I’m just back from my annual five-day trip to Las Vegas, where I spent aggregates of about three hours pontificating at Mark Skousen’s FreedomFest and about 60 hours playing poker. I love those five days—they’re always therapeutic—and hardly any of my friends understand why.
Part of it is that I love to watch the sheer professionalism, in the best sense, of the top Vegas hotels. It’s not just that they are immaculately maintained and operated, but that they hire a lot of really nice people. Las Vegas is supposed to be hard-eyed and cold, but the places where I eat dinner or sit at the bar (my favorite is the Country Club at the Wynn) usually have wait staff who are as friendly and engaging as anyone at a diner in small-town America. At the best poker rooms (my favorite is the Bellagio), the dealers are variously funny, acerbic, and wise about their world, besides being dazzlingly good at their job.
But the therapeutic part comes from the time with the other players. Las Vegas poker rooms, unlike think tanks and universities and Washington, are the real world. Occasionally you end up at a table with drunks and people who are nastily competitive, but more often it’s an assortment of interesting people who would never be together anywhere else—programming nerds, the founder of a major website (at one of this year’s tables), small business owners, blue-collar guys, retirees, tattooed guys who look like they might ride with Hell’s Angels, women of a certain age dripping with jewelry, women of a younger age with distracting cleavage, tourists from Ireland and Nigeria and China and Russia and wherever, and the occasional aging social scientist. You want to see an America that looks like the multi-ethnic society with everybody getting along that we see in commercials but hardly anywhere else? Go play poker in Las Vegas.
At a good table, there’s a fair amount of talk and camaraderie. We don’t learn deep secrets about each other, but we chitchat, and it’s fun. And one other thing: When the conversation reveals that I work in the policy world of Washington, the standard reaction is polite curiosity (“What do you do at a think tank, anyway?”) and no particular interest in following up. They’re not hostile about Washington; it just exists at the periphery of their lives. That’s as it should be, and being reminded of that once a year is therapeutic.