Sam's Town (owned by Boyd Gaming, half-owners of the AC Borgata)
Stayed 12/19 Fri and 12/20 Sat, standard rooms, comped
Monopoly color group rating: LIGHT BLUE (but honest)
Our play: moderate
The original plan for our 5-casino visit was to use the weekend to break up
the gaming -- either go to Laughlin, or shopping, as the case might be. So
booking Sam's Town was a fallback that we didn't really expect to use. In
fact, we had concurrently booked a comp offer at "Excalibur", part of the "One
Club" casino chain (like Luxor) -- but then decided we should get far off the
Strip.
Besides, we'd visited ST a few years ago and wanted to see how our memories
stood up. Turns out we've grown up... but maybe Sam's hasn't evolved (like
us).
Rooms at ST are of the Motel Six variety. Remember that first glass shower
door you installed in your first house -- the $39 do-it-yourselfer special at
the home improvement store? Well... they've got one here. And, yes -- they
used an extra 4 tubes of clear caulk -- just like you did!
Two years ago, you could get standard basic-cable channels in the rooms.
Except CNN -- there was a lot of fuzziness or interference on the all-news
channel. Funny how they could let that same problem fester for two whole
years, and not a single casino employee in all that time bothered to fix it.
(Yeah -- funny. NOT!)
What does a married couple do in Vegas on a Friday night? How about...
laundry?! Right south of the casino proper is the Sam's Town RV park, and
although you need to be a visitor at ST to know the secret laundromat door
entry code "1-2-3", they probably haven't changed it in 15 years. Thanks to
this public email, the whole world knows this SECRET ENTRY CODE now. Think
they'll change it? (Meet you there in August 2004, and we'll try the lock
together. 
After getting clean underwear, it's time for a night out, of course. Well...
they were letting way too many people into Ra at Luxor, big-ass people I
wouldn't want to meet on the streets, even, let alone at a place with a cover
charge. I mean it's the slow time of the year -- but even then you have to
keep some standards, right? So we didn't do "Ra", just pissed some money away
outside it, and wandered the One Club properties a little, then headed to..
Fremont Street -- just a ceremonial drop-in. Turned my $20 into $80 in a
video slot and left. Then to...
The Strat (we were really picking at random), looked around the floor for
anything to play, and didn't find it, so then we drove...
EAST on Sahara, and found a big empty shopping plaza which had a barbed wire
fence around a big closed nightclub-type property on the southern side. All
the plaza had was a wig shop, a Hispanic sector, a Korean restaurant sector, a
northern sector with a sign saying "FANTASY CLUB" which looked
semi-interesting (until we saw a drag queen hobbling up on high heels with a
cheap bouffant wig from the shop at the other end of the plaza.) The plaza
looked like it could be fun, if not dangerous, to explore after dark. But it
also would require a considerable investment of time, and we didn't want to
leave our bankroll in the car nor carry it into one of those places. (We
returned later that weekend to eat Korean barbecue, and it was delicious. No
word yet on the Fantasy Bar.
Finally back to ST ... play as expected. No tie-ins to Borgata. Very
different marketing, really -- ST is trying for the Walmart crowd, while the
Borg is trying to do a Bloomingdale's. Food comps and cashback were VERY slow
in coming.
Turns out that the only time anyone goes to Sam's Town anymore is when they
offer 6X comps. 6X is what they need to offer a fair return to customers...
but then, they also need to have a couple upscale restaurants on the property
or nearby. We didn't see anything. They didn't try to make any offers to
out-of-towners, like us.
Sam's Town is unique among properties we visited because they have a bowling
alley -- we don't bowl -- and a movie theatre. Well... sorry guys, but I
brought 40 movies with me on my Toshiba laptop. The movies I brought were ALL
fresher than what the casino was showing; the only one I didn't have was the
final installment of LOTR (which I'm downloading as I write this).
So we put in our time there at ST, and left Sunday morning. The curious thing
we saw, as we were packing to leave, was on the local TV news reports of the
drunk-driving accidents the night before.
Our second afternoon in the city, Tuesday, we'd driven up to Fiesta Rancho
(where Bob Dancer had his final-of-ten classes on VP) because we wanted to see
what made this casino "good". Aside from his picture on a bank of machines,
the answer was: nothing. Too much cigarette smoke to stay at the casino until
the Dancer evening class, so we left. (But at least we knew where the casino
was.)
So -- fast forward -- we're getting ready to check out, Sunday morning at ST,
and the TV has this local story on drunks smashing up their cars, and right at
the same time the night before when we were turning from Sahara onto Boulder
Highway to go home to ST, there was an accident in front of the Fiesta Rancho.
The good ol' boy in the pickup had driven right through another car on the
highway -- never even braking -- then I guess he went airborne and flipped,
wiping out 6 or 7 cars parked in the lot at Fiesta Rancho. (If my memory's
right, those cars are parked more than a hundred feet from the Rancho
highway.)
Yeow. Hate it when that happens. (Yet another reason for me never to drink.)
And the reason for us not to ever go back to Sam's Town is the same reason a
guy wakes up one morning, looks at his life partner of 30+ years, and walks
out the door, never to return. We changed.