Troll City USA

Just returned last evening from Atlantic City, where I joined Partha, Vinod and several of Jesse's other friends for Jesse's bachelor party. I have to say that we had a pretty good time, especially considering I slept on a floor. I can't say that I was optimistic before we left, and actually my skepticism was well-founded. Over all I have to say that casinos are thoroughly repulsive to me, not because I'm morally opposed or anything, but just because they seem slimy. And oh was it slimy. When we were at the casinos, I mainly kept myself busy observing things. Below are some of my observations.

The first observation I had I am calling the Slot-Troll Hypothesis. This hypothesis holds that the appeal of playing slot machines is heavily biased towards those people who look like trolls. I couldn't really find a picture online that accurately depicted the full trollishness of your typical slot machine player, but the images below give you some idea of what I'm talking about.


The second observation is also about slot machines. All slot machines look exactly alike, and it isn't completely obvious why this is. I mean, I understand that your average trolly person is mesmerized by shiny flashy things, and so you would want to have a lot of shiny flashy slot machines, but why make every single one like that? Aren't there any people that would prefer a more sensible-looking slot machine? I know I would. I would have expected more variety in the design of slot machines, with maybe 20% of them being less gaudy.

Being an economist, I also thought quite a bit about the games themselves. To get too into this would break my initial pledge not to wax philosophic in my posts, but suffice it to say that the existence of casinos (and particularly games where you play against the house at known odds) raises interesting questions about incentives, rationality of players, etc. There are only a few options for why gamblers do what they do, and I was curious what the dominant motivation really is. Is it (1) that gamblers just don't understand that they (most of them) are risk averse, (2) that gamblers really do get a sufficient amount of enjoyment or satisfaction from playing the game itself to make up for their expected losses, (3) that gamblers *think* that they really get sufficient enjoyment or satisfaction from playing the game itself to make up for their expected losses, even though they don't, or (4) that many gamblers actually are not risk averse? Or is it (5) that gamblers are simply irrational, and aren't making the decision to gamble or not to gamble in the way that many of the rest of us would? I dunno.

While the slots and to some extent the other table games where you play against the house were trolly, I noticed that the poker area was not trolly. That, by the way, was where most of my friends were playing. I was actually going to play some poker with them, but I never got around to it.

Atlantic City is not the place to go for Indian food. Aloo gobi is $18, and doesn't include rice. If you want rice, that's $8 more.

There are feral cats all over the f-ing place in Atlantic City. Seriously, we walked down the boardwalk and saw like fifty of them. It was really really cold too, but they didn't seem to mind.

I did do a small amount of gambling. Partha and I wagered on a few games of skee ball. That was about it though.

What did I learn? Poker wasn't quite as repulsive as I thought, but the rest of Atlantic City was thoroughly stomach-turning. But even so, it wasn't a bad experience. I had quite a bit of fun hanging with the rest of the group, and observing the trolls.