I love Vegas. It’s a madcap, crazy, 24/7 party where inhibitions are down, and anything goes. It’s somewhere I can travel alone and yet strike up conversations with poker players, with taxi drives or with the guy sat next to me at the bar. It has for years been an occasional refuge from the humdrum of everyday life, and I feel stress leak away in the plane there.
I love the food in Vegas. Every cuisine is here. Great chefs from across America and the world come here to serve their food to the constantly changing audience of diners. Vegas, perhaps surprisingly, is a great foodie town.
I love the card rooms in Vegas and the way I can get any game I want whenever I want it. The dealers are good, the casino take is relatively small and the vast pool of players often makes for soft games where a reasonably skilled recreational player (I am one such) can expect to do well.
I love the poker players in Vegas. They’re a diverse, polyglot bunch, here from around the world to test their wits against each other in what is a game of chance if looked at in a single hand but yet where skillful players ultimately come out on top. They tell outrageous anecdotes, drink, argue about sports, bluff each other, steal pots, go to bed at 3 in the morning and, win or lose, come back and do it all again tomorrow.
And yet……
I hate Vegas. It hides its sleazy, grafting, money grabbing nature behind a thin veneer of palpably fake class. The marble lobbies and plush carpets can’t begin to cover up the single aim of the whole place which is to fleece its visitors of every penny they brought with them. Vegas constantly has its dirty fingers dipping into your pockets searching for a dollar, or preferably ten or a hundred.
I hate the food in Vegas. A croissant will be the size of house brick and leaves you feeling like you’ve eaten half a pound of butter (hardly surprising because you HAVE eaten half a pound of butter!) The business model of all Vegas food outlets is to serve you twice what you want to eat and charge you four times what you want to pay. Food is just another part of the omnipresent money grabbing machine.
I hate the card rooms in Vegas. The constant bloody noise from the casino slot machines, the over-loud piped music are hard to shut out. I hate how the waitresses (and yes, they are all female) are squeezed into overtight cocktail dresses for the titillation of the largely male clientele. There is a hierarchy of female beauty in Vegas. Slim, pretty, twenty something students get to make thousands in tips in the best hotel restaurants. Forty something mothers of two gets to hustle for tips serving drinks to rude poker players. Nothing has changed in this town for years.
I hate the poker players in Vegas. Yesterday it was a bunch of kids in their 20’s or early thirties. I recognise the type. They didn’t finish their expensive Ivy League education because they found that trading bitcoin, playing poker and doing drugs in their frat houses was more fun. They have so much money yet show it no respect, making ludicrous side bets at $1,000 a time. I worked hard for a lifetime to be here, to be able to put these chips in front of me and put them at risk. I’m happy to take advantage of their drink and drugs inhibited decision-making to build a solid win, but I feel soiled by the ugliness of their drunken talk, their meanness to the dealers and the waitress and their casual disregard for the real value of the chips they are throwing around.
So, taking all this into account, where do the scales balance?
I hate Las Vegas! Of course, I hate Las Vegas. It is the most unlovable city on the world, money grasping, sleazy and horribly misogynistic. It’s a fetid swamp of excess consumption and bad behaviour, lacking any real class or tradition.
And yet…
And yet, here I am.
Again.
The truth is that, though I hate Las Vegas, I love being in Vegas. Is this sophistry? A clever bit of hair splitting to disguise a sordid love affair I would rather deny?
I come for the sense of being off the grid, living on my wits in the hand to hand combat of the poker table. I come for the camaraderie, the fact that I am known and respected by and the chance to put myself to the test. I suspect I shall keep coming here, although part of me is always glad to leave.
So Vegas, you ugly bastard…
I’ll be back