Gambling in America

A Slow tropical breeze wafts through the sun-baked marble veranda overlooking the walking ring at Hialeah Park. It is ten minutes to post time for the eighth race, an event that now seems certain to deny me the $96,000 Pick-Six payoff that should be mine, all mine. So far today, I have been the Lord of the Races, picking the first five winners in the Pick-Six, horses that looked like baffling long shots to the mere mortals in the stands but were routinely brilliant selections for a Lord of the Races. Now, though, I have only one horse going for me in the sixth and final leg of the Pick-Six, a filly named Clay Path, and I am certain she will lose.

Clay Path, a class act who today is matched against a pack of second-raters, has not raced in six months, but she is so much more talented than her opponents that she need be only halfway ready to win. The odds board is telling me, though, that she is out for only a prep and some exercise today, not to make me rich. She should be an overwhelming favorite, but instead she is a tepid choice and her price is not falling. She is a dead piece, and the sharpies are staying away.

I explain all this to my beautiful companion on the veranda, a five percent investor in my Pick-Six syndicate and, thus, the beneficiary of $4800 if Clay Path gets home first.

"It doesn't matter," she says, sipping her banana daiquiri. "Where in the world would you rather be? I hear it's snowing back in New York."

Here, it is a balmy 72 degrees at the country's most beautiful race track, a palatial tribute to French architecture. From where we stand, we can see the dreaded Clay Path and her rivals being saddled up in a grassy walking ring that is surrounded by tall, swaying palms. Beside them is a bronze of the great horse Citation, surrounded by a pool filled with water lilies. On the other side are fountains, beds of flowers as vibrant in their color as the South American parrots in the aviary on the grounds of the race track.

On the front side of the track a few minutes later, the world's largest colony of pink flamingos preens on the two islands in the track infield as the gates open for the eighth race. Clay Path, away from the gate sharply, is cannily snatched up and taken back to the end of the pack by a jockey who holds the reins as tightly as a frightened child on a merry-go-round. He loosens them slightly when the cause is lost, letting Clay Path finally advance to fifth place, a dozen lengths behind the winner.

The Pick-Six is lost and the final two races on the card are a bust, but the splendor of Hialeah and a gorgeous south Florida sunset remain to soothe me on the way out of the track, along with my companion's uttering the magic words "Let's go to the dog track for dinner."

I am, in a sense, $96,000 poorer, but I am in Gambling Heaven. Six months later and 1000 miles north, I find myself in the heart of a lower circle. The road maps call it Atlantic City, and the sign at the entrance to this place says Del Webb's Claridge Casino Hotel, but I know that I have found Gambling Hell.

I have been sitting at a $25 blackjack table for seven hours, trying to win back the $1200 that virtually disappeared in the first half hour. I have worked the remaining $75 back to $800, but every time I approach the $1000 threshold, the cards fall with cosmic injustice. The dealer, sullen and hostile, is snapping the cards at me, grabbing my losing bets with enthusiasm. Only a few feet away, the clanging slot machines are hammering at my brain.

Finally, the cards start falling, and 20 minutes later, there is $1600 in front of me. I stand up, almost falling as I find that both legs have fallen asleep, and begin to shove through the slot-machine crowds to the cashier. It takes 20 minutes to get to the front of the cashier's line. Staggering toward the lobby now, I feel the eyes of the Casino Undead upon me: It is a pack of the Bus People, the backbone of business in Atlantic City, desperate wretches who lose their quarters early in the day and then sit in the lobby, staring vacantly ahead, until it is time for the bus to take them home. Finally reaching the pavement and the first fresh air I have breathed in half a day, I can look forward to the 20-minute wait for the valet-parking drones to find my car and then a two-hour drive home on a dark and rainy turnpike.

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Paradise Lost's Satan and Star Trek's Khan said they would rather rule in hell than serve in heaven, but I preferred losing out on $96,000 in Gambling Heaven to winning $400 in Gambling Hell. Even a gambler does not live by bread alone.

The American gambling landscape has plenty of examples of both paradise and inferno, with a lot of purgatories in between. For most novice or casual gamblers, it is hard to tell them apart until one's sentence is sealed. Unfortunately, there is no sign on some of Las Vegas' most opulent gambling halls saying, We take your money and treat you like Garbage, no caveats at some race tracks that Our racing is awful and so is this track.

