It’s been awhile since I commented on the state of things in Las Vegas. And the demise recently of the Sahara presents a good opportunity to do a reassessment of that gaming venue.
The Sahara’s closing recently was a shock to some but not to me. I predicted many years ago that the jewel in the Nevada desert had become overbuilt. Too many casinos for the traffic. Too many hotel rooms. For now and into the foreseeable future.
And everything’s been going downhill for at least five years now. I’ve seen it, slowly losing the games that players want and then the players themselves.
I have my own list of many casinos I think will fail soon in Las Vegas. But then again none of them is as bustling as they were just five or six years ago.
Deutsche Bank, owners of the Cosmopolitan, is reportedly trying to dump that property. Too late, it discovered it could attract a young crowd. But guess what? Young people have a lot less money to spend!
The Planet Hollywood casino is in bankruptcy and is likely to fold. My wife and I got sick off its breakfast buffet (I’m not a buffet person but friends of ours wanted us to meet them there). The food seemed like it was from the day before and was terribly overcooked.
The Excalibur was nearly empty on a recent visit. Toilets and sinks were broken in the ladies’ room my wife went to. It seemed run down. The blackjack offerings, too, were not what they’d once been. Shoe games replaced the once plentiful double deck games. I remember when that place was hopping – you sometimes had to wait to find a good seat at a blackjack table. There were many blackjack players there years ago and the smoke was as thick as fog. No more.
But they’re not the only ones who’ve seen better days…or whose blackjack offerings are not anything to brag about.
It wasn’t long ago that the Bellagio was one of the best places to play blackjack. They used to have double deck games everywhere in its vast and classy interior expanse – with the cards dealt face-up. No more. A recent visit there saw its tables mostly empty – most without dealers even. I only saw three double deck games open, with four players scattered about those tables. The rest of the floor featured shoe games and shuffle machine games. Not attractive as a blackjack venue anymore. Sad. Still beautiful inside, though. Not a place I’d rush back to.
The Mirage? A mirage of its own self, too. No longer a great blackjack place. Primarily multi-deck games and mostly empty.
The blackjack tables at the Venetian, once full of single and double deck games, were also nearly empty when I was there recently and the tables I passed were multi-deck games. Not a blackjack player’s paradise.
Worse, I sat down to play poker and I was ripped off by several cheats at a no-limit table, sitting closely together – their arms pressed against each other’s. Even my wife noticed them cheating and she’s not a player. It was that obvious.
The player next to me was upset about them too. Dripping with sarcasm, he whispered in my ear, “those guys are awfully lucky” as he got up to leave. I left shortly afterward, down about $250 – which is not terribly much. But this kind of thing should be routed out of every honest casino. It’s thievery, a crime, straight up. I was robbed of that money and that’s not right.
I don’t know who those guys were or who they were associated with, but they were pretty blatant about what they were doing. The last hand I was in, I was the big blind and when the three stooges raised (as they did every round) to an amount above the value of the hand I held, I folded and glared them down. They were now the only ones in the pot and they started giggling like a bunch of schoolgirls. They made no pretense of wanting to play against each other.
“Oh my,” my wife said, as all three of them checked in advance of all the remaining rounds. “They’re not even trying to hide it.”
The dealer inexplicably growled: “I’m not taking any more advance checking.” Was she in on it? Or embarrassed by her noticing the same thing my wife and I were?
We left. That’s shameful stuff. I wouldn’t return there unless someone told me they’d done something to rid the poker room of cheats.
We went over to the Wynn casino and that blackjack room, too, was almost devoid of players. Even the slot machines were sitting idle. I was told by someone in the know that Steve Wynn – who operates a good casino – was funding his losses in Las Vegas with his profits from his Macau operations. Not sure if that rumor is true but it had the ring of truth.
During the same recent trip, we were pulled over by an over-eager motorcycle cop. Even though cars were whizzing past mine, he pulled me over. He ticketed me for going 5 MILES ABOVE THE LIMIT! I had to shell out $145 for the ticket.
My wife was floored. She concluded what I did:
“Oh my,” she said. “They’re so hard-up for money with the bad economy that they’re trying to balance their budget by handing out speeding tickets.”
The trip left us with a bitter taste in our mouths. Victimizing visitors with uncalled for speeding tickets is just plain dumb.
You know, sometimes you feel differently toward something you used to love when your loved one experiences it with you. You see it through her eyes.
So on my most recent visit, I started to see it with jaundiced eyes. It’s amazing how far down the ladder Vegas has come since just five or six years ago, when it was still a blackjack Mecca.
No more. It reminds me of the way it was before my first book came out, when you had to hunt and pick to find the casinos with good games.
Well, the good news, of course, is that states like Colorado and many others still have casinos offering good pitch games. And the job of today’s blackjack player – with fewer good games out there – is to get more discriminating and more resourceful and seek out the places in the country that are still smart enough to offer good games players want to play.
Richard Harvey is the acclaimed blackjack strategies innovator, expert player, blackjack coach and bestselling author of Blackjack The SMART Way (the NEW Gold Edition), Cutting Edge Blackjack (the NEW Third Edition), NEW Ways To Win MORE at Blackjack and the audio book Richard Harvey’s Blackjack PowerPrep Session. Have blackjack questions? Send them to rharvey2121@netscape.net. For more info see http://www.blackjacktoday.com.
