The Great Haul of Vegas on Chinese New Year

Deep in the warm crevices of the Strip, a well-dressed, diminutive man fingers his chips contemplatively, regarding the story unfolding on the table and computing just how much it’s going to cost him to stay in this one.

Nothing new here under the sun-like floodlights that bathe this gaming table at 2:30 a.m.: Here are the players, the risks, the half-full cocktails, the furzy, smoky, stale air.

But there’s something else, too. For starters, there are dominoes and dice and chips, a conjuncture of paraphernalia not often seen in the casinos. The game is called pai-gow , and heaven help you if you play without understanding the rules.

Talk Fills the Air

And then there’s the table chatter: Chinese--the Cantonese variety--and it’s everywhere on this cool night last weekend.

Welcome to Chinese New Year--4685, the Year of the Hare--done up Vegas style with high-ticket traditional Chinese banquets, those blaring marquees declaring “ gung hay fat choy “ (Happy New Year, more or less), cordoned-off Chinese “villages” that offer partying moms and dads a place to park the kids; and, of course, all the gambling action a visitor from Hong Kong--or Monterey Park--could ask for.

Any culture, given the opportunity to celebrate the clean slate a new year offers, will hunker down to usher it in, but the Chinese have always done it a little differently, with greater attention to tradition and less to intoxication and frippery.

But as the world becomes a cozier place and cultures butt up against each other like party guests, some cross-fertilization of celebrations was bound to occur--and where else but in Las Vegas, where the world comes to let it all hang out?

“Chinese New Year has become a pretty big deal for the town,” said Don Guglielmino of Caesars Palace, one of the handful of Vegas resorts to seek out the Chinese New Year business. “You wouldn’t believe the kind of action we get at the baccarat tables when these guys from Hong Kong and Taipei (the capital of Taiwan, the Republic of China) come in. Maybe 10 years ago, whatever business we got on Chinese New Year was unplanned, spontaneous. But we go after it now.”

At the pai-gow tables at Caesars--more have been opened for the new year’s first weekend--thousands of freshly exchanged dollars are passing over the felt with jaw-dropping regularity. One man, identifying himself only as “a businessman from Taipei,” drops $5,500 on a single play.

“Is too bad,” he said dryly, reaching into the inside pocket of his elegant pin-stripe suit. “I get it back later, though.”

Others gathered around the table but not playing--either tapped out or just pooped out--become reflective, and even a tad resentful, when asked about the congruity of Vegas and Chinese New Year.

“Celebrating is celebrating,” said Zhenxing Yao of Hong Kong. “Why not come here? Is different thing to do, and we feel welcoming here. If you have money, is a fun thing.”

“We want to have some fun ourselves on New Year’s,” said Kyung Chang, who hails from Los Angeles. “The parading in Chinatown is nothing new. Coming here has become tradition for us. We have been coming for five years now, and it gets better every coming.” The Changs had their three children, two grandparents and an aunt along on this trip, and Grandfather Chang--who, at “about 85,” according to his son, spoke not a word of English--gaped at the outlandish display in the casino, shaking his head every so often.

‘He Likes It’

“He thinks it makes no sense,” the younger Chang said, “but he likes it.”

Larry Vo lives in Los Angeles but serves as docent for the growing annual flood of Chinese and Chinese-Americans who descend upon Vegas for their New Year, guiding them from room to banquet hall to casino.

Guglielmino said more than 600 of Caesars Palace’s 1,700 rooms were taken over last weekend by people with Chinese surnames. Other hotels reported similar numbers.

“It’s a very popular thing to do, to come up here--there’s really nothing strange or different about it anymore,” Vo said, brushing a cigarette ash from his impeccable white dinner jacket. “The hotel organizes a big traditional Chinese dinner for several hundred (the dinner at Caesars served 575), then they open up the tables. We get, as you say, ‘a little wild.’ There are some who will lose a lot of money; some will win. But that is why they come here.”

Vo said the formal dinner Friday was over by 8:30--the traditional hour that the New Year comes--and, after safely ensconcing the children, his group of “about 90” clamored for “party, party, party.”

Vo smiled. “I think they got what they were looking for. I haven’t seen half of my people since 9 p.m.” It was half-past midnight, and the stream of Asian faces through the casino--chatting, smiling, carefree faces--was getting denser by the minute, not only around the pai-gow tables, but also in the blackjack, craps and slot machine areas.

A grinning man who called himself “Hsu from Taiwan” had an impressive array of black $100 and green $25 chips stacked in front of his spot at the blackjack table, and said he’d had a rather good night so far.

“Aces. I keep getting aces,” he admitted, as another hand was dealt to him. He said that he and a couple of friends had flown over Thursday night and intended to stay in Vegas a week. “Takes long time to get feeling better after tonight,” he said, laughing. The last time he had visited, two years ago, Hsu said, he had stayed only for three days and “I couldn’t do my job well for long time.” He said he was already excited about coming in 1988 (or, rather, 4686).

In the Vegas Hilton on Saturday morning, blackjack dealer Charlene Lewis nursed a cup of coffee and told some stories of her shift the previous night.

“The Chinese crowd gets bigger every year, seems like,” Lewis said, lighting a cigarette. “When I first started working in Vegas (1981), Chinese New Year was no big deal; there were a few who’d come up from L.A. and a couple of real high rollers from Hong Kong. But now it’s something else. And generally speaking they’re fun people to have at your table, even if they don’t speak the language. They spend a lot, are here to have a fun time and are real polite.

“I had a young guy from Hong Kong, I think he said, drop about $3,000 at my table in a half an hour last night, and he was smiling like it was his birthday,” Lewis laughed. “I don’t know about you, but if I kept losing like that, I know I wouldn’t be smiling.”

But the hotels themselves are smiling widely at the recent upswing in Chinese New Year business, and Guglielmino and the Hilton’s Bruce Banke agreed that Asian business would become increasingly important to the Vegas resorts.

“The Pacific Rim business is becoming Priority One around here,” Guglielmino said, adding that Caesars World Inc., the hotel’s parent corporation, has recently opened offices in Singapore, Hong Kong and Tokyo to attract fun-seekers to its resorts. “It’s going to get a lot bigger before it evens off.”

Banke seconded that notion. “We just opened an office in Singapore, and we’re just beginning to tap into that market. But we see the potential. Since Atlantic City opened up for business, we’ve had to ease up on Europe and the Middle East, so it’s time to concentrate on the Pacific action. Lucky for us that area is what’s growing the fastest.”

Yet, as Lewis finished her coffee in the Hilton’s casino bar, the Chinese traffic slowed to a trickle. Actually, at 8:30 a.m., all casino traffic is rather slow. Still, one shy woman wandered up to the bar and looked around, seemingly lost.

“Can I help you find some-thing. . .?” Lewis asked.

The woman started, then smiled. “I am looking for blackjack table,” she said. “I think my husband fell in.”