Finding a good place to gamble does not mean finding a place to win money. Ninety-nine percent of the people reading this article are going to lose money gambling in the course of their lives, and the more they gamble, the more they will lose. The remaining one percent comprises professional gamblers, the winners of lotteries and those who work the winning side of gambling—bookmakers and race-track and casino owners.

This is not meant to be discouraging. One hundred percent of the people reading this article will lose money the next time they go to the movies or out to dinner. The point is finding value for the entertainment dollar. In gambling, there is the additional lure that the nonprofessional may actually go home a few dollars ahead. If not, the idea is to walk away enriched from the fun of it.

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Casino gambling in this country is legal only in Nevada, Atlantic City, New Jersey, and Puerto Rico, though the action on that commonwealth island is a minor attraction for tourists and lures few serious gamblers. Nevada and Atlantic City offer the same major games—blackjack, craps, roulette, baccarat and slot machines—and the biggest casinos in both places are attached to luxury hotels. Otherwise, they could hardly be more different.

All the best Nevada action is in Las Vegas, our national monument to greed and vulgarity. A 24-hour-a-day psychedelic engine, the city turns mild-mannered folk from the heartland into depraved gamblers. The idea is to go wallow in it.

A good rule of thumb for the Vegas greenhorn is to forget about staying in or doing any serious gambling at the casino/ hotels you've heard of, but by all means to walk through them. Caesars Palace's moving sidewalks and replica of Cleopatra's barge are wonderfully wacky. The gambling tables, though, attract an inordinate number of high-rolling sleazeballs, fat dentists and contractors in country-club sweaters. The scene is similar at Bally's Las Vegas, formerly the famous MGM Grand, which is as big as its old name but a cold and hostile place.

Las Vegas is essentially two cities, the Las Vegas Strip and downtown Las Vegas. The Strip is where the Rat Pack used to run and where the highest rollers play, but downtown is where to have fun. Downtown not only is Vegas in its most glorious tackiness but also offers the most favorable and pleasant gambling venues.

Downtown is packed into five long blocks that seem like one continuous neon casino. Audio-animatronic monkeys and cowboys beckon pedestrians to come inside and try their luck, and homely girls in wild West garb shove coupons at everyone for free slot pulls and souvenirs. (Forget about finding hookers, though; the street trade has all been moved indoors after a rash of incidents in which husbands were boldly solicited despite wearing wives on their arms.) Almost invisible amid the gaudiness of downtown is the city's best-kept secret, a casino/hotel with the aptly invisible name of the Las Vegas Club. The rooms cost $25 to $40 a night and are as nice as those renting for twice as much on the Strip. The casino is an even better deal. The Las Vegas Club advertises itself as having the world's best blackjack rules, and it's right. A player can double down not just on his first two cards but on his first three or even first four cards, pairs and aces can be split and resplit indefinitely, the surrender rule is in effect and there is an automatic winning payoff for any six-card hand totaling 21 or less. For those to whom the preceding is gibberish, suffice it to say that those rules give a good player an advantage over the house even without counting cards.

The entire place is roomy and sedate and the dominant motif is baseball, owner Mel Exber's passion. The dealers dress in sedate baseball jerseys, easy on the eyes, and are uniformly talkative and cheerful. This is the rule downtown, where many of the casinos are owned by old-timers. On the Strip, home of the corporate conglomerates, the dealers are instructed to talk as little as possible, to keep the game and the profits going quicker.

Many of the downtown casinos, including the Mint, the Horseshoe and the Fremont, offer single-deck or double-deck blackjack instead of the four-, six- and eight-deck games elsewhere. The dealers are under orders to shuffle up early if blatant card counters tip their hands, but a good, discreet player can get a real edge in the single- and double-deck games.

(continued on page 138) Gambling (continued from page 64)

Many of the downtown casinos also have installed the most entertaining slot machine ever invented, the Sigma Derby. As many as ten players sit around a mechanical race track, feed in coins, bet on one-two combinations of the five runners and then watch little plastic horses contest one of thousands of variations on races. Players root for their tiny Secretariats, and the whole thing is a lot more congenial than waiting for little pieces of fruit to appear in the slot-machine windows.

