The Vegas Fan's Guide to Atlantic City

Update as of 2016!

AC has fallen on some hard times. Casinos in Philly & New York have chewed into their gambling pool. Its still a blast and the beaches are clean and free. Plenty of things to still see and do. BUT since I wrote this trip report the Atlantic Club is closed (looks like for good) The Trump Plaza has closed (looks like for good) The Showboat, which I loved, has closed and sold to a school (Might not ever reopen as a casino and is facing lawsuits from its neighbor Taj Mahal) and Revel, the nicest joint on the boardwalk, went bankrupt, again, and closed. Out of these 4 the Revel might actually open up again soon.

Update as of 2018!

Revel will reopen and Ocean Resort, Trump Taj Mahal will reopen as Hard Rock and the new owner of the Showboat is actually trying to open a casino there once more!

I know a lot of people ask about Atlantic City, so I figured I'd write this Guide/Trip Report. It might sway some people. I have always toyed with the idea of making a run to Atlantic City. I have heard mixed reviews from everyone I know that has gone. Most of what I read online said I wouldn't like it. Everything from, its dangerous, there are a ton of homeless people, locals selling drugs in the open, there is not much to do there besides gamble etc.

But what most people agreed with was the notion of "Don't go to AC expecting Vegas, you'll just be disappointed" But I wanted to see it.

And I loved it! If you go to Las Vegas to just sit by the pool, go to clubs and watch Cirque shows You Will Not Like AC. But if you go to Vegas to gamble, eat, casino hop, shop and relax you will love AC.

Here are the basics: Getting around is simple. Don't worry about getting tunneled in AC, cab fare from the airport to any casino is a flat $27. Getting back is a flat $35. Taking a cab to any casino is capped at $13.00. But CET runs a free shuttle (if you are staying with them or a Platinum or above player) that will run from 1 side of the boardwalk to the other or get you from any of their properties to the Marina District. So no need to rent a car.

Just like Vegas I'll chop the boardwalk into 3 sections. It’s all connected, and walkable, from end to end in about an hour. Obviously you will be stopping at casinos or stores along the way, so it isn’t bad at all.

Section 1 will take you from the Atlantic Club (formally AC Hilton) to the Tropicana to the Trump Plaza to Caesars to Ballys. You can also get to The Pier, kinda like the Forum Shops over water. Behind section one is an expressway and a big, very nice outdoor outlet mall called Tanger. Tommy Hilfiger, Nike, Disney Store, Coach, Guess etc. Its all here. And very safe and well kept. Lots of savings on higher end brands, and its just a block from the casino. You could spend hours here if you are a shopper.

All of section 1 is a safe zone. Everyone has security out there, plenty of cameras, and it looks like any trouble makers seem to avoid it.

Section 2 is no mans land. Plenty of little shops, all independent. They pretty much go like this: Massage Parlor, Cheap T-Shirt Shop, Psychic Readings, $1.00 Hot Dogs repeat. Over and over again. Just those 4 types of stores with a dollar store thrown in for good measure, every few feet. A couple of games of chance on the boardwalk, like basketball or darts to win carnival prizes, an arcade here or there, but for the most part nothing to see or do since there are no casinos in no man’s land.

And without those casinos it can get kinda shady. You do not want to explore AC, off the Boardwalk, in this small stretch. No fancy outlet mall behind here, just the inner city. Pawn Shops, hair braiding places, nail salons etc. Kinda rough. I took one for the team and explored, found a good Philly Cheese Steak place.

But I'm one ballsy bastard and I do not recommend exploring it on your own. Really nothing to see anyway.

Section 3 starts at Resorts to Taj Mahal to Showboat to Revel with a great old timey amusement park on a Pier called Steel Pier. This stretch is very safe as well, and a ton of fun. The Boardwalk is the strip and the Marina District is Fremont St. Just in distance. Since the big 3 properties in the Marina are Very Nice!

So with that said I'll start the trip report. The Players: Grid and Kid Brother.

