No Dice

I spent part of last week where the Old Frontier meets the New Frontier, i.e, Indian Reservation territory in Southern California, where a barren landscape has begun to sprout giant beanstalks called "casinos." A complicated drive involving routes 101, 60, 71, 91, 15 and 76 eventually landed me at the Pala Hotel south of Temecula in the grand metropolis of Pala. This was my second sojourn to this incipient casino row, as I search for a local gambling alternative that requires neither airport security lines nor a twelve-hour auto round trip.

For the record, I liked the Pala casino a lot, though my sentiments may be influenced by the fact that the cards were generous there and I won some money. The resort itself was congenial and well-appointed; the room was spacious and had an excellent bathroom. The service people were all extremely courteous and the food was surprisingly good. The casino itself was laid out sensibly and the noise level was minimal compared to raucous casino neighbors, Pechanga and Harrah's Rincon. And, it had craps.

The classical game of craps in my favorite gambling game. There is nothing like the thrill of a good craps run, when the chips in your tray seem to be procreating, but until recently this excitement was denied visitors to California casinos. Some arcane state statute regarding local gambling has proscribed the determination of gaming results by dice. I don't know whether this was a sop to Nevada gaming interests or the peculiarly arbitrary thought of someone who once lost badly at the craps table. Whatever, this limitation undermined the appeal of local casinos for me. But now the Indians (I guess we can use that term again) have found a way to circumvent the law and open up those green felt rectangles with all the funny numbers, and even include the use of dice. It's not quite the same game, but close enough.

Pala's solution was to use a deck of 36 cards, each with an individual dice roll, for determining the rolls. The dealer pulls out two cards from a shuffled deck, places one on a blue square and another on a red square. The player then throws two dice, one blue and one red, and the higher number determines which card is selected as the rolled number. (There is never a tie, because one of the dice has only 2s and 3s on it, and the other has only 4s and 1s.) All the betting odds are the same as the classic model--the only real difference is that the moment of revelation is when the card is turned over, as opposed to when the dice land. It sorta worked, though I missed the pure excitement of anticipation watching the parabolic flight of the cubes. On the other hand, there is no concern about someone's hand getting in the way of a dice roll and causing a seven-out.

Pala's was only one approach to the dice circumvention. Harrah's Rincon also used card reveals, but in a more attractive form. The dealer randomly laid out twelve playing cards, six in a blue row and six in a red row. The card values for each row were Ace (1) through six. The player then rolled regular dice, and the numbers thrown are applied to the layout of the cards, with two corresponding cards revealed (so that a red 3 and blue 4 meant the third card in the red row and the fourth in the blue row determined the outcome). Somehow I found this more aesthetically pleasing. I did not check Pechanga but I believe there they don't even bother with dice. That makes sense and speeds the game along, which is good for the House, but I'm glad I didn't participate; throwing the dice needs to be part of the ritual.

I've read that Indian casinos, scattered as they are all over the country, are now amassing profits greater than those in Vegas. Though this is a rather warped way to compensate for our near genocide of Native Americans (there, I said it!), it appears to be working, as the ingenuity of the tribes is making the gaming experience, at least, as attractive as Vegas, Reno, Laughlin and Atlantic City. It would be nice to see this flow of income transform the area as well, as happened in Vegas and Laughlin but not in the still derelict Atlantic City. Twenty years down the road let's hope the road has turned into an avenue. Meanwhile the remoteness of the Indian casinos will limit me to just occasional visits--but I won't feel cheated when I go.