The first time I went to Las Vegas was Christmas, 1988.
We were living in DC at the time, and while I played poker in home games, the only place I could gamble legally was Atlantic City. I made the four-hour drive several times a year to spend a weekend walking the boardwalk, sitting in poker games at the Taj Mahal, and playing craps at The Sands (where they comped my room and dinner at their excellent steakhouse).
At the time, the Taj was the poker room on the east coast. A decade later, it would be featured in the movie “Rounders.” This was long before the poker boom and the explosion of no-limit hold’em. Stud was the game everyone played. To this day, I consider it the toughest form of poker because, to be good at it, you have to pay attention to so much — especially the cards that are folded by the other players. In hold’em, you have to read the players, but in stud you have to read the players, the cards they’re playing, and everything that’s been thrown away, too.
I always took Christmas week off from my morning radio responsibilities, and this year I decided to see what Vegas was like. Martha had no interest in going, so I got on a six-hour, non-stop America West flight from BWI at around 9pm on Christmas Eve. I slept most of the way until I was awakened an hour outside of Vegas by the flight attendants singing Christmas carols over the PA as midnight approached.
That was the last indication I had that it was Christmas. As I walked off the plane, I noticed there were no holiday decorations among the rows of slot machines in the terminal. This was apparently a city where Christmas was just like every other day in a different world. Outside, I found one of the shuttle buses that go to the hotels on The Strip and sat with my eyes wide open taking in the lights and sights.
Vegas had not yet grown into its mega-resort era — the Mirage wouldn’t open until a year later, and the Bellagio, Aria, Wynn, and Venetian were years away from being built. The shuttle dropped me off at the Riviera, an old-school casino on The Strip’s north end that came cheap with my airline package. If I wanted the schlocky Vegas experience, this was a good place to start. I wanted to go out and explore right away, but I was exhausted, so I took a few pictures of the neon lights of The Strip through my hotel room window, then nodded off around 2am.
When I awoke, I made my way to the 99¢ breakfast buffet (I told you this was a long time ago!) and made my first Vegas discovery — you can’t eat well for a buck. I took two bites and pushed the plate away. Ah, well, let’s go see what this town is like.
The Riviera casino was just like the places I’d played in Atlantic City, so I didn’t waste my time there. My plan was to walk down The Strip and walk through as many other casinos as possible, starting with Circus Circus across the street. This may have been one of the first Vegas destinations to target families. True to its name, it had performers working the trapeze or high-wire or juggling or tumbling way above the casino floor. An act would come out, do their stuff for ten minutes, get some applause from a small crowd watching from the ramps leading upstairs, and then things would quiet down until the next act appeared 20 minutes later. It was clear the circus aspect was just a gimmick to get you in the door, and when the performers weren’t doing their thing, the casino wanted your attention — and money.
After the first act, I wandered through a large arcade on the top floor, a place for families with young kids to spend their money on pinball and video games before they were old enough for the adult games downstairs. It had the same cheesiness as a traveling carnival, without the tattooed Tilt-A-Whirl operators.
As I made my way back downstairs, I walked over to the poker area, where there were a few low-limit stud games. The floor man told me he had an open seat in a $1-2 game, so I sat down to see what Vegas poker was like. As with most daytime games in Atlantic City, the average age of the players was 60 or so. I was half that age so, of course, the dealer welcomed me with, “How much do you want, kid?” I gave him five $20 bills. He gave me eighteen red $5 chips, five white $1 chips, and a roll of dimes.
A roll of dimes? The only time I’d seen actual coins in play at a poker table was at a home game, when the stakes were literally nickels and dimes. I looked around the table and realized everyone had dimes in front of them. “That’s for your ante, kid. Put a dime out there,” the dealer explained. Half of the players shook their heads, while the other half took drags on their cigarettes.