One real edge the Strip holds over downtown is in providing plush surroundings for sports and race betting. Caesars Palace has the world's best off-track-betting parlor, a high-tech room with giant-screen live telecasts from major tracks. The Stardust has a similar room, a bit dowdier but also livelier. A lot of sports bettors congregate in those two places to watch satellite telecasts of football games from around the country. In every major casino, there is a sports book that will take bets on virtually anything that moves. Sharpies shop from casino to casino for the best odds and point spreads.

Playing poker in Las Vegas for serious money should be left to the professionals, who wait hungrily to pick the bones of tourists who arrive expecting to repeat their success in kitchen-table games back home. The pros are content to put in eight hours a day, play only one in 20 hands and grind out a profit, and many play as secret partners or as shills for the house. Amateurs should stick to the low-limit games and play 'em close to the chest.

(Draw poker, incidentally, is legal in some Southern California towns, but playing the big poker rooms there is extremely unpleasant. Those places have all the ambience of a high school gymnasium, and the players are a scary bunch of hustlers who are not above stealing a chip from your stack if you turn your back.)

Taking children to Las Vegas, or expecting to improve one's health while in town, seems to contradict the spirit of the place. For those who insist, the Las Vegas Hilton is strong in both areas. The Hilton, which is just off the Strip and is one of the world's largest hotels, with more than 3100 rooms, offers extensive supervised youth activities and even separate dormitories in which to pack away the kids while the folks are losing their college-tuition money at the tables. The sprawling spa area is well equipped, and even the dissolute can enjoy the ten-dollar oxygen pep-up offered to weary gamblers.

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The rest of the Nevada gambling scene consists of Lake Tahoe, Reno and some smaller pit stops, such as Henderson and Carson City. Of those, only Lake Tahoe is worth a visit, and then only for those who want some alpine scenery mixed with their gambling. The betting rules throughout northern Nevada are unfavorable to the blackjack player, and other games are limited, as is the choice and variety of casinos. In Lake Tahoe, Caesars has the best casino and hotel, with many of the rooms providing huge circular tubs for those intent on reliving the excesses of the latter Roman Empire.

Northern Nevada, despite its limitations, is paradise compared with Atlantic City, a living civics lesson in why casino gambling should probably not be legalized anywhere else in the country. Since the first casino opened there in 1978, the place has been a disaster for virtually everyone except the fabulously successful casino operators. Crime and housing costs have soared, driving out many residents, and few of the promised benefits that wooed New Jersey voters to approve casinos in a 1976 referendum have paid off.

Atlantic City, an hour from Philadelphia, two and a half hours from New York City and within 200 miles of 20,000,000 Americans, is in essence a huge slum with ten palaces towering above it. While the famous boardwalk has a certain tacky seaside charm during daylight in the summer, the rest of the town is a frightening and gloomy ghetto that should not be navigated on foot at any hour.

The philosophy on which Las Vegas was built, and which survives there downtown, is to make everything attractively inexpensive so that people will gamble at your casino. In Las Vegas, parking is usually free, rooms fetch reasonable rates and meals are outrageously cheap. In Atlantic City, the prevailing attitude is "Gouge the customers at every turn." Rooms start at $90 a night in most places, food prices are similarly inflated and posted parking rates are as high as ten dollars for 12 hours.

Casinos everywhere thrive on the business of high rollers, most of whom are extremely inept gamblers who like the feel of betting big bucks, either because their jobs provide no opportunities for risk taking or because they are self-destructive individuals. Any bettor who buys in for $10,000 or more in the course of a visit can command a range of perks from meals to a suite and even air fare. Generous guys, those casino owners: If you regularly lose $20,000, they will gladly send a car or plane to get you.

Anyone playing for more than spare change in the slot machines should ask the nearest casino pit boss to validate his parking stub, which is done without hesitation. Anyone who plays for a while at more than $15 a hand can command at least a free meal in the coffee shop. Novices, though, should beware of seduction by freebie, a syndrome that once led to my purchasing history's most expensive sandwich.

