After wandering—and pushing—around for a few minutes I spotted a circus wagon frontage with the word “Paymaster” inscribed in ornate lettering. I must have been one of the first to cash in, as almost everyone else was preoccupied with the razzle-dazzle of opening day. I pushed my chips in to an impeccably dressed guy inside, one with a $2,000 suit and a $50 haircut. Saddled with a splitting headache from all the clamor, 1 just wanted out. “Just gimme my money and let me out of this bedlam. When I shoot raps I sure as hell don’t want to step into elephant shit! You better believe I’M NEVER COMING BACK TO THIS FUCKING CRAZY CASINO AGAIN”

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Maybe I overreacted just a trifle, maybe I was rude to the dude, but I just needed to express my desire to split as soon as possible. Mad as a hatter, the guy, in all his sartorial splendor, counted out my money, and gave me one of the dirtiest dirty looks I’ve ever been zapped with, as I wheeled around and hightailed it out to the street.
A couple of weeks later in New York I picked up Life magazine which, to my surprise, had an eight-page photo spread on the gala opening of Circus Circus in Las Vegas. Along with all the pictures was a short interview with the very same Beau Brummel from the cashier’s cage—Jay Sarno, one of the owners of Circus Circus. “What makes me mad,” he complained, “are these guys who come in and hit and run and complain about elephant shit. We don’t have any elephants at Circus Circus.”

Today, most casinos are corporate entities, run by MBA CEOs with $1,000 suits, button-down shirts, and pricey ties. Their marketing departments are jammed with high-tech computers and business machines manned by accountants that you would expect to find in a shoelace factory’s office. When I first got to Las Vegas in the early 1960s, all the casinos were either controlled by the mob or by free-wheeling, old-time gamblers who started out running sawdust joints in the Old West. A lot of their accounting was done in back rooms by shady-looking, cigarette-smoking characters wearing visors and wrinkled sport shirts.
Whenever a new casino would open, as the Castaways did in the early 60s—an ill-fated venture built directly across from the Sands—all the other High Rolling casino games owners would swoop down on opening day, loaded with money, and with the evil intent to try their luck at the tables, doing their damnedest to put the newcomer out of business. A wild idea to be sure, but a long-standing Vegas tradition nevertheless.

In the case of some new casinos, the ploy turned out to be an unexpected shot in the arm for the new kid on the block, and the old-timers retreated, licking their wounds. In the case of the Castaways, the good ol’ boys had a lucky run at the tables and cleaned out the Castaways’ cashier’s cage by dawn. And damned if the casino wasn’t forced to close its doors the very next day for a spell, until it was finally able to hustle up new financing for a reopening.

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Las Vegas’s allure is irresistible to the world’s tourists, and also for our country’s conventioneers. Tradeshow Week magazine ranked Las Vegas at the top of their list of America’s most popular convention sites in 1999. This oasis in the desert hosted 32 of the 200 largest conventions in the United States, followed distantly by Chicago and New York. But conventioneers beware! Las Vegas has its allure, and it also has its drawbacks. The noted Philadelphia attorney Albert B. Gerber booked a First Amendment Lawyers Association (FALA) annual meeting there. His endless problem was corralling FALA lawyers who were strung out at the gambling tables, and getting them into the seminars and meetings.

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Conventions in the following years were held in cities offering less razzle-dazzle.
All those genial, ever-smiling casino hosts and owners are always playing hardball, no matter how friendly they appear. Even when they go out of their way to comp you for a drink or a meal, they have only one thought in their mind, just one goal on their agendas: separating you from your money as quickly as possible. In case you doubt what I say, let me tell you about the gala opening day of Circus Circus in Las Vegas.

Ballyhooed for weeks prior to its debut as the first Las Vegas casino geared for the family crowd, opening day at Circus Circus was eagerly anticipated. When the day came, the crowds lined up early. Frankly, I didn’t give a tinker’s dam for a family-oriented casino as I was a foot-loose bachelor, and a casino was a casino, but this day I was with a lady friend-of-the-moment who was eager to see the new attraction. Reluctantly 1 said okay, and we joined the long line that snaked halfway to the next casino. 1 hadn’t seen a line this long since the heyday of Radio City Music Hall. After an interminable wait we finally got inside. With all the hoopla and advance publicity, there was more razzle-dazzle than one could imagine. Bands, acrobats, circus animals. Dozens of carnival booths ringed the three-story building, with all the carnies hawking their wares and spieling their spiel, not to mention the jugglers, clowns, and trapeze artists that rounded out the pageant.

