As part of the xmas festivities this weekend, Ryan’s family and I went down to Atlantic City Friday night to try out luck. We went to Harrah’s, which wasn’t all that impressive. We got dinner in the casino, and the food was pretty bad. Then time to hit the gaming floor. Ryan’s dad said that you could always tell the quality of a casino by how attractive the cocktail waitresses were, and these were pretty bad. One woman had a picture of her mommy baby on her tray’s tip cup; very tacky! That combined with her sullen-bordering-on-hostile attitude meant no getting drinks from her!

Ryan and I weren’t really into the idea of gambling; we were just going to look for a bar and drink and people-watch. Found a bar, but it was loud, as there was a Beatles cover band playing, complete with Sgt. Pepper-era outfits, and even a left-handed bass player lead singer. They even talked with a British accent in between songs. Entertaining, but still too loud.

Came back to the floor, and found Ryan’s mom, who gave us each $20 to play slots next to her, with the understanding that if we hit, we’d have to give her half. Ha, ha.. very funny.. no problem. Plugged my $20 into a quarter slot machine, and starting playing 3 credits at a time. Up a little, down a little, up a little more, and then down to about my last $10. Then I get 7-DoubleThingy-7. $200. I couldn’t even believe it. Cashed out right away (didn’t get the cool sound of 800-plus quarters dropping into the bin… instead you get a paper chit printed out that you bring to the cashiers window), gave Ryan’s mom her $100, and then more or less called it a night. I did put $10 into a dollar slot machine, and hit $15 on my first pull, but then whittled away the $25 in about 2 minutes.

The other thing I really noticed was how smokey it was in there. There was a “non-smoking” slots section, but it was very small. I wonder if they will ever have fully non-smoking casinos? Gambling and smoking seem to be strongly linked, but I would have said the same thing about Dunkin Donuts 10 years ago.