On my first trip to Las Vegas ten years ago, I was playing $25 blackjack at the Union Plaza Hotel and Casino on a morning so slow that I was the biggest bettor in the pit. A bored casino floorman began stroking me, lighting my cigarettes, giving me tips on what to do in town and telling me to be sure to let him know if I wanted to get something to eat when I was done playing. Flattered by the attention, I felt slightly obliged to keep playing at a table where the cards were running badly and had run through all but $100 of a $1500 buy-in when I finally had the sense to give it a rest. The floorman, friendlier than ever, rushed over and gave me a chit for the coffee shop. Frustrated and furious with myself, I tried to get some of my losses back by searching for the most expensive thing on the menu. So I got a free $12 crab-meat-and-gruyère-cheese sandwich that cost me only $1400. And it wasn't even any good.

The typical Atlantic City player, though, is a day tripper and a low roller, giving the city an additionally cheap and desperate feeling. In Las Vegas or Lake Tahoe, almost everyone has a hotel room to go back to, some strolling and sightseeing to do and a set number of days over which to budget a gambling bank roll. In Atlantic City, people are always checking their watches and betting more than they should in their last few minutes before heading home.

Atlantic City offers far less gambling variety than Nevada, without poker, keno or sports- and race-book betting on the menu. While the rules concerning double odds are favorable for those who insist on playing craps, a game of pure chance that demands no skill and offers no long-term chance of beating the house, blackjack is played with six or eight decks out of a shoe practically everywhere and pairs cannot be resplit, a bad deal for the player.

If one must go to Atlantic City, as even I must two or three times a year when the blackjack demon's call proves irresistible, the best bet is Bally's Park Place. (Yes, the properties in Monopoly really are named after Atlantic City streets all the way down to Mediterranean and Baltic avenues.) Bally's, alone among the 12 superstructures, keeps the slot machines decently separated from the gaming tables, offering some relief from the noisy machines and their yapping players. Bally's is darker, quieter and generally more civilized than its counterparts, and the personnel seem a tad friendlier. The irony here is that Bally is the world's largest manufacturer of slot machines, which would figure to make its casino the noisiest one-armed-bandit joint anywhere; but the opposite is true.

Bally's has the advantage of being centrally located among the ten casinos on the boardwalk and within walking distance of some of them. The two casinos off the boardwalk, Harrah's Marina and the Trump Castle, are a few miles away on a marina in what promoters call the other Atlantic City. True, they are somewhat less crowded, but their isolation from the city's lone attraction, the boardwalk, makes them unappealing.

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The best place to gamble in Atlantic City is six miles from the nearest casino, at Atlantic City Race Course. It is not a particularly attractive track and the racing is generally second-class, but the fact that the game is horse racing and not craps, roulette or blackjack makes it a winner.

A quick way to win a bar bet is to challenge the nearest sucker to name America's most popular sport over the past decade. Give him three guesses. Professional basketball isn't even close, professional football is warmer and major-league baseball runs a strong second. But the winner on paid attendance seven out of the past ten years is horse racing. The figures are somewhat phony, though, because a hard-core of daily race-goers runs up the turnstile count while casual fans grow scarcer each year. The two main reasons are that racing remains largely absent from network-television exposure, and that the game carries an outdated stigma of disreputability. A race track, in the eyes of many Americans, is a place where your unemployed brother-in-law goes to hang out with creepy old guys and criminals, with a few rich cretins sitting in the box seats.

In fact, while horse racing may no longer be the sport of kings, it is the game of choice among most professional gamblers, bettors who relish an intellectual challenge and players who enjoy some aesthetics along with their action. And while a cheerfully larcenous spirit is close to the heart of the game's appeal, race tracks are uniformly safe and honest enterprises.

The pleasure of betting on races, rather than on cards or dice, is the challenge and exhilaration of smoking out a winner. Fans are betting against one another, not against the house. There is a sense of triumph on choosing the right horse that is absent in the casino. The winning blackjack, craps or slot player has merely been sitting in the right place at the right time.

There are two or more tracks in virtually every major city in the country, except in those states, mostly in the South, that piously ban the sport because they prefer to keep gambling illegal. There are two types of racing: thoroughbred racing, the more popular kind, with jockeys riding sleek and fast horses, and harness racing, in which horses of a different breed pull little carts and drivers while trotting or pacing at a slower gait. Most thoroughbred racing is conducted during the day, and the big wheels roll at night.

The ideal thoroughbred track combines the best of zoos, botanical gardens and parks with the most challenging gambling around and a sport that is unrivaled for color, drama and pageantry. The most important racing in the country takes place in New York, Southern California and south Florida, and those states have the nation's most splendid tracks.