You get the picture. The damn noise from all of the above was maddening. Fighting my way to a green-felt table—any green-felt table—was a hassle in itself. Finally 1 managed to squeeze in at a craps table (I really didn’t want to shoot craps, but getting a seat at a blackjack table was well-nigh impossible). I stuck it out for a few hands because a guy at the other end of the table had a great shoot, but the cacophony was beginning to get to me. Able to stand it no longer, I picked up my chips and looked around for the cashier’s cage.

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Contrary to popular belief, prior to the arrival of casinos in Atlantic City in 1973, there was one locale in America, one oasis in the gambling-dry desert of the continental United States, where a thriving slot-machine metropolis was going strong, 24-hours-a-day, every day: Waldorf, Maryland.

Waldorf is but a dot on the map, a small locality on the highway that's less than an hour away from Washington, D.C. Here, during the 1950s and the late 60s, there were twenty busy slot machine palaces dotting the highway, strictly coin casinos with no table games, bearing familiar names such as The Golden Nugget and The Sands. How or why these came into existence, and why they were phased out by the early 70s is still unclear to me. But looking back on the scandal-ridden history of the politics of Maryland's state government at the time—one governor was removed from office, and former Maryland Governor Spiro Agnew had to resign the Vice Presidency under fire when it was proven that he was still getting payoffs from Maryland's shady enterprises even after he became Vice President—maybe it does add up. Besides, some of the proprietors of the Waldorf slot machine palaces looked like characters that stepped right out of Mario Puzo's The Godfather.

Whenever the annual American Booksellers Convention was held in Washington, D.C.—and for a period during the sixties it was anchored there—I'd make it my business to take at least one side trip to Waldorf, especially if I was attending the convention with a lady that I wanted to impress. One pretty miss who had never been in a casino—in fact, had never ever in her life even set eyes on a slot machine—was bowled over by the slot machine city. Trying her luck, she walked up to a four-quarter, double-barreled bandit, dropped in her six quarters, and spun the wheels for the first time in her life. Naturally, she hit the jackpot for $250.
Recently I was on a Greyhound bus going south and passed through Waldorf. No more slot machines, and no more crowds. Fun City was no more.

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American Indian casinos are not bound by any Casino Commission rules. A few tribal casinos make public the percentage figures for the month, but most do not. Tribal lands are extraterritorial entities, recognized by treaties that go back to colonial days. The question of paying income and other federal taxes is moot.

The day-to-day regulation of a tribal casino is generally left to the tribal gaming authority, a situation that some have described as "the fox watching the hen house." Michigan tribal casinos all post signs that say the state doesn't regulate activities conducted within the confines of the casino.

In a letter to the editor of a gambling magazine a senior citizen complained bitterly that Foxwoods in Connecticut has no nickel machines. "Are they greedy, or don't they care that older people on low incomes like to slow down the pace?"
"Foxwoods is so busy that it has neither the space nor the desire to offer nickel machines," was the curt, straightforward reply from the editor.

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Caesars, with a comparatively modest 10.3 percent, banked a cool $1.2 million. And the Taj, with the lowest percentage win of any of twelve casinos, ended up on top of the heap, with an impressive $1.65 million win for the month.

Mini-baccarat, is a comparatively new table game for some casinos. It showed some surprising statistics. Usually perceived in the crowded casino as just another table game on the floor, it doesn't have the aura of the baccarat pit. Yet to my astonishment, the figures show that mini-baccarat sometimes equals or even surpasses the grosses and losses of its big brother!

Three of the twelve casinos had bigger grosses on their mini-baccarat tables than on their regular baccarat tables. All three had more minis action than regular games.
The monthly baccarat grosses of the casinos were quite varied, from an impressive $2,642,000 high for the Taj, to a minuscule $59,000 for Harrah's (and that was the grand total for both baccarat games).

It is interesting to note that, although the Casino Control Commission has given its okay to fifteen "Other" games, most all of the casinos opt to run only five, usually three Chinese-oriented games, along with Caribbean and "Let-It-Ride" poker. The report also lists regular poker, which, for all its pop culture fame, only half the casinos offer. Of the ones that do, only the Taj had a take of more than a million for the month from that game.
The "Other Games" are also winners for the casinos, with percentages that run from a high of 22.9 for the Taj to a low of 9.8 for the Showboat. The Showboat was the only casino with a percentage win for "Other Games" that was lower than their win on both blackjack and craps.

