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Rooms for NYE

This year’s rate check was conducted on Dec. 2 and turned up 86 casinos that have rooms available for New Year’s Eve, compared to 91 last year. The number of nights is the minimum required stay; the dollar amount is the total cost; resort fees aren’t included. 

1 night: Buffalo Bill’s $148, Westin Lake Las Vegas $152, Sam’s Town $157, Railroad Pass $159, Longhorn $168, Hotel Jefe $170, Skyline $180, Hilton Lake Las Vegas $189, Circus Circus $197, Lexi $199, Boulder Station $199, Sunset Station $199, Silver Sevens $209, Santa Fe Station $219, Suncoast $224, South Point $225, Main Street Station $231, Cannery $239, Palace Station $243, Oasis @ Gold Spike $269, Aliante $276, Downtown Grand $276, Four Queens $289, Hotel Apache $289, Az. Charlie’s Boulder $298, El Cortez $299, Golden Gate $299, Tuscany $329, Strat $349, Westin Las Vegas $351, Az. Charlie’s Decatur $365, Westgate $390, California $399, English $399, Green Valley Ranch $399, Ellis Island $424, Sahara $424, Silverton $429, Gold Coast $475, Orleans $476, Red Rock $499, Rio $499, M Resort $509, OYO $605, MGM $649, Cromwell $721, Trump $730, Circa $799, Fontainebleau $944, Four Seasons $975, Caesars Palace $1,186, Nobu $1,311

2 nights: Golden Nugget $488, Plaza $510, Excalibur $520, Luxor $524, The D $568, TI $633, Fremont $693, Mandalay Bay $710, Flamingo $735, Virgin $740, Harrah’s $748, Delano $791, Palms $792, Palms Place $802, Resorts World $898, Durango $919, JW Marriott $933, Horseshoe $946, NYNY $1,018, Park MGM $1,018, Linq $1,046, Elara $1,152, MGM Signature $1,152, Paris $1,260, Vdara $1,354, Aria $1,359, Waldorf Astoria $1,490, Planet Hollywood $1,496, Cosmopolitan $1,680, Bellagio $1,708, Venetian $2,085, Palazzo $2,138

3 nights: Encore $2,297, Wynn $2,297

Sold Out or N/A: Casino Royal, Eastside Cannery, NoMad, Platinum, Primm, Serene, Whiskey Pete’s

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Karma’s a bitch; Hard Rock triumphs

If you rely on the sleepy, docile Las Vegas Review-Journal for your casino news, you missed a doozy. The local ‘dead tree of record’ still hasn’t picked up on a dispatch from Inside Asian Gaming about the dismal performance of Resorts World Las Vegas. The latter is reeling from its worst quarter since 20222. Between July and September, revenue averaged an unimpressive $59 million a month. Return on investment for the $4.2 billion metaresort fell from an insufficient $50 million per quarter to $15 million. Suffice it to say you’d need an electron microscope to find the ROI in that.

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Miss Behave’s Mavericks

Plaza

Wed – Sun 7 p.m.
Sat 7 & 9 p.m.

$35-$99

“Miss Behave” is the stage name of Amy Saunders, a British-born performer, comedian, and producer best known for her sword-swallowing prowess. Self-taught in the skill (it’s not an illusion; sword swallowers actually take the sword up to the hilt — down the esophagus and into the stomach), she started swallowing swords in London in 1996 and has set several records for the feat. She’s also a producer who’s been running her own variety revues since 2008, including Miss Behave’s Game Show, which appeared at Bally’s (now the Horseshoe) between 2018 and 2020.

Miss Behave’s Mavericks launched in March 2022 at Cheapshot, a Fremont East bar and small theater, and lasted nearly a year. In August 2023, it was announced the Mavericks was moving to the Plaza Showroom, where it opened late last month. We’d heard intriguing things about Miss Behave and her shows over the years and we like the showroom — small but spacious and comfortable, excellent sound system and acoustics — so we attended a Saturday early show shortly after it opened.

Saunders was described by the BBC as “a live cartoon with a late-night attitude” and she lives up to the characterization, emceeing Mavericks in her lilting British accent, cracking jokes, ad libbing, stepping off the stage and prowling the audience so you almost feel part of the show, and generally keeping things moving along at a rapid clip — in her words, “lubricating the situation.”