The time to go racing in Florida is in the Season, the first three months of the year, when the action is at either Gulfstream Park, north of Miami, or Hialeah Park in the heart of that city. Hialeah, the aforementioned scene of the $96,000 miss, was modeled on Longchamps in France but is far more attractive. The place reeks of tropical decadence at its best. Gulf-stream, sleeker and more prosperous, lacks Hialeah's lushness but is still a lovely place to win or lose.

In California, Hollywood Park, near Los Angeles International Airport, is convenient but hardly worth seeing. An hour north, though, is Santa Anita Park, at the foot of the San Gabriel Mountains with a majestic backdrop and an architecturally appealing Spanish facade. Stargazers should hit the Turf Club, where the likes of Fred Astaire, Walter Matthau and Dick Van Patten regularly shovel their salaries through the pari-mutuel windows.

New York, home of the nation's best racing by a neck over California's, offers tracks that are open year round. Stay away from November through April, when dreary Aqueduct in Ozone Park, Queens, is playing. But Belmont Park, which operates the rest of the year except for August, is stately and grand, physically the nation's biggest track at one and a half miles around and a monument to good taste and simple elegance.

Visitors to New York City may be tempted to visit one of the 100 or so green-and-white Off-Track Betting shops around town, but they should resist. O.T.B. is a civic fiasco and a raw deal for bettors, offering lower payoffs than either tracks or bookmakers pay out and doing so in shabby and unpleasant surroundings.

Just about everyone involved in New York racing spends the year waiting for August to roll around, because then the action moves for four weeks to Saratoga Springs, 150 miles north of New York City. What ensues is a four-week party in a postcard-pretty small town that comes alive with glitter and raffishness and the classiest month of racing in the sport. The track, a wooden relic, has the feel of a county fair, with wholesome food and questionable hot tips being hawked with gusto behind the stands. In the mornings, the best horses in the world gallop through the dawn mist as waiters serve local melons and berries.

The racing, besides attracting the top horses from around the country, varies more than anywhere else, making it an invigorating challenge for the regulars and a primer of the sport for the novices. Races are run at many distances, grass racing is plentiful and there are even steeplechase races. This is also the meeting where the most blue-blooded and highly touted two-year-olds are cracked out for their debuts, offering a preview of the following spring's Triple Crown races. California has its own version of Saratoga, a summer meeting at the Del Mar Thoroughbred Club near San Diego. The racing is not quite as good and the atmosphere nowhere near as electric, but the track is an attractive one and the ocean breezes are soothing. Every day after the last race, fans are serenaded with a recording of Bing Crosby crooning Where the Surf Meets the Turf.

Some of the nation's best-known tracks and races should be avoided like a slow horse with a bum ankle. Chief among those is the Kentucky Derby at Churchill Downs, a delight mainly for undergraduates who like to sit in the infield, swill and regurgitate beer and hold up signs exhorting female passers-by to Show us your tits. For horsemen in the business, rich folk who can afford the nearly $4000 tables in the clubhouse and television viewers, it is a great race, the culmination of months of drama and speculation. For the rest of the public, it is an afternoon with all the charm of crawling through a commodities-trading pit. The betting lines are impossibly long and it is difficult to see the races. In addition, one or two of those Derby-day races often have the suspicious look of local sharpies' putting a few good things over on the unsophisticated crowd. Those dying to experience the legendary mint julep should skip the trip and try tasting the combination of six spoons of sugar in a glass of bad bourbon. Stir with a stick of mint gum. Keep a spittoon and a chaser handy.

Probably the worst place to bet on horses in North America is Keeneland, the Lexington, Kentucky, track that is dear to the hearts of the nation's tony owners and breeders. Running only three weeks in the spring and fall, it functions largely as a social event for the area's horse gentry, who maintain a clubhouse that is truly a private club, with the public barred. Operating under the slogan "Racing as it was meant to be," Keeneland fulfills its self-appointed role as a guardian of tradition by offering no public-address system, no race caller and no exotic bets such as the trifecta or the Pick-Six. Add to this Kentucky's generally high-handed treatment of the horse player and Keeneland becomes a horse player's nightmare. This is really a pity, because the track itself is pretty and the quality of horseflesh high.

