Stardate 20021031.2219

(Captain's log): I can't tell you how painful it is to try to play Blackjack at a table with someone who doesn't have the faintest idea what they're doing. Gad. Someone asks for a hit on a hard 17 while looking at a dealer 6, and I have to forcibly resist the urge to shriek at them. All I can do is to pick up and move, of course; they've got just as much right to be there as I do, and we all have a constitutional right to be damn-fools.

Spotted in the book rack in the newsstand: "The secrets the casinos don't want you to know!!!" That must be why they're selling the book in the casino's newsstand.

It seems as if the slot machines change every time I come here. As time has gone on, they've been moving away from the traditional slots with real rotating barrels with symbols printed on them. Originally that was the actual randomizing mechanism, but it hasn't been for a long time. These days the cylinders have encoders on them and electric brakes, and the computer inside the slot machine decides ahead of time what's going to happen, and then stops the barrels where it needs them to be. Some of the stranger machines have such physical barrels and have video screens on which the computer displays a graphical version of those same barrels, moving the same way. (I never quite understood the point of that.)

But the new concept is more or less like a "Neo Geo". That was a video game where a fixed piece of hardware could be reprogrammed to play several games by inserting ROMpacks, sometimes with redressed external decorations and sometimes without. These days here in slot machine heaven, at least five companies make the equivalent, in competition to one another. The same physical hardware can be redressed by replacing two plastic panels and by replacing the firmware, and the unit can be converted into a different game. They all have color graphics displays with decent refresh rates which are touch-sensitive, plus a standard set of physical buttons and the all-important cash ingesting and cash dispensing mechanisms.

One company makes units where the screens are truly immense, with what looks like a 2:1 aspect ratio oriented vertically (but with horizontal rasters). The graphics on those units are notably better than the others, too, but what I noticed is that they were technically excellent, with lots of eye candy, but just plain weren't as much fun as some of the others. One company, IGT (who actually put their URL in fine print on the plastic panels, a nice touch) has a kind of goofy attitude towards game designs, and although the graphics looks to be 8-bit dithered, they were nonetheless quite popular. All of these games have what amount to interludes sometimes. Usually the screen displays a simulacrum of rotating barrels, though they often do rather odd things (like have some of the symbols animated). But when you hit some particularly rare combinations, the screen will redraw and you get to interact (sort of) with an animated sequence for an extra bonus.

In one game what you were observing was a fisherman pulling lobster pots out of the water and you got extra points for every lobster he got. (You pick which pots to open.) The stories behind these games were nothing if not original, and easily the oddest one was based on (wait for it) strip clubs. The symbols on the rollers were things like discarded G-strings, high-heel shoes, and so on, and if you managed to get three special symbols (the heads of strippers) in the leftmost positions of any pay combination you'd purchased that time (up to nine per spin!) then you got to choose either a man or a woman for a strip show. The way it works is that there are 8 spectators (women when the stripper is a man, men if it's a woman) and you pick three of them. Each one has an amount they're tipping, and if they total above a threshold then the dancer removes something and you get to try again. (That actually is the amount of money you win in the bonus round, strangely enough.) Each time the threshold rises, and I don't honestly know how far they strip. I watched a woman play that part and she was having a good time, talking to me about it and totally unashamed. She said that the men go down to a G-string. I have no idea whether the women end with one or two pieces of clothing. This is all done as cartoons, by the way, and they're not 3D.

Yes, I played it for an hour. I never got more than two steps into the striptease out of six, which meant that she removed her bowtie and her gloves. Hardly worth it, actually; I can get better entertainment for $20 elsewhere in Vegas, so I stopped. I don't usually play the slots, but I was curious about this one.

That's because I don't like long-odds games. I play Blackjack and Pai-Gow Poker. One version of Pai-Gow Poker is "progressive" which means that in addition to the normal play, you can if you wish feed a dollar chip into a slot each hand, and if you've done so and if you get a very good hand, you can win a lot of extra money from a pool which rises slowly over time. But it takes a hell of a hand to win anything with the lowest bonus hand being a natural straight flush. Only I saw a woman win that way. She had a Royal Flush using a Joker, and won $657 on a $10 bet plus $1 in the slot – and all the other $1's in the slot that never won her anything.

And that's the problem for me: I don't like to play and play and play and not win anything. For me, psychologically, winning a small amount a lot of times is more satisfyi