Las Vegas News from around the web

If you haven’t smashed a finger or cut yourself, Dorian Oldan says, you’re not working.

At least not at his job. Oldan is a flair bartender.

Yeah, flair bartending — juggling bottles, rolling glasses down your arm, slinging garnishes. It’s dangerous work.

“You’re gonna cut yourself sooner or later,” Oldan says.

New Year’s may have been better than expected in Las Vegas, and that could mean Wall Street is ready to start betting on local casino operators again.

KeyBanc Capital Markets’ Dennis Forst said early assessments reveal that the holiday brought good crowds to Las Vegas, although spending at casinos and on food was a bit mild.

The venerable Circus Circus has sat atop our annual readers poll in nearly every “worst” category for four years running. Having not visited the Big Top on the Strip since 2004, we figured that now would be as good a time as any to sleep in glow of clowns and see what exactly is going on.

My question is about slot machines. Thirty years ago when I first started vacationing in Las Vegas, slots were little more than an afterthought, exiled to the far corner of the casino where little old ladies with coin buckets and dirty fingers pulled handles and went cross-eyed from watching the reels spin. Today, they occupy well more than half the casino. To what do you attribute the increase in the popularity of machine games?

I got MGM Mirage VP Alan Feldman on the line today for this AFP piece on the start of hiring of the 12,000 or so employees for CityCenter. As usual, some interesting stuff didn’t make it into the story.

Las Vegas podcast #195 includes:

• Root of All Evil opener
• Five Hundy by Midnight wins Best Las Vegas Podcast Trippie Award
• Encore opens
• New Years Eve stunts
• CityCenter rumors
• Treasure Island deal with MGM Mirage lasts one year
• The Real Deal closes
• Trader Vic’s rumor
• Crown Las Vegas is back
• Best of Vegas hotel deals
• New Year’s wishes
• Listener calls about MGM upgrades, Ellis Island, bacon martinis, Blue Man Group, Lion’s Share, the $20 trick in Reno, Mirage poker room rumor, Wynn comps, MGM Foxwoods, Encore, Andres, Golden Nugget, Grand Lux, Palazzo rooms, Paris buffet and more
• FreeHollowBooks.com
• Call us at (702) 866-9494

Slot machine tournaments offer adrenaline rush for casino customers

Pat Lamendola is a button pusher.

Oh, she says she likes video poker, playing at Aliante Station a few days each week. But when she talks about Quick Hit machines, she gets a glint in her eye and you can tell, slots are really her game.

On a recent snowy Monday, Lamendola stands in line to play in a slot tournament at Aliante Station. Fresh off a $160 win at a Quick Hit slot machine, Lamendola admits this isn’t her first time in a slot tourney, although it is her first in Las Vegas; she doesn’t like them but the entry is free. She can’t resist.

Consumer Electronics Show, which could draw 130,000, starts this week

Strip resorts, restaurants, show producers and exotic dancers reeling from slumping tourism will get a boost in coming weeks with four major conventions and trade shows each bringing more than 80,000 attendees to town.

The largest of them, the International Consumer Electronics Show, anticipates 2,700 exhibitors, about the same as last year. But the figure represents the loss of 300 companies that are not coming this year, being replaced by 300 other companies attending for the first time.

And because of the recession’s effect on the Strip, convention sponsors may not be complaining as much this year as they have in the past about exorbitant room rates or being forced into bundled convention packages that saddled them with minimum food-and-beverage guarantees.

Strip casinos have been struggling lately to keep up their gaming revenues. Fewer people are visiting Las Vegas and that means even less are gambling. But could the cure for the downturn be reaching out to would-be gamblers in their own homes?

Online gambling sites offer the same variety of games that most Strip casinos do — from sports betting, to poker and even bingo. But current laws keep online gambling out of the U.S., something that many casinos supported. But some are now seeing it as an opportunity.

Cleopatra Keno is a video keno variant in which the player wins 12 free games if the last ball drawn contributes to a player win. All wins in free games are doubled. Free games do not earn additional free games.