Opinion
Green Felt Journal
The Experience of Fremont
October 4th, 2012
Safety, comfort and a can’t-miss attraction: the Fremont Street Experience “solved” what everyone in Las Vegas thought were the biggest problems facing downtown. But it couldn’t address the bigger problems of broader local and regional competition facing downtown in the 1990s, just like it can’t do much about the deflated gaming economy today. Read more »
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Signs of the (Disappearing) Times
Vegas Vernacular captures the past as we build the future
October 4th, 2012
Las Vegas being Las Vegas, though, a share of self-awareness has always come from outsiders. Las Vegans were proud of the hotels of the Strip in the 1960s, but it took three Philadelphia-based architects—Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour—to produce the seminal book Learning From Las Vegas and make the case that the architecture of the Strip was the antidote to boring, functional modernist style that was then in fashion. Read more »
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What Would Murray Do?
As the campaign settles into a race for the ideological middle, a look at how Las Vegas’ late, great libertarian radical might have addressed the country’s ills
September 20th, 2012
Murray Rothbard loved the intersection where politics and economics collide. The legendary libertarian intellectual, who taught economics at UNLV from 1986 until his death in 1995, was a devoted anarchist. But like many an anarchist, he was fascinated with government, and if he were here today he would be blogging endlessly about the current presidential race and America’s economic funk. Read more »
Green Felt Journal
Poker’s Perilous Perch
September 20th, 2012
Nevada poker is in an odd place. On one hand, poker room revenues have declined by 21 percent since 2007, and several casinos have downsized or closed their poker rooms, including the Tropicana on Sept. 11 . On the other hand, some are counting on online poker to revitalize Nevada’s gaming industry. As summer slides into fall and we get ready for online poker to go live next month, where is poker in the Silver State heading? Read more »
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Tony Hsieh’s Really Big Shoe
Dreams of the legendary 23rd Floor of the Ogden
September 13th, 2012
I would write up my visit to the 23rd Floor, but I would leave out every detail that might make you want to go up there and take away my Fernet-powered boat and smoking-hot actress wife and simply tell you that Tony Hsieh has a great vision and we must support it at all costs. Read more »
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Name Games
Why stop with McCarran? Let’s rebrand everything!
September 6th, 2012
There’s been plenty of talk this summer of renaming McCarran International Airport. At first, it seemed like a lot of talk from people who hadn’t thought much before talking: A name change would be neither cheap nor easy, and this isn’t exactly a time when the public coffers are overflowing. But with Sen. Harry Reid recently declaring that he thinks a name change is in order, this is clearly a subject that needs further discussion. Read more »
Green Felt Journal
South Point Puts It On (the) Line
September 6th, 2012
On Aug. 23, the Nevada Gaming Commission approved the South Point’s application to run a legal online poker room—the first Nevada casino to be granted such a license. We are on the cusp of writing history. So what’s really going on with the operation, which will probably start accepting real money bets on poker before Halloween? Read more »
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Dream On …
He was so close to the payday of a lifetime ... and then he fumbled
August 30th, 2012
I went to bed on Dec. 3 with $10,500 in my pocket … and it was literally the saddest fucking moment of my life. Because only a small fraction of the cash was really mine. It’s not that I robbed anyone. Instead, I felt like I’d been robbed. By the gambling gods. Again. Before I get into the specifics of how $43,800 slipped through my fingers, here’s a little backstory: I’m a square, a betting sucker, a casino’s best friend … or as I like to think of myself, a dreamer. Read more »
Green Felt Journal
The End of Empire-Building?
August 23rd, 2012
The American gaming scene is changing. Call it maturation, or an adaptation to the post-recession, long-recovery economy, but the industry is shifting. For the past generation, expansion has been the rule, not the exception. That’s not the case anymore, and Las Vegas will have to adjust to a new paradigm. Read more »
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The Summer Our House Went Lousy
Warning: The following may cause itching
August 23rd, 2012
It was almost spring break, and our family had been infested since Christmas, when my third-grader—the youngest of our three children—brought it home from a sleepover. Unfortunately, it took us two weeks to discover she had pediculosis (lice), by which time it was already a thriving case—a couple of dozen nits, visible to the naked eye. We set straight to work to keep the little buggers from spreading. “I’ll get the heads,” I told my husband, “you get the beds.” Read more »
