a long weekend away. We took the red-eye back via Airtran and are paying the price. I got to sleep a few hours little bit at Amy’s parents. Amy says she did not sleep that much, and so went to bed immediately upon getting home. A couple of minutes later, Harper woke up from her nap and started demanding obscure things and crying when I couldn’t provide them. Welcome home!

Airtran is a no frills kind of carrier, and I guess that’s why we chose them, pricewise. But the lack of pillows and narrow aisle ways made sleep next to impossible. When I’d start to dose, the flight crew would bump past me along the aisle. I’m pretty sure I got some spray from a drink or two being poured. I’m sure lack of sleep is making me lead with the less pleasant aspect of our expedition.

Las Vegas is a wonder of marketing. People crowd together to basically line up and give away their money. Amy & I are no different. We didn’t lose too much and had a good amount of fun playing craps and whatnot, but on a purely rational level, it’s a pretty stupid way to spend one’s time.

The social aspect of the table games is pretty interesting. Different games seem to have different cultures. The machine games involve little to no interaction at all (and generally have some of the worst odds.) Blackjack is something of an unfriendly game since the intentional acts of one player will have an impact on other players down stream. If a player upstream “incorrectly” (based on the statistics) takes a card or doesn’t take a card the player downstream can see what would have happened if the upstream player had made the “right” decision. If the consequences are negative, the downstream player will blame the upstream player. (If the consequences are positive, the downstream player will forget more quickly than if the consequences are negative.)

Roulette has a calm but friendly kind of culture. The game moves somewhat slowly and players win or lose independently of each other. It depends on the people of course, but conversation seems to be pleasant but subdued. My favorite roulette grouping came at about 8:30 a.m. on Sunday. I had gotten up and showered and Amy was still sleeping. I figured I’d play a little before taking some coffees and crouissants up to the room. I sat down at a table occupied by a woman in her mid-20s wearing a dress, smoking cigarettes and drinking Amstel. Clearly, she had not yet been to sleep. Shortly after I sat down, a couple of guys in their mid-20s joined the table. They had crossed paths with Malaya (spelling approximate) earlier and introduced themselves as Ian and James. They were also on the tail end of a long day. Even though I was gambling at 8:30 in the morning, I was revealed to be a clean cut middle-aged guy, inasmuch as I had slept and showered. The waitress came by — I ordered coffee with cream. James ordered coffee with Jameson’s. I got coffee with cream. James just got the whiskey with no coffee. For having been up for goodness knows how long and still throwing back the alcohol, all three of them were surprisingly coherent. Still, I can’t imagine having to deal with an airport or air travel after a night like that.

Craps is a more energetic game, but still mostly friendly. People mostly bet the same way and are mostly hoping for the same numbers. Consequently, when the dice start rolling the right way, the money starts flying and there is a good deal of cameraderie. When the dice are rolling the wrong way, there is a sense of combined suffering. At the craps table, you can make bets that take advantage of the dice rolling the “wrong” way — e.g. the “Don’t Pass” line. But there is a significant amount of social pressure against doing this. The big swings in fortune make this a more energetic kind of crowd. You can win big and you can lose big, in a hurry.

My natural conservatism when it comes to money makes me a little leery of craps. So, I played a little when we were on the strip (where minimum bets are higher), and left the craps to Amy who won fast and lost fast. Meanwhile, I played more roulette where the swings are not as severe (particularly if you bet like I do.) When we went downtown to the Fremont where they had $5 minimum bet tables (as opposed to the $10 or $15 tables we were seeing at Harrah’s and the Flamingo), I joined in at the craps table. We played for probably 6 hours there. I think I ended up $30 in the black for the day. (A princely $5 per hour.) But the crowd at the Fremont was a lot more to my tastes. Low-rent, friendly people are apparently my preferred crowd.

There was the older, slower man of (I believe) some sort of Pacific Island descent. At first, I thought his roll was going to be painful. But then, he slowly lined up his dice with threes showing on top, dots on each three parallel from top left to bottom right. Then he would toss them in a perfect rainbow that landed just short of the back wall and, more often than not ended up with something good. At one point, Amy was having a spectacular roll and, after she’d hit a point, we’d do a “terrorist fist bump” — this gentlemen, who spoke almost not at all, was very amused by this and started giving Amy a fist bump as well.

There was a middle-aged man of (again) Pacific-Island descent whose technique I wasn’t close enough to see but who had monster roll after monster roll. In two consecutive rolls, I think he must have thrown the dice 60 times. He was everybody’s friend. Other notables at the Fremont tables were the elderly black gentleman who liked to bet the 10, his son (not there at the same time as his Dad) wearing a nice suit. The very elderly gentleman at the table with his cane betting the 6s and 8s but frequently forgetting where he had put down his money, leading to sometimes protracted conversations with the dealer. One of the elderly gentlemen’s sons who made a pile of money “playing the dark side” and betting the Dont’ Pass and Don’t Come lines. (I put a stop to that by throwing a couple of points and convincing him to play with the crowd.) There was the vodka fueled redneck with tattoos on his arms, betting money on basically everything. He was enjoying the action, but I can’t imagine this was a money-making strategy overall. I am surely forgetting some people, but these were some of the principals at the Fremont craps tables with us on Sunday.

Back up at the strip, around the Flamingo, there was more to look at, but things were much more impersonal. One interesting phenomenon was the way people dressed. In particular, I noticed a lot of women dressed to the nines while the guys they were with were very casual. I know there are a lot of professional escorts and the like in Sin City, but I can’t believe that all such couples were of this variety. Something about Las Vegas apparently just makes some ladies want to dress trashy. I just had to learn to live with this. (Not to get too racy on this, a family friendly blog, but there was woman at a roulette table with me who had her boobs squished together and up in such an extreme fashion that even I found it disconcerting.)

Walking through the chaos on the strip was entertaining at first, but got to be more of a hassle than anything else. There are any number of bottle necks along the sidewalk, occasionally made worse by the lines of people (like 20 to 30 standing shoulder to shoulder) flicking their “girls-2-u” flyers to grab your attention and try to get you to take one. Then there were a seemingly endless number of people at casino entrances trying to offer you a free show or deal on something but in return wanting to pitch you on a condo or something – – after the first one became obviously a pitch for something, I started declining to listen to them in progressively less friendly ways. On the other hand, Amy & I took a run down the strip that was a lot of fun. We ran the approximately 5 miles from the Flamingo to the Stratosphere and back. Plently to look at, and at the time of day we were running, the crowds didn’t impede us too much. I wouldn’t want to run like that on a daily basis, but it was a nice change of pace and certainly better than the treadmills at the Flamingo.

But now we’re (as the nursery rhyme says) home again, home again, jiggity jig.