The Passing of a Crappy Casino

Bill Barnwell:

I went to O'Shea's on Monday to see if it lived down to my memories, and it was every bit as crummy as I remembered. The beer pong games were still going: For $23.50, you got cups, Ping-Pong balls, and two pitchers of beer. The lines of teams waiting to play that I remembered from five years ago were replaced, though, by empty tables short one group of mid-forties men who were calling it Beirut. (That's the Great American Argument.) The LCD boards at the roulette tables that trick passersby into thinking that their number is due had been turned off, even at the two active tables taking bets. One had a girl screaming "SEVEN!" at the board in the hopes that her number would come up, horrifying the superstitious bettors at the craps table 10 feet away. The casino was already using the $1 chips from its sister casino, the Flamingo, in lieu of its own currency. The poker "room" did have a one-table tournament going, but the satellite tables sitting at the front of the casino remained mostly empty. I sat there once in a chair that was literally outside of the casino, with its hind legs sitting on the Las Vegas Strip; anybody with even the slightest bit of gall could have grabbed my chips and run into the crowd without any fear of repercussions, but that was just the sort of place O'Shea's was. When I read a month before my move in August that a man was killed in a fistfight at a Strip casino, my initial reaction was "O'Shea's." I wasn't wrong.

I've never been to Vegas (I haven't been west of I-35 since I was four years old), but if I went out, O'Shea's sounds like my kind of place.  Barnwell's post was somewhat entertaining, but I loved the comments.  Cheap and crappy equals a place I want to go.