That was one of the bad things about playing poker in those days — the smoke. If your seat happened to be between two smokers, you were doomed to suck secondhand smoke for as long as you sat there. There were ashtrays on the table and, quite often, a player would have one cigarette dangling from their lips while another one was burning in the ashtray. Years later, when I’d moved to St. Louis, I discovered a little $5 plastic fan I could bring with me and place on the table to keep the smoke away. Sometimes, I’d point it right at another player’s cigarette in the ashtray to make it burn faster. One of the many ways poker has improved in the last quarter-century has been forcing the smokers to leave the room to light up.
I only played that stud game at Circus Circus for about an hour — I don’t remember if I won or lost, but it wasn’t much of a swing either way — because I wanted to do more exploring. Since those two bites of runny eggs at the Riviera buffet hadn’t satisfied me, my next stop was Slots Of Fun, right next to Circus Circus. I wasn’t going to drop a single coin in a slot machine, but they had a sign offering a giant foot-long hot dog and a beer for $1.99. Sounded good to me — the right price, and they tasted pretty good, too.
As I walked down The Strip, I hit the classic venues with names I knew from afar — the Desert Inn, the Stardust, Caesar’s Palace, the Tropicana, and the Sands (where all of my comps and goodwill from Atlantic City meant nothing because they were run by two different companies). I noted the places I wanted to play later, but for now I was happy to be a tourist. After a couple of hours on my feet, I grabbed a cab to downtown Las Vegas, home of Binion’s Horseshoe, the then-home of the World Series Of Poker, where legend said the best players gathered every day.
I expected to be impressed by the poker room at Binion’s Horseshoe, but was disappointed as soon as I walked in. The place was dirty, the low ceilings kept the smoke hovering over everything, and the chips were filthy. Still, this was considered the place to play, and I’d never considered poker a game of hygiene, so I approached a floor man, who put me on the list for a couple of games, then pointed me towards the poker buffet. In those years, the Horseshoe put out a lunch and dinner buffet for its poker players. Nothing extravagant (that day the entree was corned beef and cabbage), but the food was good — and free. Along with all the action on lots of tables, I was beginning to understand why the room was packed.
I spent the rest of the afternoon in a stud game where it was clear who the good players were and who the tourists were. Not wanting to seem like one of the latter — the fish the local sharks feasted on every day — I played tight but paid close attention. After an hour or so, I could tell who the grinders were, the players who were there every day, making enough to pay the mortgage and car loan and other expenses. It was clear they were better than the players I’d sat with in Atlantic City, most of whom were weekend warriors playing the same way they did in their home games and leaving without most of their money.
This was long before the internet and TV had made the best poker players celebrities. I’d read Al Alvarez’s classic “The Biggest Game In Town,” so I knew the names Doyle Brunson, Johnny Moss, Amarillo Slim, and Nick The Greek, but I didn’t know what any of them looked like, and I was too involved in my own game to see if there was any true high-stakes action going on. Besides, I’ve never been a star-chaser.
I played into the evening, then left to see what the other downtown casinos looked like. If I thought those strip hotels were old-school, they were modern compared to the dinosaurs in this area — the Golden Nugget, the Four Queens, Lady Luck. The players in these places seemed more desperate, the waitresses older, the restaurants uninviting, the staff bored. Frankly, I’m amazed they’re still around in the 21st century.
The rest of my weekend was filled with more walking, more poker and craps, and my first Vegas show — Splash, the revue at the Riviera with elements of burlesque, including a comedian, acrobats, sea lions (!), motorcyclists, topless showgirls, and a water act with female swimmers doing moves in a giant clear tank years before Cirque du Soleil’s “O.” That was also the first time I saw someone slip some money to a maître d’ to get a better seat (“Yes, sir, right this way” to a table near the front). I sat in the back and just took it all in.
As I boarded my flight home, I knew I’d go back to Vegas, and have been there dozens of times since. I’ve watched the town explode with theme resorts featuring volcanoes, dancing fountains, the New York skyline, the Eiffel Tower, singing gondoliers, and massive amounts of traffic. I’ve stayed on The Strip, off The Strip, in big hotels and little efficiency apartments — more than twenty places in total.
But on occasion, my thoughts turn to that first trip to Sin City, when I learned a very valuable lesson: stay away from 99¢ buffets.