Reflections on Sin City

Against my better judgment, I went to Las Vegas.

“And it occurred to me that maybe there is no philosophy on Earth that would endorse the existence of Las Vegas. Even Objectivism, which is usually my go-to philosophy for justifying the excesses of capitalism, at least grounds it in the belief that capitalism improves people’s lives. Henry Ford was virtuous because he allowed lots of otherwise car-less people to obtain cars and so made them better off. What does Vegas do? Promise a bunch of shmucks free money and not give it to them.”

-Scott Alexander, Meditations on Moloch

This past October, the high-frequency trading firm where I work sponsored a weekend trip to Las Vegas. Having never been to Vegas before, I was not really sure what to expect- of course I had heard the stories and the clichés, who hasn’t, but those sorts of things are often caricatures of a place at best¹. And while I had no real desire to burn money at slots or engage in other deeply questionable life choices, I was curious to see the city in person. Plus, I expected the food to be quite good and figured that in the worst most tedious scenario, I could default to overeating and playing poker- the latter of which I could at least rationalize to myself as being plausibly positive expectancy.

We left work early and flew out on a Friday. Disembarking the plane, it was immediately clear that we were in Vegas- not only were there slot machines everywhere but the words “WELCOME TO LAS VEGAS” were plastered in neon across multiple walls. The thought of a person playing slots in an airport is vaguely horrifying to me; I was relieved to notice that all the machines I saw were unoccupied².

We arrived at the hotel shortly after. The place we were staying at was pseudo-Italian themed; it was called either The Palazzo or The Venetian and was very unclear about which. The check-in process was smooth and well-managed and the rooms they put us in were luxurious without being gaudy. I was surprised, though on reflection this was naïve of me. Vegas gets the human psyche; a customer at ease will seek out a new anxiety.

Having settled into our hotel room, my roommate and I went down to the casino to gamble. At no point did this require leaving the building; The Palazzo/Venetian was set up such that ideally, you’d never have reason to go outside. The casino floor was intoxicating; one might wonder if those urban legends about over-oxygenated air had truth to them. Everything I saw seemed to vie for my attention- but what was most striking, at first, were the slot machines. They put the airport slots to shame. They were color and light and grinning computerized women with ample cleavage. They were dazzling and audacious and dreadful. They made sounds like cha-ching and mwa-mwa-mwa and the clattering of coins. The people sitting at them did not much look happy; they did not much look anything except perhaps bored. I don’t blame them. Sit there for hours and of course lights and tits become tedious.

Vegas has a bizarre relationship with the human body. Images of the thing are everywhere, and they are of course conventionally ideal. Usually, the point is selling- whether it’s upscale jewelry or tickets to a cowboy astronaut strip show, every picturesque person you see is crafted to pick your pocket. But the people who aren’t just pixels look different, as if they’re made of either plastic or leather. The former chase a dream that is just out of reach; the latter have given up its ghost.

I left my roommate playing craps and wandered the casino floor in search of the poker tables. It took me a while to find them; they were sequestered away in the corner, far from the lights and the glitz. No one in the poker room was plastic. Where the rest of the casino seemed to cultivate an atmosphere of frivolity and fun-fun-fun, the vibe here was almost ominous. There was a soda fountain in the corner that promised an endless supply of free caffeine and aspartame. I filled up a paper cup and scanned the tables.

The logic here was simple: poker is a zero-sum game³, so the best way to maximize your expected winnings is by choosing your opponents carefully. I had never played in a live game with strangers before but I knew what to hunt for. Young people with hoodies and headphones were to be avoided; the ideal table would be one at which everyone else looked either desperate or inebriated. Yet ideals are often unattainable in practice- I settled for a spot at a table with two old white men drinking beers, a sad-looking businessman in a shabby suit, a young woman in a UNLV hoodie and a middle-aged Asian woman with a severe demeanor. I figured that between the two women one of them was probably a shark, but that all-in-all the table looked reasonably soft.

It’s hard to know how long I played; the walls were strategically devoid of clocks and my phone was dead thirty minutes in. But after what felt like a few hours, I was $300 positive. Most of this came from raising against the increasingly morose businessman- he was not good at poker and quite likely had an addiction. Over and over, he called others’ bets with fear in his eyes and a hand like second-best pair. When he inevitably busted, he bought back in with crumpled bills from his pocket- reluctantly, as though he had no choice in the matter. It was sad and strange to watch.

