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News-Sentinel.com Your Town. Your Voice.
Opening Arguments

Vice check

Screwed again in the Heartland:

The quintessential Las Vegas or Atlantic City casino experience comes with card dealers in ties, feather-festooned showgirls and the most coveted amenity: the free drink.

Yet as casino gambling has migrated from America's storied gambling towns to middle America, the complimentary cocktail hasn't always survived the trip.

[. . .]

A new Ohio law puts the state's up-and-coming casinos — just approved by voters in the fall — among those that don't allow complimentary cocktails. Other Midwestern states — Missouri, Illinois, Indiana and Kansas — don't allow their casinos to offer free alcohol, says the American Gaming Association.

The story quotes an Indiana gambler -- Lynette Gross -- who misses the free drinks here she's gotten used to in Las Vegas. "It just makes it more fun," she says. "It's one less thing you have to pay for," adding that she doesn't think "it makes you drink more. It's just a nice perk."

Not having to pay for drinks doesn't make you drink more? Well, let that one pass. But, as everybody knows, drinking greatly improves our judgment and reasoning ability. How are we supposed to beat the odds at the casinos if they don't let us get rip-roaring drunk first? And how are we supposed to make it on the long, lonely drive home stone-cold sober?

Comments

Doug
Fri, 06/18/2010 - 8:12am

Is that a misspelling in the quoted article? Wouldn't that be "complementary" instead of "complimentary?" I'm not 100% on those words, so I'm really asking.

Leo Morris
Fri, 06/18/2010 - 8:27am

No -- "complimentary" is the form generally used to mean getting something for free. If the drinks were "complementary," it would mean the drinks and the gambling enhanced or completed each other, which I suppose is true from the casino's perspective.

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