Luck3Sevens
Lifetime Streaker
- Joined
- Feb 25, 2008
- Messages
- 2,234
This Monday I took a trip to Atlantic City, my first time there in 2 years, and I’m am quite strongly convinced that it will be my last visit there. Let me just say that on-line gambling has land-based casinos beat hands down. Woe unto the land-based casinos when on-line gambling becomes legal again.
First off, the bus ticket jumped from $21 to $33 in two years time. At the casinos there are so few ATM machines, maybe one on each side of the vast casino, I found myself walking around and around. Next, the fee to withdraw money is $4.50 each time. Four dollars and fifty freaking cents!! I have to mention PNC Bank for this outrageous bit of robbery. Are they issuing gold ducats?! Shame on PNC!
It seemed like everything there was slated to take advantage of the gambler in the worst way, and granted, that IS the job of the casino, but there is usually some subtlety to it, some wine and dine before I am sexually ravaged you know? Not this time. For instance, they have chased all of the little hot dog vendors away, so I could not grab a quick (and cheap!) bite outside of the casinos, which makes no sense to me. Wouldn’t you want me to eat quickly so I could get back to losing my money?
In any case, I ventured out onto the boardwalk, looking for the little discount shops and pizza joints that used to be interspersed between casinos and they were gone. I had to walk about 5 city blocks to get to the mall seeking out a McDonald’s, because I refused to pay $10 for a burger at the casino eateries. Okay, now years ago there was a great mall at Atlantic City called the Oceana, it was shaped like a boat and sat between the shore and the boardwalk. Well the Oceana was now reconstructed or under construction, I couldn’t tell since outside of it was just a series of billboards hiding the exterior. Inside, there were little boutique type shops with fancy names. I stood staring at the site map to see where McDonald’s now was, because the old entrance was moved. There was none. Under the category "Restaurants" there were a lot of sushi joints, something called "Game On," and a "Giorgio de something or other." I decided to try Giorgio for a slice of pizza. This entailed more walking, traversing the entire mall to find what I discovered was a pretentious café at the back of the mall. I ended up scarfing down a sandwich and drink for about $9 bucks.
Now onto the games, the games are the typical casino games, but let me tell you the minimum wager to get any kind of results is ridiculous. Absolutely ridiculous. They boast a lot of penny machines, "Pennyville" one place advertised proudly! And I got suckered into playing one of these penny machines. I stuck $40 into that one-armed bandit, which advertised random free spins. Now the minimum bet on this thing was 30 cents, the next up was 60 cents. BUT in order to qualify for one free spin you had to bet 90 cents, 2 spins were $1.20 and so on. I never got a single free spin, though the woman next to me hit it twice, and we could not tell what would trigger it. Needless to say, the penny machines will soon have you penniless.
Then there are the myriad nickel machines. Nickel machines where the minimum bet is a mere 45 coins. 45 nickels not so bad right? Except once you do the math, you’re playing $2.25 per spin! I tried playing 25 to 35 cents per spin. That would encompass 5 to 7 lines at 1 coin per line. The return on THAT bet was pitiful, 2 coins here and there—hardly worth it. On Tunzamuni, a 3-Reel Microgaming (on-line!) casino game, 5 nickels, that’s a 25 cent bet can get you a jackpot of over $100,000 dollars! At the RTG,’s a random bet of 20 cents can get you a jackpot of over $1000. In Atlantic City, where "Wheel of Fortune" is one of the more popular games, you have to play 75 cents per spin (on quarter machines) to have the "Spin the Wheel" option. A spin on the wheel can net you from 50 coins ($12.50) to 1000 coins ($250). Where do YOU think that wheel settles most—that’s IF you even get to spin the wheel which I didn’t? In any case, it was a particularly unprofitable time the day I went. I heard very little in terms of ringing bells and people whooping and screaming. That’s another thing—the noise! All the damn bells and sound effects on those bloody machines are cranked to deafening, all to distract you from the fact that you’re losing money. The machine goes nuts when you hit two coins. Two coins? For that I expect an apology, not a triumphantly loud ding!
Like I said before, I know that the odds are stacked against me when I gamble on-line or on land. However, there’s a line that the land-based casinos cross in Atlantic City where the abject greed is so obvious that it leaves a bad taste in your mouth. The on-line casinos get more of my money, AND my endorsements because they allow me to play longer, to dream bigger and they toss me a bone in the guise of a win or a free chip every now and then. Put it like this, the on-line casinos are like a suave playboy who gives me such good lovin’ that I can forgive the fact that he’s usually broke and forgets his wallet when we go out to dinner. While the land based casinos are like some perv who steals my purse and feels me up for good measure. No contest here. Goodbye Atlantic City-I wonder what Vegas is like??
