"The best way to make money in Vegas," said the dealer, "is to stay home."

We smiled and bet a silver for the dealer. He's a good dealer; he chats with his players, gives them advice from the book, and cracks an occasional joke. Those are the best dealers. Those are the ones we tip graciously and generously and frequently.

Not the cold ones. Not the Dragon Ladies. Dragon Ladies are the stone-faced Asian ladies whose smiles could put ice in a gorilla's ass. They laugh when you lose, grin when they win, and taunt you with their cold eyes.

A good craps roller makes everyone smile though. Everyone. A good roller can last ten, twenty minutes. Even longer. (Both on the table and in bed, they're so fond of saying.) The good ones know how to roll. They place certain numbers up, hold the dice a particular way, and throw them just like that. And the dice actually come up with the numbers they want.

You can always hear cheers and applause from a craps table. Only occasionally on a blackjack table. There's a lot more hand waving on a blackjack table.

The casinos on the Strip are full of these tables. Along with hundreds of tourists. Languages abound. Walk through a casino and you'll hear Japanese, German, French, Hindi, and other flavors of the human tongue.

You won't get that in a local casino though. A friend took us to one. It was twenty minutes outside of the Strip. The minimums were much lower. One dollar craps tables. One dollar blackjack tables. Waitresses who've never heard of Sapphire gin. Old men with oxygen tanks on one side and a cigarette on the other side. And dozens of little old ladies huddled over noisy one-armed bandits.

I took a cab back to the Strip and the driver remarked, "We don't never get no foreigners in this here casino." Locals come here for their daily gambling fix. Tourists rarely do. Apparently I was quite an oddity here. At least they were real friendly and didn't shoot me and bury me in the desert.

One-armed bandits, on the other hand (no pun intended), are not friendly. Not for me, at least. A friend fed one of those bandits five hundred dollar bills. And on his first pull, the bandit spit out fifteen hundred dollars. Fifteen hundred dollars! The Gods of Slot Machines must have been with him that day.

The Gods were not with me though. In my pocket was the cash I intended to spend. "I am only going to play this money," I told myself. "Nothing more." Then my friends repaid me for their hotel rooms in cash. And the cash in my pocket grew. It grew without any warning.

And just as quickly as it grew, it shrunk. It shrunk before I realized what was going on. When I finally caught on, the cash in my pocket was a mere whimper. Which was exactly the sound I made when I realized this. It had been eaten away by the craps tables, the blackjack tables, the slot machines, and just about every other devious enterprise Vegas put in my path.

Damn. I knew I should have taken that dealer's advice.

. . .

What Vegas advice to you have?