BCAA Travel Blog

There are places we never visit because of what we suspect we will find there. We hear accounts from friends, read stories in the media, or see a movie set in the locale, and close our minds to a destination. Sometimes it pays to confront your biases, or as Hunter S. Thompson once put it, “Buy the ticket. Take the ride.” A couple of years ago I received an assignment to write a magazine piece about playing poker in Las Vegas. The story angle was simple: What happens when a guy who has never been inside a casino goes to Sin City to play Texas Hold’em, a game that the guy knows little about? Until I got this gig I had always avoided Vegas. I figured it would represent the worst of America–an overdose of crass commercialism, bad taste and grasping greed–not to mention brain-broiling heat. As it turned out that Vegas had all those things, but that’s only part of the story. There was a lot about the city that I liked. In fact, I came to see how you could easily get hooked on the town.I rolled into Vegas at night, which is really the only way to do it. The shimmering lights, the crowds and the gigantic hotels delivered a major jolt to my retinal nerves and instantly fired up my adrenaline glands. No sooner had I checked into my hotel, I was off, seized by a powerful impulse to explore. I had no specific destination in mind; simply moving was all that mattered. I left the vanilla-scented air of the Mirage behind and slipped into the electric dream.

Maybe the hardest thing to believe about Las Vegas is that exists at all. It’s the world’s largest oasis, set in the middle of the Mojave Desert. The resort’s origins date back to 1946, when mobster Bugsy Siegel’s built Las Vegas’s first glitzy casino, the Flamingo, named, for his long-legged girlfriend, Virginia Hill. Modeled after the resort hotels in Miami, the Flamingo was what Siegel called a “carpet joint.” He didn’t live long enough to see the Flamingo flourish. After going $5 million over budget on construction, Siegel was murdered in 1947 by his East Coast financial partners. But the Flamingo gave Las Vegas exactly what it needed to become Nevada’s number one gambling destination–a luxurious hideaway where the high rollers could spend their money in style. The Flamingo, a riot of vibrating pink neon, still exists today, but Siegel wouldn’t recognize it, or anything else about the town.

In Siegel’s day, less than 9,000 people lived here. Today, with a population of two million, Las Vegas is the fastest-growing American metropolis. The city’s setting, in a desert basin rimmed by rust-coloured mountains, affords several spectacular nearby sightseeing options, including an array of national parks and Hoover Dam, Lake Mead and Red Rock Canyon. But the majority of the city’s 35 million annual tourists don’t come here seeking natural wonders, but rather those of the artificial kind, which are plentiful in a place that has been described as “A Disneyland for adults bad at math.” According to the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, 87 percent of tourists will gamble during their stay, and although the LCVA doesn’t mention it, most of them will lose. Gambling revenues in Vegas in 2007 totalled more than $6 billion.

It’s no mystery why Vegas has never felt much need to diversify its economy beyond the tourism and gaming sector. Seventeen of the 20 biggest hotels in the world are found here, including the largest, the MGM Grand, which has more than 5,000 rooms and 12 theme restaurants. Unlike other cities, where hotels are built near the major attractions, in Vegas the hotels are the major attractions. Each megaresort boasts a crowd-attracting gimmick. The Mirage has a volcano that erupts nightly at 30-minute intervals, the Bellagio boasts a nine-acre lake and fountains that dance to classical music, Treasure Island stages an epic battle between pirate ships, Paris sports a replica of the Eiffel Tower, Luxor features a 10-storey tall Sphinx with laser-beam eyes and a full-scale reproduction of King Tut’s Tomb, while the Venetian has a network of canals, replete with crooning gondoliers.

I checked out virtually every major hotel on the Strip during my stay, but ended up playing most of my poker at the Imperial Place. Located across the street from Caesar’s Palace in the heart of the Strip, the Imperial Palace, or “the I.P.” as the locals call it, is an anomaly in Vegas, a worn relic where the fakery is completely see-through. Built in 1979 on a narrow parcel of land, the Imperial barely has space for a driveway, much less a volcano. Its lone sidewalk gimmick is a white, jump-suited Elvis impersonator—you pose with him in front of a giant slot machine, then collect your free photo inside the casino. For many years the Imperial was owned by Ralph Engelstad, the grandson of a Minnesota potato farmer, who made it big in real estate, earning his fortune in 1967, by selling 145 acres to Howard Hughes, who used it to build the North Las Vegas Airport. Under Engelstad’s command, the Imperial became known for room rates geared toward the middle class, celebrity impersonators and an antique-car collection considered the third-largest in the world. Included among the old Cadillacs, Duesenbergs, and cars of former U.S. presidents were a number of autos that once belonged to leaders of the Third Reich, including Adolph Hitler’s 1939 parade car and a Mercedes owned by Heinrich Himmler, the commander of the S.S.

