Discover: Good Luck - gambling in Las Vegas

HAVE YOU VISITED ANY OF THE MULTIBILLION-dollar casinos in Las Vegas lately? If you have, try to forget for a moment the excesses, the gaudiness, the unimagined heights of faux. Instead, try to remember what happened to your senses--those receptors of sight, sound, smell, touch, and taste your brain relies on--when you entered the gambling areas.

Did it seem as if everyone must be winning? Weren't the bells, bongs, bings, bangs, and strobe lights that usually accompany jackpot payouts everywhere and unceasing? And weren't you mesmerized for long moments until you realized that there wasn't much cold hard cash spilling out of those machines after all, that the sights and sounds of winning were just another illusion in a city of illusions? And did you then notice there weren't any windows anywhere? Or clocks? Or that you couldn't find your way out once you were inside? And how about those free drinks?

Ah yes, the spirit of the Wild West lives on. Not much has changed since Doc Holliday made a slippery living at the poker table. And it can still feel as if every gun in town (a town where, by the way, it's legal to wear your side arm) is aimed at you--at least until your wallet is empty. Except that no one actually pointed a pistol at your head and said "Go to Vegas, or else." But you're smart. You went figuring you could beat the house by being smarter than they are, by knowing probability cold, by running a few million hands of video poker through your computer before you picked a machine to work over.

Your instincts were right. In "The New Math of Gambling," writer Brad Lemley reports that you can visit America's frontier fortress of greed and come back a winner without getting lucky But you'll have to be a bit sneaky, breathe a lot of secondhand smoke, learn how to count cards with your foot, and have pockets deep enough to wipe out a decent college fund before you begin to win. And watch out for the fast-draw dealers who can put out five hands of blackjack in less than three seconds, then get in your face with "hit?" "hit?" "hit?" before you've even looked at your down card.