The 250 Square Foot View

Recently, I’d been itching to get down to Atlantic City. I hadn’t been there in a while, plus I’ve been watching a lot of Boardwalk Empire lately. It was time to visit my old friend again.

So, using an amNY daily deal, three coworkers and I took the Hampton Luxury Liner bus down to Atlantic City for the day this past Saturday.

For $7, the deal included a round trip ride to Atlantic City–normally $25 on Hampton Luxury Liner–and $10 food and $5 slots vouchers for the Resorts casino. (I ambitiously bought three thinking I’d make multiple trips, and since the remaining two will expire at the end of the month, I’ll have paid $21 for this $7 deal.)

Cheap round trip bus rides are nothing new for Atlantic City casinos. Long before Groupon or LivingSocial, casinos figured out that if they subsidized the cost of a customer’s bus ticket to AC, they’d easily make it back on the tables.

One of the challenges of gambling in AC on the weekends is the higher table minimums. Blackjack generally has the best odds of any table game, but if you only have $100 to spend and you’re playing at a $10 minimum bet table, you don’t have much margin for error. If you are lucky enough to find a $5 table and sit down with that same $100, you might have enough money to stick around and survive a few losing hands until you find yourself on a “heater.”

So when I spotted two $1 minimum blackjack tables at the Trump Taj Mahal, I sat down immediately. I had never seen a blackjack table with such low limits outside of Las Vegas, and I figured there must be a catch. And there was.

The $1 blackjack tables were charging a “hand fee” of 25 cents per hand for any bet under $10. Meaning, if I played 50 hands an hour (and didn’t bet at least $10 on any of them), the casino would get $12.50 even if I broke even. Despite a few bad beats and many questionable decisions from the really nice but inexperienced gamblers playing beside me,  I walked away with $110–a net profit of just $10 after hand fees and tips for the waitresses and dealers. The casino’s profit (even though I won) was $2.50.

Experienced gamblers will warn you about all the “sucker bets” the casinos build into their games to win even when they lose. This includes the “Insurance” bet at the blackjack table, where you’re given the option of insuring your bet against the dealer’s possible blackjack, or accepting a smaller payout for blackjacks at a “Single Deck” table (they pay 6-to-5 instead of the usual 3-to-2). In my excitement over finding a low stakes table on a weekend, I failed to identify the 25-cent hand fee as yet another obvious sucker bet.

Clearly, the $1 blackjack tables were designed to attract the low stakes gamblers who didn’t really know how to play the game to their best advantage. Even as I, a more experienced blackjack player, used by-the-book basic strategy, I barely managed to turn a profit. The other guys at the table, a bachelor party from Virginia, walked away one by one having lost all the money they had started with. (Mind you, none of them lost no more than $30, which was basically their “casino fee” for being able to sit around with their friends and ironically drink White Russians.)

As for me, by the time we returned home to New York my wallet was only $60 lighter than it had been when I stepped onto the bus that morning, and I’d been able to gamble, eat, and drink all day. Considering my history with AC, I’d call that a win.