Engelstad’s collection of Nazi memorabilia grew in the mid-1980’s, as he planned to accompany his cars with a public museum. The hotel’s collection, which became known as the “war room,” included Nazi knives, propaganda posters, uniforms and swastika banners. In the late 1980s, Engelstad ran into trouble when reporters revealed that he had held two private parties in the war room on April 20–Hitler’s birthday–in 1986 and 1988. The festivities featured “a cake decorated with a swastika, German food, and German marching music,” according to Jeff Burbank’s book License to Steal: Nevada’s Gaming Control System in the Megaresort Age, which devotes a chapter to Engelstad’s collection. As Burbank wrote: “Bartenders wore T-shirts bearing the words, ‘Adolph Hitler-European Tour 1939-45.’ A life-size portrait of Hitler with the inscription, ‘To Ralphie from Adolph, 1939,’ hung on the wall. Beside it was a second painting with a likeness of Engelstad in a Nazi uniform with the message ‘To Adolph from Ralphie.’”

Nevada Gaming Control Board agents found a plate used to print hundreds of bumper stickers with the message “Hitler was Right” that were sent out from the hotel. In the media frenzy that ensued, Engelstad released a statement saying, “I despise Hitler and everything he stood for.” He insisted the parties were “spoofs” designed to celebrate the purchase of several new additions to the hotel’s Third Reich collection. But the damage had been done. The board, citing harm to Nevada’s national image, fined Engelstad $1.5 million. After his death in 2002, the property was bought by Harrahs.

I knew nothing about Englestad when I was in Vegas, but his hotel definitely qualified as eccentric.  Although its pagoda towers suggested Japan, the indoor theme was closer to Hawaii with a Mai Tai lounge and a poolside luau buffet. Geographic consistency may not have been a priority, but organized lunacy appeared to be. The blackjack “dealertainers” were made up to resemble Bette Midler, Michael Jackson and Ray Charles, and were liable at a moment’s notice to break into song. The first time I strolled through they were dressed as the Blues Bothers with black fedoras and Ray-Bans. On the stage in the centre of the casino one of the dealers was doing a frenetic impression of John Belushi singing “Soul Man.”

I picked the Imperial after researching poker rooms online at www.allvegaspoker.com, where the various venues are rated according to such factors as ambience, quality of competition and the attractiveness of the cocktail waitresses. One review stated that the Imperial’s casino resembled ”the villains’ den in a Bruce Lee film,” a description that I found irresistible. By Vegas standards, the Imperial was actually quite low key. Its diversions don’t come close to matching the hubbub at the MGM Grand’s 23-table poker room, which is ringed by a bar with go-go dancers and a rock band, a sports book decked out like a NASA control centre, the Rainforest Cafe and a glass-enclosed lion habitat. All the tables at the I.P. feature low stakes Hold’em, which renders mirror shades and killer stares ridiculous and erases any chance of rubbing shoulders with Ben Affleck. What passed for extravagance was the complimentary tray of sandwiches and cookies they brought out every few hours. The room’s quirky, low-rent atmosphere was completed by the dealers, who although not official “dealertainers,” are no less distinctive, with the men resembling extras from The Sopranos and the women loudly cracking their gum and calling everyone, “Hon.”

My trip to the desert, much like the game of Texas Hold’em, was a series of revelations. Vegas, I learned, has the key to unlock our inner child. Virtually anything you want to do here is legit. Guilt and adult responsibility are suddenly swept away and you are free to indulge your vices. Want to eat chocolate cake at 3:00 a.m.? No one cares. Craving a lap dance at 2:00 in the afternoon? No problem. Want to gamble all night? Go right ahead. No one is going to judge you. It’s somehow reassuring to know that no matter what your particular kink is, there is someone else in the hotel, perhaps even in the next room, doing far worse things.  

Las Vegas is one of those rare places with the power to banish time, and not simply by removing all the clocks from its casinos. The city encourages you to live in the moment and indulge in fantasy. Casino poker was mine, and the dream unfolded in style. I loved the disarming camaraderie I found among the players, the eccentric charm of the dealers and the hypnotic swirl and clatter of chips and cards. Even better, I won some money. Against all odds, alone in the weirdest city of them all, I felt right at home.

Photo Credits:

 #1: letstravelvacations.com

#2: engagementguide.wordpress.com

#3, 4: photobucket.com

Filed under: Destinations