Travel: Las Vegas

Down on the craps tables, I watch as my friend wins $3,000 on a roll of the dice for some Canadian guy. "Thanks buddy, you're lucky for me," he says. There's no more recognition than that - his hand is simply blessed with the good rolls right now. He is The Shooter.

Another man, slightly built, his skinny wrist displaying a watch that would buy you a decent house, isn't having such a good time. He's down, and moreover, he's chasing his losses with $1,000 chips. One of the three immaculately turned out dealers at the table offers a touch of advice, patently absurd advice, but this is Vegas and it's 5:45am. "Try that table sir, this one is bad for you."

"Twenty-one million," another friend whispers to me.

"What?"

"The total value of the chips on this table," he replies.

Vegas has fine dining to compete with any of the best in Europe, Tokyo or New York. It has wonderful shows with magic, fantasy, music. The four miles of the Strip offer some of the best accommodation in the States, although less in hotels than in complete resorts such as the Wynn or the Mirage. You're a cynic? Walk past the giant choreographed fountains outside the Bellagio as they spurt and twist to some pop classical music - you'll gasp a little, I'll bet you. The streets are clean and safe as a vault. The politeness of American service - however motivated - beats the equivalent British surliness any day. And yet all this means little set against the reason for the very existence of this city in the desert.

Las Vegas is a neon oasis dedicated to the wager, the odds, the chance - and if you accept that being conceived in the first place is a lottery with worse odds than those of Camelot, then we're all born gamblers.

From the vast arrays of slot machines to the high stakes poker rooms; from the 30ft high banks of TV monitors showing horse racing, baseball, college basketball - and for all I know midget lacrosse - to the roulette wheels and the blackjack tables; Vegas is a democratic Babylon allowing you to lose or win money on any budget.

And it's smooth, glittering, glamorous even. If, like me, your only previous experience of a casino is a 2am visit to a tawdry Edinburgh establishment seemingly containing the city's entire Chinese population, then Vegas exposes you to gambling as it should be. So big, broad and excessive that you are encompassed and joyfully prevented from gaining the sense of perspective that would enable you to belittle the experience, or perceive its more harmful side. And I speak as the great-grandson of a woman who would pawn the family's best shoes for "just one more flutter".

Craps was our game of choice - odd considering a more general familiarity with cards, or even the monstrous madness of Roulette. It's not such a popular game in Britain, but it offers simplicity for the novice and then layers of complexity for the more experienced player. Make no mistake however, at heart you are betting on the roll of a dice - or more correctly two. You want a 12? That's a 35-1 chance. Any other part of your life you'd take 35-1 on? No, thought not. Stick to the "easy way" rolls.

And so to the other vice that really puts the V in Vegas - the flesh. At heart, I'm one of Cromwell's men and hence I've never so much as dipped my innocent toe into the world of strip clubs, generally subscribing to the view that watching 'women who hate men dancing for men who hate women' isn't really my cup of sleaze.

Eight thirty in the morning, and I'm leaning against a rail in the bright sunshine having emerged from a night in a vast temple of sin, wishing my pupils worked more like those of cat. Cromwell would not be pleased.

I could try and convince that I maintained a strictly anthropological stance to the whole matter. With most of my shirt buttons undone by a hand other than my own, that would not wash.

An amoral Vegas answer to my unease about such venues would be: "Do you know how much those girls make in a year? Cash?"

Mid-week and tired by constantly tacking into the winds of fate on the craps tables, we understandably go off to fire guns.

At least one of our dissolute four man party has fought in a war and the other three, including myself, aren't averse to the smell of propellant. And of course Vegas delivers. The Gun Store has a lot of weapons to choose from, from pistols to belt-fed support machine-guns, bringing to mind a delicatessen: "How much muzzle velocity does sir require?" We each select an assortment of military-grade hardware, go off to a sound-proofed booth and pretty soon the floor is littered with expended casings.

Edited highlights would show an instructor telling one of the two ostensibly Muslim members of our group to shoot a "jihadi" target in the head with an H&K G-3 assault rifle. "Like, you know, Durka Durka?" Fair enough, he's lapsed anyway.

Levelling a Glock at a target of a gunman and his terrified lady hostage, one of us is laconically informed by a female instructor to "shoot the blonde first honey, it lowers his collateral."

I can also personally recommend emptying a belt from a M249 Squad Automatic Weapon at Osama Bin Laden's image. It does wonders for the circulation.

Back at the craps tables, the general level of "stitious" has had "super" added to it. An Argentine woman sighs as the dice glance off my friend's fingers. "You never get a good roll if they hit your hand," she says. A heavy set Mafia-looking guy, whose grasp of arithmetic must surely be limited to body counts, offers a prayer up with each throw. Tipsy Hispanic girls from New York chant the name of a new croupier as he comes to take over the table: "Yoooooou'll be lucky for us Tony!" Another man best described as a probable dentist from New Hampshire obsessively reorganises his chips as if regimenting them will lessen his reliance on the randomness of the table.

One of my friends is now $2,000 up. "I'm cashing these," he says and I stroll off with him. A brief conversation with the cashier and he turns to me. "I've won $1,980. I'm going back to round it up."

And that's how the House wins. Three hours later, he's $400 down.

I leave you a priceless Steven Wright observation: "In Vegas, I got into a long argument with the man at the roulette wheel over what I considered to be an odd number."

THE FACTS

Flights from Glasgow to Las Vegas from 376 return, www.cheapflights.co.uk; Caesars Palace, www.caesarspalace.com; The Gun Store, thegunstorelasvegas.com; for general information about Las Vegas, www.visitlasvegas.co.uk

This article was originally published in The Scotsman Magazine on Saturday 23 October 2010.