Official World Poker Tour Magazine

Someone much smarter than me (and whose name escapes me) said of Vegas: “It’s what the Nazis would be doing on a Friday night if they’d won the war.” I may have massively mis-quoted there, so if you’re reading this and know the real quote, do write in.

Anyway, if that’s the case, then Big-Top-themed hotel Circus Circus (so bad, they named it twice), where I’m currently in residence, is what Billy Smart, Paul Daniels and the Mayor of Blackpool would be doing if they’d somehow amassed an army and defeated the world’s powers.

Four days in Vegas and it’s only just dawned on me: my hotel room is almost directly above a rollercoaster, fun fair, amusement arcade and daily show. What’s more, I’m not in the least bit surprised (although I’ve developed sudden cravings for candy floss).

“If you gave a 10 year old boy a whole box of Lego, Meccano and Duplo bricks” says Gerard Harris, “but only on the condition that he used every single piece all at the same time, he’d probably come up with something like Las Vegas.”

There are many examples of this brilliant observation but Circus Circus was certainly made from the Lego Funfair bits from the box. Eerily plastic promenades of family restaurants, magic sideshows, tacky toy stalls and, er, masseurs, line the route to the ‘PleasureZone’, a glass dome full of vomit-inducing rides, retro arcade machines (Galaxians, anyone?) and Zoltar machines straight out of Tom Hanks 80s crowd-pleaser, ‘Big.’

It’s wholly appropriate that you get these ‘Big’ machines in Circus Circus, and indeed dotted up and down the Strip. The city as a whole was built on adults making that wish that they’ll be children again – and on the whole, that wish is granted in full. And where better for parents to bring their kids to show them just how degenerate gambling can be, how tacky the American Dream can really get and how greedy the human race is. Still, the rides are good, aren’t they?

One hilarious thing about Vegas is that the decor is so spectacularly non-anything. You could call it ‘kitsch’, retro, 70s, hotch-potch, whatever. I prefer to see it in the same terms as Gerard’s 10 year old. If the hotels and casinos themselves are like a young boy’s Lego-brick hatchet job, then the interiors are like giving a designer every pen, pencil and graphics package on the market, but only on the condition that they first drop acid, tear up their art degrees and get cracking.

To illustrate: as I returned back to my hotel one late night after play had finished at the WPT, I noticed the carpet on the way to the lifts. I just had to take a photo – a bizarre mix of ‘Day of the Triffids’ and ‘The Joy of Sex’. Or maybe I’ve had one late night too many and I’ve started to hallucinate. Someone get me out of here.