Curiously, seven of the fifteen "Other Games" were shunned altogether by all the casinos, and four "Other Games" were offered in only five of the casinos.
Mini-craps was offered by three casinos, with win-percentages ranging from 7.5 percent to 22 percent. Mini-dice, a game separate from mini-craps, was offered only by the Taj, which reaped a fat 36.9 percent profit on it. "Fast Action Hold 'Em" was just at Harrah's, which netted a hefty 31.8 percent profit.

Keno, the last entry on the "Other Games" pages listed by the casinos, is a game heavily weighted percentage-wise in the casino's favor. Even though it has a better than 25-percent house edge, only six of the twelve casinos offered the game.

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As interesting as I found the information on the slots, the data on the table games was even more illuminating.

The report covered not only blackjack, craps, roulette, and baccarat, but also mini-baccarat and the Big Six Wheel. "Other games" encompassed Chinese games such as Pai Gow and Sic Bo as well as "Fast Action Hold 'Em" and Keno.
To my astonishment, the biggest percentage winner for the casino—in every casino—was the Big Six Wheel. The percentage of the win is so outrageously high that the casino owners should be arrested for thievery.

I always knew it was a rip-off, but only by reading the report did I discover just how much of a rip-off it is. Both the Sands and the Tropicana won more than fifty cents out of every dollar bet on that infernal Wheel! It was 52.9 percent and 50.9 percent respectively.
No casino had less than a 38.6 percent win, and ten of the twelve casinos netted better than 40 percent profit for the month.

Anyone who bets on the Big Six Wheel is a Class-A schmuck. Spread the word. Do your good deed for the day. The casino "fix" is in when it comes to the Big Six!
Though statistically you get a bigger bang for your buck at craps than at blackjack, seven of the twelve casinos showed a better take on craps, percentage-wise, than on blackjack.
Roulette is always a casino's gold mine, especially games with the double-zero wheel.
Baccarat is the fishnet for whales in all casinos. It is the big money game, and sometimes lucky players can damage the bottom line. Many of the big bettors are Asians, whom the casinos take great pains to accommodate in every way possible. It is not unusual for a whale to win or lose sums in the millions during his junket to a casino city.

Looking over the baccarat wins (and one loss) for the casinos in April, 1998, no pattern emerges. From the large 33.5 percent win for Harrah's—which amounted only to a small $35,774 in dollars—to the 6.0 percent loss for Trump Plaza—which translated into a big $157,041 loss in dollars—baccarat remains the wild card for the casino. And the win percentage has no relation to the amount earned or lost. The percentage refers only to the "drop." The Hilton, which had a very low 7.9 percent win, ended up with $384,000 in the till. Bally's 13.4 percent—almost double the Hilton's, yielded only $7,000 more in revenue.

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Looking over the huge maze of figures in one report, with literally thousands of listed entries, I was curious to see what I could learn. I charted the statistics regarding slot machines and table games.

It was a painstakingly slow job, but when I finally finished and saw what I had in front of me, I was more than repaid for my labors. I now had in front of me all the background data on all the machines and all the table games in all the casinos.
I found out important information about the slot machines, including how much money each casino made on each denomination machine, and even how many of each kind was on the casino floor. (To my surprise, the wild roller-coaster ride on the $100 slots at the Showboat was for just one machine!)

This is what I learned from my slot machine charting, probably the first time this information has ever been laid out for the gambler in a book on Atlantic City casinos. I am reprinting my charts, as is.

The quarter machine was the big winner for all the casinos, with six of the twelve casinos netting more than $10 million each for the month. None of the other six cleared less than $6 million on these cash-cow machines.

Percentage wise, outside of the lowly nickel machine, the quarter slots gave the casinos their biggest bite of the player's dollar.
Surprisingly, the least profitable of all were the $100 slots, with only one casino netting as much as $263,000 on them for the month. (Resorts even lost $52,000 that month on their $100 machines.)

The $25 slots were more profitable for the casinos than their $100 machines, with Caesars netting the top $374,000 from their eleven machines. Two of the casinos were clobbered by the players, with a combined $232,000 loss.
The $5 machines were a modest winner for the casinos, with five of the twelve casinos taking in from $1.1 million to $2 million each, with the other seven netting only amounts in the hundreds of thousands.