Round Trip from Chicago right into AC Int was $75.00 No, that is not a typo. 75 bucks will get you there and back. Just 90 minutes to get there.

Easy Flight. Paid the cabby his $27 + $5.00 tip and he acted like he won the lottery. Unlike Vegas, AC is not a tipping town from what I saw. Way more locals than tourists. I didn't have my normal Vegas Bankroll, since I plan on hitting LV in a month or so, but turns out I didn't need it. 2 out of the 4 days we both made some money and the other 2 we lost our daily gambling budget. But overall with 4 days of 12+ hour sessions we both came home with 1/2 our Bankrolls!

No huge hits, but plenty of small ones to keep us going. AC is not as tight as they say, at least for us, your millage may vary. Checked into Bally's, which actually cannibalized both casinos to its Left & Right. The Clairidge & Wild Wild West.

We got in early and took the 1st available room. It was clean and modern. A bit small, but so what, it was free.

The room was a room. It had walls and kept us safe. Nothing great but not the biggest shithole I have stayed in. No view, and it was on the ground-floor. When i say no view, I mean no view. Those curtains are just for sure. You open them up and the windows are just painted so you cant see out.

Not even sure if they were windows to be honest. Maybe just pieces of plexi on a concrete wall. Does it matter? Lets stay on topic here!

They shut down the casino at Clairidge, but still run the giant one in WWW.

WWW casino is awesome. I'm a fan of Super Themeing and this is probably my favorite casino anywhere! They are adding shops and moving things around so sadly parts of it were shut down and they built a wall around it. But the parts that were still up and running were a blast!

You actually gamble in the Wild West, from a mining town, complete with rail cars above your head, to Main Street USA. Its like gambling in Frontier Land at Disney World! Very Cool.

I took this off the WWW casino

Bally's itself is OK, big, clean with lots of older games I play. Just nothing special.

Here is a shot of Bally's slot floor.

Bally's is connected to WWW which in turn is connected to Caesars, and its Huge as well! 2 casinos on 2 levels.

Very cool in here. This is just the lobby!

For my gaming here, I hit these...

Caesars connects right into the Pier. A pretty cool mall. Nice mix of lower end stuff like Hello Kitty to higher end like Luis Vuitton. They had a water show in there, kinda like Bellagio just not nearly as big or awesome. But still, its free.

You could spend some time in here if you like to shop. We do not... so we headed next door to Trump Plaza. Probably the smallest casino in AC. Nice, clean, kinda looked like the Golden Nugget on Fremont, but the lobby looked like an office building out of the 70's. Floor to ceiling gray marble.

They had a great promo going on for new card members. $100 on them. Day 1 $25 in food & $25 in Free Slot play once you earn 20 points. 3 days later you can do it again. If you plan it right, you can sign up at 11:59PM on Friday and by 12:01AM Sunday you can get your other 1/2. Took me a $20 bill to do so, so it seems pretty easy.

And I was able to roll both my Free Plays into real money. This ended up being almost a hundo.

Trump plaza is small, and pretty dated. But very well kept. They have a giant Rain Forest Cafe there, but I never saw anyone in it.

A little bit of a walk down the Boards will get you to the Tropicana. The Trop is very nice. Some parts of it look old and dated, others were insanely nice. Great little mall here as well!

They did not have any new card sign up promos going on, so I didn't gamble much. Lost a $20.00 playing $5.00 WOF. I wish I had a better shot of the casino, but this blurry one will give you an idea. This place, like most in AC, is huge!

And their mall... Kinda looked like Pirates of the Caribbean.

Last casino on this tour for the day was Atlantic Club, used to be a Hilton and they pulled the name from this shithole. I can see why. The casino was fine, outdated and a little worn. But she is wayyyyyyy down at the far end of the board walk, and really removed from all the action.

