Is Atlantic City blackjack dying a slow death?

We can remember going to Showboat in the 1990s and there were seemingly acres of blackjack tables. Same held true for every casino in Atlantic City. While there were always non-blackjack tables spread out here and there, if you said "table game," invariably you would be referring to blackjack.

Now as you walk the somewhat empty floors where those hundreds of blackjack tables used to vie with one another for supremacy, you note dozens upon dozens of "new" table games such as Let It Ride, Caribbean Stud, Three-Card Poker, Four-Card Poker, Casino War, pai gow poker, mini-baccarat, Texas Hold'em Bonus, and others.

True, the slot machines have essentially defined American casino gambling ever since 1984, when both Vegas and Atlantic City made more money for the first time from the machines than from the table games.

But now blackjack is being squeezed by the other table games. Some of this could be due to the disgust of traditional blackjack players with many of the new rules — these folks may have walked away from the game or reduced their playing time. But the current generation of players seemingly don't want complicated basic strategies; they want easy games that are much more the equivalent of slot machines than they are of blackjack.

As long as casinos can make money from their tables, it doesn't matter to management whether the players are playing blackjack or Three-Card Poker. There is no sympathy or sense of tradition in the executives' offices. If blackjack is being slowly replaced by other games . . . well, that's the way it is.

No doubt blackjack is still the No. 1 table game, but its days of reigning supreme in the non-slot areas are slowly diminishing. Just take a walk through the Atlantic City casinos and you can see for yourself.

Blackjack could become the Titanic.