Final Macau Post

Ah, gambling in Macau - so after all our fun with Sic Bo and Roulette, we headed over to our old standby favorite of Blackjack.

As I said yesterday, Blackjack should be easy for us to play even in Macau, the rules are simple and well documented and everyone follows the same guidelines, right?

Biggest difference is the way the dealer operates, it seems standard in that all the player get their first card, dealer gets a face up card, players all get a second card, and then the play begins. That's right, the dealer doesn't take a second card so how people play effects the second card the dealer gets. We still stuck with the mindset of "Presume it'll be 10", but that concept was foreign to the locals here. Dealer showing a 8,9, or even a face card and they stand on a 12. What?
So lets say that the dealer has an 8 showing, I'm at the end of the table and take a hit to my 15. I get a 5 to give me twenty, great right? No, because the Dealer now takes a 10 and has 18 beating most of the table, whereas if I had stood on the 15 the dealer would've busted by going 8, 13, and finishing with 23. So, everyone with 12 and 14 lost because I presumed that the dealer had what the dealer ended up getting. I still win in this example, which is nice.

This method of playing is maddeningly frustrating as people refuse to build good hands that will help them, and us, win. We found our selves more often then we'd like saying "If only she had hit that 14 against the dealers Jack, you wouldn't have busted and I would've taken the Ace the dealer got..."

So, in this way of playing, if the dealer is showing an Ace you get asked if you want insurance, but you don't get to find out if you lose until after everyone has played and used up more cards - usually your best hands of the night.

But, now for the real differences, they have a 'Doubles" bar in front of where you place your bets. You can bet this and if you end up with doubles the casino pays you out at 30:1. That's not a bad bet except that the few times we tried we lost, and then usually received doubles right afterward.

The other twist is what I kind of call proxy betting, where you'll be playing with 10 HKD on the table and someone will lean over you and put some money down behind yours, usually 30-50, but sometimes hundreds of dollars, and they win or lose based solely on how you play. I can tell you that it is a little more stressful to hit the 13 against the dealers 7 when three people before you have 13, 18, and 15, and there's a Asian man standing right behind you with his 50 in your hands... Tina had this happen to her more then I did. But people will come right up to the table, lean over you and bet that you will get doubles, or just bet along with you, so the tables get big crowds around them where everyone is involved.

The final difference that we noticed gambling in Macau is that they don't really drink while gambling. Well, they drink, but they drink milk or tea or some strange pinapple-guava juice mixture, but not the acholic drinks that we are used to people drinking when gambling. I've heard, read actually, that it's because they feel they shouldn't be drinking when gambling because it interferes with their luck or something, maybe their concentration. But most of the games they play are luck games and not skill games, except for the Blackjack, which they've managed to take the skill out of. We managed to get some drinks and at our table, despite our alcoholic intake, we managed just about the same as everyoen else at the table.

More on gambling in Macau

Earlier we mentioned that Macau is marketing itself as the "Las Vegas of Asia", and as you wander out of the old downtown section you quickly move from the feeling of walking in Portugal to walking in Las Vegas. The somewhat recent additions of big name American casinos such as MGM Grand, Wynn, The Venetian, and Sands definitely add to that overall feeling.

But yet something is very different starting, as we mentioned, with the fact that the gambling floors are not the prominent item in the hotel and with the fact that when you find them they are fairly quiet. Having to go through a metal detector and have your bags checked or at least searched was another item that is in marked contrast to how things operate in Las Vegas, or even Atlantic City.

Another difference is the games themselves, the majority of the tables are Baccarat, Roulette, and Sic Bo. Thrown in around the Baccarat tables are some Blackjack, Caribbean Stud, and other card games, but there's not a lot of them. In all the casinos that we went to we only saw one craps table.

The new one, at least to Tina and myself, were the Sic Bo tables. The setup reminded me of the old board game "Trouble" where you'd push down a bubble to flip the game die, this was like that on steroids. Inside a glass dome are three dice, a bottom plate starts flipping the dice and then they cover the dome with a brass cover. The dice settle and everyone bets on the outcome of those three dice on a board similar to the following one.

Seem simple, you just add the totals, bet odd or even, big or small, or pick what any two of the three dice will be. It turned out to be just a simple way for the casino to take my money. I'm sure had I spent more time there we could have won a hand or two, same as you do with roulette, but we didn't bother to chase our money and find out.

As for the Roulette tables, something that I love in Vegas, we headed over to a simple 25 HKD table, handed in 100 HKD and asked for chips. We received 4 back, ah, no we would like them in 5HKD increments please. Similar to playing a $5 table at home where you can place 5 $1 chips on separate numbers. Nope, here you have to play with the minimum for the chip, feel free to spend more at once. We both lost with our 25 dollar chip so we cashed back in and walked away. Granted, even if we had both played 5 numbers we still would have lost, but we would have played again. It's just that even when we know we are going to eventually lose our money, we'd like to do it slowly...

From there to the Blackjack, something we know, where the rules are simple and well documented. Or so we thought...

...more tomorrow.

Just like Vegas?

So, while we were in Macau we did partake in a little of that gambling that they are known to have there. This link on Macau is probably what we should have included when we first posted, but eh, those of you with the initiative would have looked it up anyway.

But, although we spent most of our time in Macau hiking up to lighthouses and convincing Tina to take shortcuts through junkyards (here I would have liked to have spent some time just perusing), we also decided that we should maybe at least wander into one of the casinos. It would be like a trip to Vegas where you walk the strip and take a tour of Hoover dam, but never set foot inside the Tropicana...

The first casino we walked into was an old Macau casino/hotel, and although we knew that it was going to be different then Las Vegas we wern't quite prepared for how different. You walk into an entrance that is like the entrance of a hotel in Des Moines, Iowa. Quiet, clean, maybe a little more elaborate then Iowa but not a casino. There's a little sign pointing to an escalator that simply reads "Casino -->". Two flights up and your at an entrance to a casino, we can see gambling tables inside, but you need to walk through a metal detector first. The guard stops us and asks to see our membership cards - huh? He points to a simple desk and tells us you just need to hand in your passports to become a member. Maybe it's us, but we don't carry our passports around, so we ask if all the casinos are like this - "Yes, every one. You need to be a member for all the casinos on the island."

Wow, that seems crazy, no way we people are going to carry around 5-6, maybe 12, different membership cards. We walked out in disbelief and decided to try the Wynn Casino. An American casino would do things like they do in America, right? Right?

Well, sort of. The casino is still hidden away in the back of the hotel, you need to check your bags in, or at least Tina did, I was OK to bring my camera bag in - so long as the camera stay inside of it, and the water bottle on the outside, no that had to be placed inside the bag. No drinking outside water. After that it's just a casino, except for the silence... anyone that has ever been to Vegas knows the noise associated with the slot machines, which are very few in Macau, are delegated to the back of the casino and without all the bells and whistles.

Then, for more fun, you walk up to a table and plop down a nice thick stack of Macau Patacas (approximately 7.8 MOP to 1 USD) and they tell you "Sorry, we don't accept the local currency. we only play with Hong Kong Dollars." This would be like Las Vegas only accepting Mexican Pesos. But, the change counters will change any currency for you (free of commission) and then you are finally free to be parted from your money in the same manner as you would gambling in the states...