This is a variety show with a number of sharp edges. Acts we’ve never seen before include a woman twerking to Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, a prima ballerina and a lady in a gorilla suit doing stripteases, the hula-hoop artist performing in a duck mask to the Vietnam song “Bird Is the Word,” and another stripper riding an oversized bucking spinning balloon dog.

Two acrobats, one aerial, the other on a four-handed platform, demonstrate what Miss Behave described as “the ultimate in what’s possible to do with the human body.” Speaking of which, she swallowed a sword and one of the legs of a stool while balancing a champagne bottle on the seat.

Our favorite segment was the singer who did an absolutely fierce rendition of David Bowie’s “Rock ’n’ Roll Suicide” off Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (in our top-five albums of all time); to us, she stole the show.

Also different was the intermission about 60 minutes in. It was great to get up, stretch, go for a walk to the restroom just across the casino, and brace ourselves for the last 30 minutes.

All in all, Miss Behave’s Mavericks is a rousing good time in a great room downtown at an affordable price and you’ll definitely feel in with the in crowd when — not if, we recommend — you see it.

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Fail, Caesars; Taxation vexation

Sorry, imperator. The votes have been counted in Missouri and the initiative Caesars Entertainment tried to block, Amendment 2, has eked out the narrowest of wins. With victory within its grasp, Caesars told its troops to stand down three weeks before the vote. Now it emerges that the Roman Empire’s real motive for throwing in the towel was opportunistic and hypocritical: It could get one online sports betting license for every casino it has in the Show-Me State plus one, not the feared single license. Considering that Caesars has more online brands than it can shake a fasces at, this is good news for CEO Tom Reeg and his digital minions. However, had they sought a legal opinion sooner they might have saved themselves $15 million in wasted campaign money.

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A Cold Night in Reno

Bob Dancer

On Monday, November 11, Bonnie and I flew to Reno to play at the Eldorado, one of the three casinos that make up the ROW, which is the only Caesars Resorts property in Reno.

We go often enough to get monthly mailers, so those offers were part of the reason we chose to go then. Plus, Mondays in November offer mystery Reward Credit multipliers between 4 p.m. and midnight.

The multipliers don’t seem to be much of a mystery. It’s a frequent Monday promotion there and the last dozen or so times we’ve been there for this promotion, as Seven Stars video poker players, the multiplier has always been 7x and the limit is 30,000 Reward Credits. In the Caesars system, this means you get your original points plus 6x more — so 4,285 or more base points earn you an extra 25,715 Reward Credits. That’s $257.15 in comps (or sports bets) or half that amount if you convert it to free play. 

Slot players get bigger multipliers and higher limits than video poker players do, but you have to pick one or the other before you start. While I play both games there, I play mostly video poker, so that’s the one I pick. Our offers also entitled us to some Resort Credits, which basically means Bonnie got to go shopping. (Reward Credits and Resort Credits sound the same, but they’re not. You cannot convert Resort Credits to free play or sports bets, but you can use them for other things Reward Credits are good for.)

I went upstairs for a nap. I was tired and didn’t need to play until later in the day. I didn’t set an alarm. I knew I wouldn’t sleep all day and since I play $50-a-hand machines there, it doesn’t take long to maximize the promotion.

Around 4 p.m. I woke up shivering. Although Reno itself was around 30 degrees outside, I set the room temperature to where we like it before I started my nap. But it was much colder than that now. Maybe 55 degrees. 

There were a few lights in the room still on, but the other light switches wouldn’t work, and the thermostat seemed broken. We looked outside the room, and most of the lights in the hallway were out.

We decided to descend the stairs to the casino level. I figured that the casino would have its own generator and even if the hotel were blacked out, the casino itself was the cash cow of the organization. Surely the casino would still be going despite any city power outage. I was so confident in this that I left my heavy jacket in the room. Bonnie is 81 years old and I’m 77, but we figured going downstairs wouldn’t be a problem. Surely this issue would be fixed before long.

