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":http://www.harrahs.com/, 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":http://feralboy.com/photoalbum/photos/20031225_xmas/P1010010.jpg 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":http://feralboy.com/photoalbum/photos/20031225_xmas/P1010002.jpg, 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.