(4) - By Andres Martinez - Slate Magazine

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To: Posted Tuesday, Oct. 20, 1998, at 3:30 AM ET

Try losing seven coin tosses in a row, with 15 grand riding on each, and you'll know what Mr. E. to my right is going through. His eyes betray the stark bewilderment of a dog grown tired from chasing his tail. And yet he asks one of the many solicitous supervisors hovering behind the table for more credit. He wants to feel like Zeus again, as he did a mere 20 minutes ago. The rest of us avoid eye contact with him, lest we identify with what might become of us in a moment of weakness.
My average bet this evening, I realize with terror, is roughly what my weekly salary had been as an editorial writer. Back then I used to grapple with such lofty issues as Supreme Court jurisprudence, NATO expansion, and local politics. Now I wonder whether the banker's natural nine on the last hand means a momentum shift is upon us and whether Mr. T., sitting next to Kat, will be shot.
Kat is convinced the Mediterranean-looking guy will get shot, if not tonight, perhaps tomorrow. "He has to be in some mafia," she mutters under her breath, staring at his imposing tower of C-notes. I tell her to be more tolerant.
It must be hard being a thrifty Russian, Mexican, or Indonesian, eager to splurge a bit at the baccarat tables, and have people assume the cash in your suitcases is tainted rogue money. Maybe Mr. T., who accentuates the gleam of his chunky gold jewelry with an all-black outfit, and whose inability to sit still is bad baccarat form, just has the same aversion to complicated financial instruments my grandmother had. She put her credit card my parents pestered her to get in a safe deposit box, along with her jewels.
If it weren't for the new-hotel smell, you'd think we'd been sitting at this table since the beginning of time, transfixed by the question of whether "the player" or "the banker" will come closest to nine on the next hand. For all its hype--the intimidating barriers between mere tourists in a casino and the baccarat tables, the James Bond associations, the phenomenal sums of money involved--baccarat is that simple. The first time I played it I felt cheated. Could this be it? Had Bond really donned all those dapper dinner jackets to bet on what's essentially a coin toss? Banker or player?
The Bellagio's sumptuous high-roller rooms are crowded. We make for an interesting mix of hard-core gamblers, celebrities, and eye candy. At most casinos in town that cater to high rollers you rarely see more than one busy baccarat table, which seats 12, but here there are four packed ones going. You can be sure more money is being wagered at these four tables than in the rest of the casino put together. The buzz is that someone has already lost $6 million, in the back room where the minimums are steepest and the carpet is thickest ($250 a square yard). Mr. Wynn was kind enough to leave the minimum bet at $100 at our table, though I am the only one who ever comes close to betting it. More bets hover near the table maximum of $15,000 a hand. At the table next to ours, the minimum bet is $3,000.
Kevin Costner is playing blackjack, and Michael Jordan saunters by our table, maneuvering the crowded room with a felinelike grace. But we're an unfazed lot; hardly anyone looks up from the table. Only Juan from Paraguay, one of four impeccably mannered dealers working the game, makes a comment about the world's greatest athlete. "There goes the Jose Luis Chilavert of North America," he told me in Spanish, referring to his nation's heroic World Cup goalkeeper. I find the statement suitably surreal.
I now know better, of course, about baccarat. If its mechanics are deceivingly simple, then so are life's. And as with life, a Chinese gentleman once explained to me after we'd been going at it for 14 hours straight, the key to baccarat lies in discerning patterns. The house, which every so often does get badly burned, scoffs at this notion that history matters here, which is why it obligingly passes out scorecards. Try keeping score at blackjack, where the past is known by all to matter, and you'll most likely be asked to leave.
Tourists who drop a few dollars in a slot machine are entertained by the randomness of fate. But most who linger beyond the first entertaining skirmishes, and certainly those of us entrenched beneath the chandeliers of the baccarat pit, have a desperate need--or a grander ambition, if you will--to impose a sense of order over chaos. So we keep score, and decipher the future from the checkered past. B-B-P-B-B-B-P-P-B ... What's your next bet going to be?

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From:
To: Posted Tuesday, Oct. 20, 1998, at 3:30 AM ET