Down on the casino floor, nothing was working. There were a few lights on, including some slot machines, but none were operational. The slot machines provided some warmth, so we sat down next to some to wait things out. Nobody knew for sure what had happened, but the casino employees were pretty sure this was a blackout over a part of the city and not specific to the ROW properties. Slot techs and floor people were manually turning off machines one at a time, but we talked them into leaving the machines close to us turned on so as to provide warmth.

Restaurants were closed as well, of course. We needed to eat. The only restaurants I know about in Reno are in other casinos. 

I don’t have comps at any other casino in Reno, so I figured we’d pick a place a few miles away, call to verify they were open, and catch an Uber or Lyft. We’d have to pay retail for food in a casino (a novel experience for me), and maybe the lights would be on in a few hours and we could Lyft back. We hooked up with a player we knew and took a Lyft to the Peppermill. 

Even though it wasn’t far from the casino to the Lyft to the new casino, it was cold outside. I do wish I had brought my jacket with me.

Over dinner, we discussed where to sleep if the problem didn’t get resolved soon. The other guy with us was enough of a player at Atlantis (about a mile away from the Peppermill) that he was able to get the casino rate for two rooms at $80 per night. The host said she’d be there only until 11 and and since we needed her help to get the rooms at that rate, we shouldn’t wait until after that.

We called back to the Eldorado about 7 p.m. and the operator said the power was on in her area and she thought the entire problem was solved, so we headed back. 

When we looked into High Limit slots, there were players playing, so we figured we were okay. I sent Bonnie up to the room and got to work gambling. I was playing $10 NSU, and in 20 minutes hit a $1,250 wild royal. It took 20 minutes to be paid. Not all machines were totally connected to the player system, and on some, any cash out at all required a hand pay. So, the slot employees were slammed. I was having doubts that I could get in my play for the promotion before midnight. The only way to guarantee it was not to hit any more taxables, but that would mean a loss of $10,000 or so, which wasn’t very attractive either.

Eventually, machines opened up in the High Limit slot area and when I hit a W2-G, I could move over to an adjacent machine and continue my play while I waited to be paid. I shared the “extra” machine with another player, who was also using it for overflow purposes. Fortunately we didn’t hit our jackpots simultaneously.

I finished playing at 11:30 p.m. or so and headed up to the room. When I got there, it turned out that when I had gone to the high limit slots area leaving Bonnie to go to our room by herself, the elevators weren’t working yet. So, she walked up 11 stories! 

As she started her journey, she connected with a casino employee who walked with her. Bonnie is an octogenarian with a cardiac history. This walk could have turned out to be fatal for her, but everything turned out okay. She didn’t want to bother me with this information while I was playing, so I never knew. Afterwards we had a talk about priorities. Yes, taking the time to help her could have caused me to miss out on part of the promotion, but her safety is much more important than that.

I don’t blame the ROW for this blackout. It hit much of the downtown area. This was a Reno infrastructure problem. It’s a fairly rare occurrence, and it just happened to bite us when we were there. Other than not getting our Monday night meals comped, and throwing our schedule off a bit, there was no harm to us.

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Norms Restaurant


The first Norms Restaurant debuted in 1949 near the famed Hollywood corner of Sunset and Vine and has since expanded to 23 locations in southern California — and one in Las Vegas.

The Vegas outpost, on the south side of W. Charleston just east of S. Decatur, opened on October 30. This is as classic a diner as you’ll ever see, with a huge 11-page menu of big food, including steak and eggs, Benedicts, omelets, pancakes, soups, salads, burgers, sandwiches and melts, pasta, chicken and steak dinners, meat loaf, seafood, desserts, and milk shakes. Everything is priced between $11.79 (for the breakfast burrito) and $23.99 (six-ounce sirloin, fried shrimp, and chicken tenders). You can see the entire menu at Norms’ website, complete with prices (rare these days), which they’re obviously proud of and for good reason.

In addition, Norms is open 24 hours, so it’s a great anytime-of-the-day-or-night play. It’s not only a classic, it’s a throwback to when all restaurant meals consisted of what’s now called “comfort food” and these diners were “everything restaurants,” exactly the way it was in the ’50s and ’60s when Norms was making its early mark.