When it came to the dollar machines, they all proved solid winners for the casinos, with an aggregate win of $55 million for the month. Only the gross on the quarter machines pulled in more revenue. Dollars easily outpaced the 50c: machines, in some cases even yielding triple the income of the half-dollar slots.

The lowly nickel machine was no big earner for the casinos and, not coincidentally, five of the twelve casinos have discontinued them altogether.

When Atlantic City casinos first opened, it was obligatory by law to have 5c machines. Now, more than twenty years later, five casinos show no trace of a nickel slot. Revenue-wise these ceased to make sense, with just two casinos barely grossing a million each, and the others only hundreds of thousands.

The dime machine? It seems to have gone the way of the horse -and-buggy. Only one casino offered the 10c slots, that one being the World's Fair, which went belly-up in 1999.
The New Jersey Industry Report for April 1998 also broke down all the table games in the casinos, which we will cover now.

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October 1997 190.3%
November 1997 112.2%
December 1997 162.7%
January 1998 61.5%
February 1998 1 17.3%
March 1998 95.9%

For four-of-the-six-months, the Showboat's lone $100 machine was a horn of plenty for the players who pumped their dollars into it. The party came to a screeching halt in April 1998, when the machine suddenly tightened up, producing an incredibly low payout of only io.i percent, probably the lowest payout of any machine in the history of Atlantic City's legalized gambling. I was so incredulous over the 10.1 percent figure that I wrote to the Casino Control Commission for verification, which I received.
It is interesting to note that the Claridge, the casino that led the pack in lavish payouts on the nickel machine, was the last casino in overall percentage of payouts. So, on the basis of this six-month mini-survey, if you're a 5<t slot player, the Claridge casino is the place for you. If, however, you're playing the machines taking coin denominations from a quarter up, you'd do well to play anywhere but the Claridge. I'm sure that the savvy $100-machine players who had access to these figures all flocked to the Showboat's $100 machine.

As I pointed out earlier, slot machines are the cash-cows for any casino. On a steady basis, slots show more profit than the table games. If you must invest your money in the slots, I urge you to subscribe to Casino Player magazine so that you can get an idea of which casinos will give you the most bang for your buck.

Slot percentage guides are important for slot machine players, as they allow them to zero in on the casinos with the "loosest" machines in their choice of coin denomination.
The Casino Control Commission also issues monthly a New Jersey Casino Industry Financial Report, this is a thirty-page disclosure document that breaks down the profit-and-loss statistics on every slot machine denomination and every table game, as reported to the Commission by each casino. It's dull but useful to read, as the thirty pages are nothing more than just one dry sheet of statistics after another.

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Someone once said there are three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies, and statistics. Consider this:

What a wonderful country America is, where more than 91 percent of American homes have indoor plumbing!
Now try this:

What a disgrace to our nation, that with our booming economy and all our wealth and natural resources, 9 percent of our American homes all lack the bare necessity of indoor plumbing!
The same figure, twisted two different ways. (These figures in my example here are not accurate. I just took some numbers off the top of my head to illustrate how statistics can be manipulated.) There are, however, casino statistics that can prove valuable to you, especially with respect to where you can play the slot machines.
Compiled by the New Jersey Casino Control Commission are the slot statistics, from the nickle machines all the way up to the $100 machines.

If you track the statistics, as I do, you come up with some eye-opening—and sometimes eye-popping—figures.

New Jersey magazine had it in every issue. Tracking the statistics for six months in a row, from October 1997 through March 1998, I came up with some interesting data. Two casinos shared the honors of having the loosest slots over-all, with three monthly "wins" each: The Tropicana on the Boardwalk, and Harrah's on the Marina.

For all of the six months tracked, the Trop had the highest payouts on the 25c machines, which are the most popular slots in the casinos. For the nickel-machine player, the Claridge was top dog, leading the pack for five-of-the-six-months tracked.
Ten of the twelve casinos have from three to nine $100 machines each. The Claridge is the only casino without any $100 slots, and the Showboat is the only casino with just one. Las Vegas casinos really cater to these high roller players with both $500 and $1,000 slot machines.

The eye-popping statistics for the six months I tracked were on the hundred-dollar slot machine at the Showboat casino. Frankly, if these figures hadn't come from the Commission, I would be skeptical. Here goes:

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