I am neither a gambler nor a lover of Las Vegas.
My gambling far-in-the-past history is a few trips to see the ponies at Suffolk Downs (still open – just checked - who knew?) and Narragansett (just checked: closed 40 years ago), where I would spend $10 on $2 bets, playing on if I managed to parlay a bet into a bit of a win. And a few times playing the slots, where my limit was however long a roll of quarters lasted. I understand that slots no longer take quarters, so that dates my gambling days.
Other than that, I do buy an occasional lottery ticket. When I check it months later, I’m lucky if I got one number “right.”
Gambling is just not all that tempting.
As for Las Vegas, well…
On my 1972 cross-country and back drive-and camp-a-thon, my traveling companion, Joyce, and I stayed overnight there. Las Vegas wasn’t as big a deal then as it was now. Still, there was a hierarchy of casinos and hotels. We stayed in a clean but down-side motel off the strip where, to our horror and delight, we found a rolled up pair of jockey shorts in the dresser. I believe the only casino we went to was the low-end Golden Nugget, where Joyce and I each blew $10 on the slots. We considered playing blackjack, but didn’t know the plot.
Beyond that initial trip, I’ve been to Las Vegas a couple of times for business meetings. The hotels I stayed in were somewhat more upscale than the crummy motel of 1972. Once I stayed at the MGM, which actually wasn’t that bad. And the tacky but adequate New York, New York. My gambling expenditures on those trips were zero. The restaurants were a bit nicer than anything Joyce and I went to. And I did enjoy watching the Bellagio fountains.
But Las Vegas is just not all that tempting.
Which is not that I don’t find both gambling and Las Vegas interesting.
Thus, I was drawn to a tell-all article on Bloomberg written by Brandon Presser, a fellow who’d run a high-roller suite for the Boulevard Penthouses at the Cosmopolitan.
Oh, he doesn’t name names. But who cares? I wouldn’t know the names of the Vegas “whales” – i.e., the folks who drop a lot bigger bundle than my grudging roll of quarters – anyway. And I assume that I wouldn’t want to know them, let alone their names. There’s just something so tawdry and ick about that town, and about anyone who’d want to spend time there in a high-roller suite.
Here’s what Presser found during his time managing the high-end clientele at the Cosmo:
First off, you have to be invited in, “which means fronting over a million dollars (and preferably two) at the Reserve, the hotel’s private, three-room casino on the 75th floor.” That’s quite a down deposit, especially when the house is gambling that you’ll be leaving a good slug of it behind.
But in return, you can choose the suite with a chinchilla-fur hammock, which one regular likes to loll around naked in, “waiting for a butler to find him.” (Note to self: if I do ever get to Vegas again, do not, under any circumstances, try out a chinchilla hammock).
One of the few big spender women leaves behind fur coats when she gets bored with them. She also likes:
…asking the butlers to dress up in pajamas, crawl into bed next to her, and read her bedtime stories.
To tacky and ick, let’s add pathetic.
High-rollers also like welcome gifts. I get this. A couple of times I stayed in hotels – ones where my company did a lot of business – and got a fruit basket and a bottle of cheap wine. At the swankiest hotel in Stamford, CT – the now defunct (I think) Le Pavillion – I also got personalized gilt luggage tags and a box of matches with my name spelled wrong. Maurreen Rogers. Thirty+ years on, those matches are still in my kitchen junk drawer. Misspelled name or not, I do enjoy getting free stuff above and beyond the chocolate on the pillow.
At the Cosmo, your gift might even be an edible chocolate sculpture “inspired by a guest’s Instagram account.” (Huh?)
But mostly the high-rollers want top shelf booze, where top shelf might be a bottle or cognac that goes for more than $4K. Or a $14K bottle of wine.
Money is no object when, for the clientele, money is no object. Someone willing to put $2M down and be prepared to lose it is the Cosmopolitan’s kind of regular.
The game of choice at the Cosmo is not, it goes without saying, the quarter slots. It’s Baccarat, where one guest bet $300K per hand for 8 decks at a time, on two tables at once.
Those are stakes of roughly $600,000 per minute, or $36 million per hour. (That nearly matches the 2017 gross domestic product of Tuvalu: $40 million.)
Fortunately for the house, the house won, as the house is inclined to do. As the fellow who won $6M on Roulette and promptly lost $7M found out. At least he had the solace of the chocolate Instagram sculpture and the $4K cognac.
Once, someone asked for a monkey to be dressed up in a butler’s uniform to check the guest in.
And here I thought robots were going to replace humans…
My bottom line: let what happens in Vegas stay in Vegas.
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Seventeen years on… Hard to believe that much time has gone by since 9/11…Nothing to add to my last year’s anniversary post, Blink of an Eye.
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