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Gaming Guru
News and Views from the World of Gaming26 December 2001
There's a brand new hotel and casino on the Las Vegas horizon. The Palms Casino Resort opened in mid-November. It was built on a vacant parcel of land just west of The Strip on I-15 and Flamingo, across the street from the Gold Coast and The Rio. The $265 million development is designed to appeal to tourists and locals alike. The hotel tower holds 447 rooms and suites. The top of the tower is home to a restaurant and bar and offers an open-air view of the Las Vegas Strip and the surrounding area. Situated alongside the hotel and casino complex is the 3-story Spa at the Palms, highlighted by a resort-style swimming pool courtyard. The spa also features elegant changing rooms, treatment rooms, an aromatherapy bar, a quiet room, a fitness center, and an exercise studio. There's a wide variety of shops and restaurants, a 14-theater Cineplex theater, a 1,200-seat multi-use entertainment venue, and a 95,000 square foot casino. The Tropicana Hotel and Casino in Atlantic City, New Jersey, has tapped into a new dimension of ways to siphon dollars from gamblers' pockets. It has introduced a bank of slot machines called Fortune Dome, and at last report people were lining up to play them. The lure? The opportunity to be hoisted into a 12-foot sphere to grab as much of the $25,000 in cash flying around as you can in 45 seconds. This is no typical casino promotion. Prospective participants pay a price. Fortune Dome slot players receive one ticket for every $25 they play into the machines. It takes 160 tickets to earn a chance at the cash grab. Unless you haven't already figured it out, you have to play $4,000 to get that chance. Is it worth it? Slot players at the Tropicana have said that the amount of cash that's usually grabbed doesn't come close to making up for the losses incurred on the greedy machines. What's really scary is that a marketing representative from the casino said that they see some of the same people going into the sphere three times a day! Just how popular are the machines? It was reported that the win on the machines (the amount of money retained by the casino) has been averaging nearly $400 per day, almost double the average for all of the other slot machines in Atlantic City casinos. My new book, The Insider's Guide to Gambling on the Internet: Your Sourcebook for Safe and Profitable Gambling,published by Bonus Books, Inc. of Chicago, is available in bookstores now. It contains a special section on horse race handicapping. Speaking about books, Bonus recently came out the latest selection in Frank Scoblete's Get-The-Edge gambling guides, Get the Edge at Roulette: How to Predict Where the Ball Will Land, written by Christopher Pawlicki. It's a scientific approach to the game that will prove captivating reading for anyone who enjoys playing roulette. This article is provided by the Frank Scoblete Network. Melissa A. Kaplan is the network's managing editor. If you would like to use this article on your website, please contact Casino City Press, the exclusive web syndication outlet for the Frank Scoblete Network. To contact Frank, please e-mail him at fscobe@optonline.net. Recent Articles
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