We were curious about the quality and service, so we checked out Norms 10 days after it opened. We were greeted immediately, everyone was authentically friendly, the service was fast, and the food comes out surprisingly quickly. We tried one of the healthiest dinners, blackened salmon. All dinners come with soup and salad, which showed up almost before we were done choosing navy bean or gumbo and the salad dressing. The gumbo was nicely spiced and full of veggies, rice, and sausage. The salmon was decent, the creamed corn was edible, and the baked potato (fries or mashed are the other options) came with butter and sour cream/chives.

Our overall impression was that this is a fine place to fuel up. Rather than a foodies excursion, Norms is more for waitresses, bussers, and dishwashers, with its workman-like atmosphere and working-class crowd. The size of the meals doesn’t compete with, say, the Peppermill, but the prices certainly reflect that; our salmon dinner was $18.99; with tax it came to all of $20.58.

For a new restaurant to open in Las Vegas, this one’s outside the norm (pardon the pun) of what happens around here, a stark contrast to the newest, trendiest, high-priced celebrity-chef haunts. But in another way, it’s also a good example of what happens around here, because everything is happening around here in the food and beverage business and Norms proves the rule.

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Big Gaming in the gloaming?

We definitely seem to be entering a cooling-off period for casinos. It was inevitable. Unless you’re a paid-up member of the American Gaming Association, you’re not liable to think that the go-go years of the post-Covid rebound would last forever. With tariffs and middle-class tax hikes on the horizon, it’s time to gather ye financial rosebuds while yet ye may. That includes, you, Pennsylvania, where revenues stagnated from October 2023 to last month, which closed out at $274.5 million, accompanied by a decline in OSB revenues and a big surge in iGaming.

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Angie’s (Bargain) Lobster

Angie’s Lobster, with seven restaurants in Phoenix, has come to Las Vegas.

Angie’s is well known in the Valley of the Sun for its $9.99-$10.99 lobster rolls, made possible by Angie’s owning a wharf in Maine, buying lobster and seafood right off the boats, and processing it all in its own plant nearby. Then, Angie’s ships the product to Arizona, and now southern Nevada, in its own reefer trucks. The owners opened their first shop in Phoenix in 2021 after selling Salad & Go, which has 150 locations throughout the Southwest.

We wonder if this is the future of “fast food.” It’s definitely fast and amazingly inexpensive, but it’s several cuts above Carl’s Jr. and KFC; it is lobster after all.

Also, it’s completely cashless. You walk in and go right to one of three ordering screens, which are pretty easy to navigate. The first screen shows you the meals that come with fries and a drink for $12.99. If you want a la carte, you change the screen with a tab on the top nav. Other tabs take you to the drinks and add-ons. If you want a receipt, it’s digital, so you have to input your phone number or email address.

Angie’s menu also features shrimp, snow crab, and cod rolls from $6.49 to $10.99, along with two breakfast rolls (eggs and bacon, eggs and lobster) and French toast ($3.19-$7.99).

We went twice, once when it first opened just to see, the second time to try everything by feeding the office. We were unimpressed with the snow crab roll. We also got four lobster rolls, two chilled, two warm (for $1 extra). Even if you’re eating at Angie’s at one of six tables inside or six outside on the patio, 32 seats altogether, there’s no real reason to get the warmed-up lobster (by the time we got the food back to the office, both were room temperature). We also tried the scallop roll, clam roll, and a side of fried cod ($2.99).

Even with the big order and a busy room at lunchtime, we were in and out of the place in 13 minutes flat. Very efficient and, as we say, fast. The only time you see anyone is when they call your name to pick up your order at the window.

The lobster was a bit mushy, but tasty. The cod was big, firm, and moist, though mostly tasteless, like most whitefish. The clams, however, stole the show. Big, juicy, and tasty, they melt in your mouth — again, surprising for fast food. The scallops are small, but definitely scallopy. Melted butter and tartar sauce come in small sealed plastic bags. The only thing missing are lemon wedges. But the house-made lemonade is an adequate substitute.

For the six rolls a la carte, side of cod, and lemonade, the bill came to just over $63 including tax.

Angie’s is located on the south side of Blue Diamond a half-block east of Decatur.