THE NEXT BIG GAME
David Spanier talks to the
biggest money-winners in Las Vegas — the casino-owners
Las Vegas 'IT'S what God woulda done . . . if He had the money.' One guy who's got the money is Steve Wynn. These days everyone who matters in Las Vegas has got the money. Whatever deity Wynn was thinking of, presumably Mammon, someone up there seems to like his action.
Wynn was talking about his new Mirage casino-hotel, a slab to end all slabs — it has got a volcano which erupts every four minutes, a tropical rain forest and (nice symbol for a casino) a shark pool. Cost of construction, $615 million. 'If wunna my staff told me we needed to spend more, $15 million or $20 million or $30 million more, to get somethin' right, I would say okay. Wouldn't even hesitate.'
Onward and upward goes Las Vegas. Nothing seems to blunt its rise — not multiplying itself with new casinos, not rival attractions like Atlantic City, not blips in the national economy. Six of the seven largest hotels in the world will be in screaming distance of each other on the Strip later this year when the Mirage and the Excalibur (complete with jousting mediaeval knights) open their doors. All along the Strip, squads of yellow hard hats bobbing under the blood-orange cranes, working round the clock as in casino shifts, attest to the mania for con- struction. The massive blocks rising out of the desert lack the bad-taste flamboyance of the Fifties and Sixties that set the style of Las Vegas. Rather, they resemble colossal slot machines from which their owners expect to shake out a continuous jackpot. The gamble is simply that the public will keep on coming.
How is it done? Over 17 million people came last year. The attraction is — well, there are several kinds of attraction, but underlying them all is the promise of action. To gamble, to break routine life on the stomach-churning edge of chance, is to feel more alive — ludo ergo sum. Vegas in that sense is not a place to get away from it all, but to feel oneself more intensely. The blazing desert sky, which makes it too hot even to cross the road, forbids escape: all doors lead back to the air-conditioned darkness and the whirr and click of the tables. The fact that for nearly every visitor it is bound to be the thrill of losing rather than the exhilaration of winning is part of the deal.
There are two kinds of casino operation: gloss and matt. The former costs a lot of money to create — essentially the need is to define a theme. Most famous is Caesar's Palace with its exterior colonnade of pillars and mock-Roman statues, its whirlie-girlie dealers in white mini-togas, its Latinate parody which can label washroom doors Caesars and Cleopatras. The Mirage has been plonked down next door to the Palace.
But the high-gloss style of gaming is currently not as profitable as the no frills approach. The most successful casino in Nevada is Binion's Horseshoe, downtown. Boasting the world's highest limit, this is an unvarnished gambling hall, without music or entertainment, where the attraction is simply the action. The Binion family rack- ed up $45 million net income on a total revenue of $108 million last year (com- pared with Caesar's $96 million on $390 million, and a casino average return in Las Vegas of around 15 per cent). Last November, Jack Binion bought out the Mint, his next-door neighbour in glitter gulch. The Mint, with its 25-storey hotel and rooftop restaurant, was doing some- thing which in theory it is quite difficult for a casino to do — it was actually losing money. Binion tore down the connecting walls and like a dam breaking the gamblers poured in. One day the ol' Mint was empty, next day the new Horseshoe was full, without any promotion. The first thing Jack Binion did was throw the music out. `Ain't no man gonna blow my money out the end of a horn,' as old man Benny Binion once said.
Jack's father Benny, now in his 80s, is one of the old-time gamblers. Back in 1931 he was convicted of second-degree murder for a crime he still insists was self-defence. In those feudin' and fightin' days the working motto was, 'Kill 'em dead and they won't give you no more trouble.' Recent attempts to set the halo of an official pardon on Benny's misdeeds have failed, though a statue of him on horse- back, lasso at the ready, has been erected outside the multi-stack car park.
`Our success down here, I tell ya, we're following Dad's formula,' Jack confided. 'In the old days, well, Dad was a bit of a bootlegger, you know. He made the booze in gallon jars and counted up the dollars. He had a partner who went around tottin' up bits of paper and doin' the accounts. Somehow at the end of it all there wasn't as much money as there ought'a been. So one day Dad kicked him out. He said what counts is gallons and dollars. Gallons and dollars was his way, 'n gallons and dollars is my way.'
Jack pauses to crack a cube of ice with his teeth. 'It's so simple. I don't know how our competitors can't see it. We just give the people better value in gambling.' All the odds tend to be shaded at Binion's. Thus on the poker machines, nowadays the favourite form of slots, Binion claims that if they play correctly, players at the Horseshoe can get a return of over 99 per cent. On blackjack, the house plays with a single deck (as distinct from six decks, which makes 'counting' so much more difficult). On dice, Binion's allows the punters more bets, at more favourable odds. On baccarat, the take is only four per cent (as compared to five per cent else- where). No wonder the gamblers like it.
The Horseshoe also stages the world poker championship. For the entire month of May, the slot machines are cleared out from one end of the casino and replaced with poker tables — sort of a heart-rending decision because slots make so-o-o much money with virtually no attention at all beyond a maintenance man. The poker championships cost the casino one and a half million, but what a marketing tool! For a month, any hour of the day or night you may pass by, high-stakes games are going on.
The poker players make their bets with stacks of hundred-dollar bills, thick as a ploughman's sandwich, wielded in their left hand like bludgeons. The stakes are too high to make sense of: twenty, thirty, forty thousand dollars up or down is no big deal. In this world a nickel means $500 and a dime $1,000.
Money is the measure, but money has no meaning. Like Steve Wynn building his concrete palace, all the winners and the losers want to do is get into the next big game.
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