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stumbled over the game in the casino of the Venetian, one of the big new hotels, and I knew that this was a card game I could play. The rules were a little different, though. The players didn’t get their own decks; instead, the dealer gave you one card, then dealt himself one card. If your card was higher, you won. It was so simple that I figured I couldn’t mess it up.
    So I pulled up a chair. Pretty soon I had a complimentary cocktail in my hand, and I was chatting away with the other warriors at the table. While we played, the dealer treated us to a long, humorous monologue designed to discourage us from ever playing Casino War again. He pointed out again and again that the best we could hope to do was leave his table with the money we sat down with. The fifty-fifty odds meant we were likely to break even, but unlikely to win.
    While the dealer tried to talk us out of playing War, some frat boys gathered to watch as we played. Soon they were making fun of us.
    â€œOh, they’re playing War,” one said. “Watch out! High rollers! Give these whales some breathing room!”
    â€œWhat a pussy game,” said another.
    â€œBock, bock, bock,” said a third, flapping his arms like a chicken.
    No security guard came to shoo away the frat boys who were calling us names, and the dealer didn’t seem to mind them. Why should he? He was trying to talk us out of playing this game himself.
    When I got up from the table two hours later, I wasn’t even, as the dealer predicted. I was ahead. I sat down with $100 in five-dollar chips, and got up with $150 in chips. But some of my fellow warriors weren’t so lucky. A smiling Asian man made dozens of hundred-dollar bets and lost almost every time. A slightly tipsy, very chatty woman who was sitting next to me burst into tears when she lost her last chip. And a man who claimed to have won three thousand dollars the night before at the Bellagio left the Venetian after two hours with the same money he sat down with.
    Sitting at the table with strangers, playing a pussy game, I felt as if I were watching the American tragedy restaged as farce. Losers come to Las Vegas in hopes of feeling like winners, if only for an evening, and winners come to Las Vegas because they can afford to lose once in a while. Out there in real-life America, the winners and losers live in separate worlds: winners in gated communities, losers in ever-harder-to-find “affordable housing.” Only in hyperunreal Las Vegas do the winners and losers rub shoulders—some sitting right next to each other at the card tables—and enact a highly ritualized, booze-soaked version of the striving, winning, and losing at the heart of American life.
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    H istorically, Christian moralists in America have opposed gambling. Dice, cards, slots—the sin of gambling was right up there with adultery. By placing their faith in chance, gamblers were refusing to submit themselves to the will of God, making a false idol of money, worshiping luck and not Christ. Gambling was long seen as a form of stealing, because for someone to win at a game of chance, someone else has to lose. Duh. The winner profits at the expense of the loser and gives nothing in return, which was seen as violating Christ’s instruction to love thy neighbor. Christian moralists believed that gambling encouraged the sin of envy, and while gambling is not forbidden anywhere in the Bible, there are many passages that discourage the love of money or wealth:
    â€œThe lover of money will not be satisfied with money; nor the lover of wealth with gain” (Ecclesiastes 5.10). “No one can serve two masters . . . you cannot serve God and Mammon” (Matthew 6.24). “Be sure of this, that no fornicator or impure person, or one who is greedy, has any inheritance in the Kingdom of Christ and of God” (Ephesians 5.5).
    And let’s not forget those Roman soldiers who threw dice for Christ’s