Can Online Casino Games Capture the Buzz of Vegas?
The best place to work out what Las Vegas is actually selling is a gravel yard full of dead signs. The Neon Museum, on Las Vegas Boulevard north of Fremont Street, keeps the old Stardust lettering and the Dunes sign, which only arrived last year, in its boneyard, behind a visitor centre that used to be the lobby of the La Concha motel. Stand there at dusk, when the restored tubes come on, and the city's whole pitch is laid out in glass and gas: the room is lit, come in. The living version of the same pitch is the Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas sign at the south end of the Strip, designed by Betty Willis and put up in 1959, and these days the Sphere, which makes the same offer at a scale Willis never had to work at.
The city has about 150,300 hotel rooms, by a tourism authority that counted fewer visitors last year than the year before, and in the big resorts the casino floor sits between the front door and the lifts, so the walk to bed takes you past the tables every single night. It has been covered why the place makes sensible men do stupid things. Strip out the room and the eleven-hour flight, though, and how much of what you went for survives on a phone? More than you'd think, because the games were only ever the quiet bit in the middle of the spectacle.
The games people actually fly for
Nevada's regulator counts the tables every year, and working from its returns UNLV's Center for Gaming Research put 1,947 blackjack tables in the state last year, against 424 roulette wheels and 421 baccarat tables, with 1,034 of the blackjack tables on the Strip alone. Baccarat earns the casinos more from a fifth as many tables, which tells you where the serious money sits, but the ordinary visitor is at a blackjack table.
Blackjack holds its place because it's the one game where you do something. Hit, stand, split, double, and the dealer's up card tells you which. Roulette is the opposite pleasure, half a minute of watching a ball slow down with nothing left to decide. Neither of them needs the carpet. A blackjack hand on a screen is dealt to the same rules and the dealer still draws and stands to a line that's printed on the felt.
The dealer on the other end
The dealer was supposed to be the bit you couldn't take home. A live table solves it the obvious way: a real dealer at a real table, with a shoe of cards or a wheel, filmed and streamed to whoever has joined from a studio that is probably nowhere near Nevada. In Britain the Gambling Commission writes a set of rules for these rooms specifically, and its guidance says croupiers "need to undergo adequate training to provide the gambling in a fair way" and that "evidence of training and refresher training should be maintained".
Baccarat players like to bend a card up from the corner and read it a sliver at a time before anyone else sees it, and the serious rooms in Vegas let the ritual run. At the high-limit tables the player with the biggest bet on that side usually gets to do the squeezing, and everyone else waits. Squeeze baccarat is one of the Betway live dealer casino games online, and the cards still come up slowly. What the stream leaves out is the look back. The dealer can't see you. A chat box means the man who wants to tell her about his day still can, but nobody is reading his face, and no waitress is bringing a drink to keep him in the chair.
On your own terms
At a real table you see the dealer's hands from across the felt, at the distance the casino considers polite. On a stream the camera sits where you'd be asked to move from, and the table is open at four on a Tuesday afternoon in Reading, which no flight gets you. The game shows are stranger still, formats built for the camera rather than borrowed from the floor, with a presenter who has learned to talk to the table.
A Strip table has its minimum on a little plaque, and on a Saturday night the plaques go up. A studio table has the same two numbers, but you choose which table to join, and the account behind it lets you set a deposit limit and a reminder of how long you've been sat there before you start. The studio version lets you set the ceiling before the first hand, which is more than the plaque has ever done for anyone.