Salocin

Party at the Borgata

Went to the Borgata casino and hotel in Atlantic City on Thursday evening for a friend's birthday party. It's a strange mix of overly ostentatious architecture, middle america losing it's pension money, and underpaid staff who clearly have the unenviable job of maintaining the illusion of luxury. It feels like a beautiful facade covering slapdash scaffolding, all for the purpose of maintaining the illusion that you and your $500 really can be millionaires for a day, if only you're willing to risk those $500 at worse-than-even odds.

I'm not a gambler, I really have absolutely no attraction to the sport, if you can call it that, but I do like to think about the statistics of the games, and there it gets quite complicated. You can be guaranteed, of course, that the house has calculated the odds to the hundredth decimal place, and so trying to replicate their math is a pointless exercise if you're a gambler: unless the house made a mistake, the game is in their favour whatever your actions, although you can bring the odds closer to even if you know what you're doing.

Nevertheless, people often walk out of casinos wealthier than they were when they arrived. The casinos combat this with loyalty programs.

I had the rules of craps explained to me by a friendly dealer. Didn't understand much, but by watching people play for a while you can get a feel for what's going on. I can understand the attraction of Craps, it's a complicated game where everybody can place a very wide variety of bets on the table, and the excitement around the table, during a run of luck, is quite engrossing.

I walked away from the gambling floor ~$15 poorer than I arrived: tips for the waitresses who brought me free drinks while I watched my friends play. The whole thing cost me half of the $140 cost of a hotel room plus a few drinks in a bar, and all in all it was a perfectly worthwhile night out. One of my friends has a propensity to complain eloquently when he doesn't get what he perceives to be the service he was promised, which resulted in our receiving a complimentary dinner for 4 - at 3:30am - which nicely dampened the morning after effects of the alcohol we had been drinking.

Woke up the next morning, looked out the window across the vast expanse of mud-coloured reclaimed land that makes up most of Atlantic City, and realized that the magic that holds the illusion together only works at night.

I have a very addictive personality, and can only be grateful that this doesn't seem to extend to gambling!