First off, the bus ticket jumped from $21 to $33 in two years time. At the casinos there are so few ATM machines, maybe one on each side of the vast casino, I found myself walking around and around. Next, the fee to withdraw money is $4.50 each time. Four dollars and fifty freaking cents!! I have to mention PNC Bank for this outrageous bit of robbery. Are they issuing gold ducats?! Shame on PNC!
It seemed like everything there was slated to take advantage of the gambler in the worst way, and granted, that IS the job of the casino, but there is usually some subtlety to it, some wine and dine before I am sexually ravaged you know? Not this time. For instance, they have chased all of the little hot dog vendors away, so I could not grab a quick (and cheap!) bite outside of the casinos, which makes no sense to me. Wouldn’t you want me to eat quickly so I could get back to losing my money?
In any case, I ventured out onto the boardwalk, looking for the little discount shops and pizza joints that used to be interspersed between casinos and they were gone. I had to walk about 5 city blocks to get to the mall seeking out a McDonald’s, because I refused to pay $10 for a burger at the casino eateries. Okay, now years ago there was a great mall at Atlantic City called the Oceana, it was shaped like a boat and sat between the shore and the boardwalk. Well the Oceana was now reconstructed or under construction, I couldn’t tell since outside of it was just a series of billboards hiding the exterior. Inside, there were little boutique type shops with fancy names. I stood staring at the site map to see where McDonald’s now was, because the old entrance was moved. There was none. Under the category "Restaurants" there were a lot of sushi joints, something called "Game On," and a "Giorgio de something or other." I decided to try Giorgio for a slice of pizza. This entailed more walking, traversing the entire mall to find what I discovered was a pretentious café at the back of the mall. I ended up scarfing down a sandwich and drink for about $9 bucks.
Now onto the games, the games are the typical casino games, but let me tell you the minimum wager to get any kind of results is ridiculous. Absolutely ridiculous. They boast a lot of penny machines, "Pennyville" one place advertised proudly! And I got suckered into playing one of these penny machines. I stuck $40 into that one-armed bandit, which advertised random free spins. Now the minimum bet on this thing was 30 cents, the next up was 60 cents. BUT in order to qualify for one free spin you had to bet 90 cents, 2 spins were $1.20 and so on. I never got a single free spin, though the woman next to me hit it twice, and we could not tell what would trigger it. Needless to say, the penny machines will soon have you penniless.
Then there are the myriad nickel machines. Nickel machines where the minimum bet is a mere 45 coins. 45 nickels not so bad right? Except once you do the math, you’re playing $2.25 per spin! I tried playing 25 to 35 cents per spin. That would encompass 5 to 7 lines at 1 coin per line. The return on THAT bet was pitiful, 2 coins here and there—hardly worth it. On Tunzamuni, a 3-Reel Microgaming (on-line!) casino game, 5 nickels, that’s a 25 cent bet can get you a jackpot of over $100,000 dollars! At the RTG,’s a random bet of 20 cents can get you a jackpot of over $1000. In Atlantic City, where "Wheel of Fortune" is one of the more popular games, you have to play 75 cents per spin (on quarter machines) to have the "Spin the Wheel" option. A spin on the wheel can net you from 50 coins ($12.50) to 1000 coins ($250). Where do YOU think that wheel settles most—that’s IF you even get to spin the wheel which I didn’t? In any case, it was a particularly unprofitable time the day I went. I heard very little in terms of ringing bells and people whooping and screaming. That’s another thing—the noise! All the damn bells and sound effects on those bloody machines are cranked to deafening, all to distract you from the fact that you’re losing money. The machine goes nuts when you hit two coins. Two coins? For that I expect an apology, not a triumphantly loud ding!
Like I said before, I know that the odds are stacked against me when I gamble on-line or on land. However, there’s a line that the land-based casinos cross in Atlantic City where the abject greed is so obvious that it leaves a bad taste in your mouth. The on-line casinos get more of my money, AND my endorsements because they allow me to play longer, to dream bigger and they toss me a bone in the guise of a win or a free chip every now and then. Put it like this, the on-line casinos are like a suave playboy who gives me such good lovin’ that I can forgive the fact that he’s usually broke and forgets his wallet when we go out to dinner. While the land based casinos are like some perv who steals my purse and feels me up for good measure. No contest here. Goodbye Atlantic City-I wonder what Vegas is like??
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