At some point I started asking myself why I was even doing this. Certainly not for the money- my expected value of playing was a good deal lower than my salary on an hourly basis⁴. Nor could it have been for the intellectual thrill of the game- my office has a poker night on Fridays and the competition there is much higher caliber (such that I tend to lose money on average). Was it that I wanted the experience of being a low-rent poker shark a la Rounders on a budget? Or did I just want a socially acceptable excuse to avoid alternate Vegas activities, like drinking excessively with coworkers and/or bleeding money at blackjack? I struggled to remember why I had signed up for this trip at all.

My train of thought was interrupted by getting dealt AJ suited, which was a good enough hand that I had to go back to thinking about poker instead of folding on autopilot. I raised preflop and was re-raised by the girl in the UNLV hoodie. I thought for a bit, called, and was quite happy to see a flop of AJ8. She checked, so I put her on either a high flush draw or a pocket pair that wouldn’t beat an Ace and I bet again. This time she raised. I’ll spare the reader the details of how the rest of this hand played out but it ended with her turning over pocket 8’s and my turning over $250. She had a wolfish grin on her face as she raked the money in.

At this point I decided to stop playing poker and go to sleep. I walked away from the tables having traded several hours of my life and a small portion of my soul for $50. The probable addict was still there when I left.

I spent the next day doing various non-gambling things. There was a company sponsored buffet where the food was quite good- premium mediocre, sure, but uncomplicated in its tastiness. There was also a company pool party that was fun for how mandatory it was, replete with diabetic cocktails and a slideshow extolling the virtues of high-frequency trading⁵. At one point I left the sprawling casino resort with a few people from my training class to go play Topgolf; this turned out to be quite enjoyable and was easily my favorite activity of the trip. After Topgolf, we spent a few hours wandering the massive shopping complex/tourism center that made up the bulk of the resort; having seen a miniature recreation of Venice that included an indoor gondola advertising Gucci shoes, I can honestly say that my life is complete.

Look, I am obviously not the target audience of Las Vegas. In some sense, I am the antithesis of its target audience- I don’t particularly like fun and tend to at least try to do the math when it comes to gambling. I’m also not so desperate to escape my life that I was enthusiastic about buying into the fantasy on offer. But I don’t want to give the reader the impression that I did not enjoy myself- there were plenty of moments where my brain was going whoo-hoo this is great or something to that effect. But I am not sure if there were any moments where I would endorse that feeling.

In other words, something about Vegas made me feel shitty about enjoying Vegas. And to be honest this feeling seems deserved. The whole enterprise of the Strip is rotten on a fundamental level, and the sheer spectacle of it all serves only to distract from that fact. People come to Vegas and uncover “needs” they didn’t know they had- a new handbag, a new car, a new face, a new life- and they pour out their wallets in pursuit of that ideal. And of course they get nothing in return- who would have guessed that a city in the desert would offer naught but a mirage? Most seem to leave the city poorer, with their identities shaken but intact- but a few give up something greater. I don’t know what my unfortunate compatriot at the poker game lost, but he won’t find it at the tables.

The worst part of all this is that none of it needs to exist. So many of the seeming evils of capitalism can be justified with the slogan For the Greater Good. Sweatshops in Bangladesh lift their workers out of abject poverty even as they exploit them. Women in Saudi Arabia can now drive due to cultural memes that were transmitted via the globalized market. As technology progresses and software eats the American soul, indices of international well-being keep going up. So much of the world runs on trade-offs, on give and take- but in Vegas, there is only one side to that equation.

In Meditations on Moloch, Scott Alexander describes having a quasi-religious experience in Vegas. I now get what he meant on a visceral level. I haven’t been religious since age eleven or so, but maybe God had the right idea about Gomorrah.

1. About a month prior to the Vegas trip, I spent three weeks in Amsterdam- again for work, although this time to work- and was struck by the mundanity and efficiency of the place. Far from being a city of wild debauchery, Amsterdam seemed to be mostly about aggressive cyclists, abundant greenery, and the understated sense of Dutch superiority that permeated everything. The red-light district was a footnote and the best “coffee shops” sold coffee.

2. But of course they must get enough foot traffic to justify not being vending machines.

3. Yes okay, it is technically negative-sum because of the rake.

4. This says more about my poker EV than it does about my compensation at work; being up $300 after several hours was also heavily influenced by my running hot. I would guess that my EV at that table was more like 3 or 4 big blinds an hour, which would come out to $15-$20.

5. At some point I will do a long write-up about the ethics of the HFT industry. For now, suffice it to say that for all our vilification in the media, I don’t really think that traders are “bad guys” in the global economy. But we’re not exactly Doctors Without Borders and no one volunteers to “provide liquidity” out of altruism.