The success of the Atlantic City casinos has forced several race tracks in the Northeast to close in recent years, but the shuttering of such dingy plants as Bowie and Timonium in Maryland was no loss. Track operators have finally realized that they must make their plants modern and somewhat competitive with the glitz of the casinos. Three tracks in particular deserve an A for effort and are worth seeing.

Garden State Park in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, just outside Philadelphia, is an ultramodern plant with a unique glassed-in paddock and the swankiest restaurant of any track in the country. It is largely modeled on Meadowlands, across the Hudson River from Manhattan. Meadowlands is probably the best night out in all of horse racing, with superior restaurants and, for the first eight months of the year, the richest and classiest harness racing in the country.

Laurel Race Course, outside Baltimore, was a dump for years; but under new ownership, it has opened the most sophisticated gambling facility at any track in the world: The Sports Palace, a horse player's toy store. A bank of video-cassette players allows a bettor to see a tape of any race run at the track in the past six months, and a computer system with 12 terminals lets a horse player research sophisticated statistical data about horses, trainers and jockeys. The Palace also features several huge television screens showing races and major sporting events around the country, and there is even a continuous ticker display of the latest sports results from around the country. Of course, betting on football games is illegal outside Nevada, but people have been known to get down a bet regardless.

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If winning the bar bet on America's number-one spectator sport seemed easy, here's one that's a license to steal: Ask a mark, "What is Boston's number-one spectator sport?" It's not horse racing this time, and the Bruins, Celtics or Red Sox won't win the drink. The answer is that Boston has gone to the dogs.

Greyhound racing, legal in just 15 states but fabulously successful in New England, Florida and pockets of the West, may be America's most invisible gambling success. Mention of the sport unfairly conjures up images of dogfighting or cockfighting and stirs memories of the hilarious lead story on the inaugural episode of ABC-TV's 20/20 a decade ago: Geraldo Rivera went undercover amid much intrigue to yield a searing exposé on the burning issue of whether or not racing dogs are trained to hunt down jack rabbits. The sport's visibility has further suffered because of concerted lobbying by the horse-racing industry, which has good reason to want dog racing suppressed: In every head-to-head clash between the two forms of gambling, dog racing has come out the winner.

The game is extremely appealing. Beyond the presence of man's best friend, the races are short, quick and easy to follow over a small track. There are no jockeys whose motives can be questioned, and the dogs show and hold steady form by racing twice a week. There are only a handful of professional dog bettors, because the betting pools at most tracks are too small to exploit and there are few opportunities for a major coup. But the game is readily accessible to the first-time or casual fan.

The world's best-named race track is where Bostonians bet the dogs: Wonderland Park in Revere. (Actually, Wonderland ties for best name with Phoenix' thoroughbred track: Turf Paradise.) Top dogs flock to Wonderland in the summertime, and the track is a lot nicer than its thoroughbred cousin down the road, Suffolk Downs.

There are dog tracks in Key West and up and down both Florida coasts, and most of them are surprisingly appealing. Derby Lane in St. Petersburg is particularly nice, and the Sanford-Orlando Kennel Club near Orlando is a perfect antidote to a day at Disney World or Epcot.

The very best place to play the pups is the Hollywood Greyhound Track in Hollywood, Florida, north of Miami and just up the road from Gulfstream Park. The best dogs in the country head south for the winter meeting and rich stake races from Christmas through April. Many dog tracks are cramped and rickety, but Hollywood is palatial by comparison and has two snappy restaurants specializing in stone crabs and Key-lime pie.

On the night of the $96,000 near miss at Hialeah, Hollywood Greyhound Track was the logical place to recover—emotionally, if not financially. The waitress at the Greyhound Club restaurant didn't have to bring the menu.

"The usual vodka martini, shrimp cocktail, stone crabs and Key-lime pie, Mr. C.?" she asked, making me feel like a million bucks, give or take $96,000. The sting of the day's losses was gone now, softened by the surroundings and the prospect of 13 dog races to come. The sleek and tawny greyhounds would run their hearts out for me, and I would be the Lord of the Races again. A tower of $100 chips in the blackjack pits of Atlantic City could not have been as soothing.

I was happy and serene without having cashed a bet, a gambler's ultimate victory. The lesson was clear: Of course it matters whether you win or lose, but not as much as where you play the game.

"If you regularly lose $20,000, casino owners will gladly send a car or plane to get you."