They had a play 30 minutes get from $10.00 - $5,000 in Free Play. But no one working there had any idea how it worked. I asked if it was 30 minutes or the 30 minute equivalent of play IE 10 points or whatever. They said "30 minutes". I said 30 minutes of play on a $25.00X2 Wheel of Fortune machine? Or 30 minutes playing 1 penny a pull on a lower denom machine. They said "30 minutes".

Turns out, I got the free play in under 30 and turned my 30.00 loss into a $3.00 loss on the Free Play. I wouldn't go back there. Too far away, and many other nicer properties to waste my time at.

For 2 guys, we had fun on the beach. Collected some shells, drank a shake and its all very clean, and the water smelled fine! Here is the Beach Bar across from Trump Plaza.

Back to Bally's for the night. Pretty much a full day in. Gambled from noon to 11:00PM pretty much non stop. And it didn't cost me a dime. I actually made back the money I paid the cabby on the way in. KB was not so lucky.

At the Wild Wild West, the buffet was $16.99 BUT they give you a $10.00 Free Play voucher. So its really just $6.99. BUT if you just earn 10 points on your Total Rewards card, its free once a day! So needless to say, we ate it every day.

Its not going to win any awards, but it was OK. Service was slow, but even the buffet was themed! You can eat on the porch of a general store, in the dining hall of a hotel or out on the streets. Pretty fun and a great dessert bar.

So day 1 ends with 1/3 the Boardwalk covered front to back. Great fun, and lots of play on our money. Didn't have time to explore the outlet mall though.

Day 2

Keeping our theme of chopping up the boardwalk, we took the free shuttle from Bally's to the far end of the Boardwalk, which is Showboat. Revel, the brand new casino, is just past Showboat. But the free shuttle only goes to CET properties.

A word on the shuttle... you have to be Platinum or above to get on. You can ride if you have your check in receipt proving you are staying at one of their hotels. But outside of that they will bounce you. These things are very volatile. Some times they come in clumps, other times they are 30 minutes apart. Some times they show up but are full and you cant ride. So it is not unheard of waiting 45 minutes to ride one. If you get stuck, just walk to the main street behind the casinos and hop on a Jitney.

They are shuttle buses that are constantly rolling and only cost $2.25. They will take you anywhere you want to be in town. We get off at Showboat and I was shocked at how nice it was. Again, huge casino floor and everything in here was top notch. I don't think this would be out of place in Las Vegas. Kinda like Harrahs in LV but bigger and much more modern.

They have a big House of Blues in here, and even THAT has its own Casino!

From there, we head over to the all new $2.5 Billion Revel Resort. Its nice, very nice. Unlike any casino I have ever been in. From the looks of the slot floor it reminded me of Cosmo if it had a baby with the Palms.

They have the casino on an upper floor, that way you can gamble and look out over the ocean. Very cool.

Since this place was brand new, they only have newer games in here. None of the 5 line older mechanical reels I like to play. But they do have my instant spins.

Its just a soft opening now. They had lots of staff on hand to shoo away all the non guests so a bunch of areas were off limits to us. They did have a taco truck in the casino with a make shift backyard eating area. It seemed popular.

It looks like they are sprucing up their beach, I bet it will be just as nice as the rest of the place. Sadly, even on the weekends, it was like Cosmo in Vegas. A bunch of people walking through the place, but no one actually gambling in there.

It was the deadest casino in AC while we were in town. We stopped in on a Thursday and again at 2:00PM on a Saturday and it was dead outside of some lookey lous. I played and lost here fast, so they might just be tight, but from talking to people out there, their comps seemed to suck, especially compared to the other casinos in town.

Leaving Revel, and past the Showboat, we hit up Trump Taj Mahal. I liked it, inside looked nothing like the outside. I would have liked the old AC of the 1900's themeing of the outside to be indoors, even just a little. But nope.

Inside, its dark and a little on the 80's side. Looked like the Tangiers from the movie Casino.

Right across from that was the Steel Pier Amusement park. It looked like a blast but was closed for renovations the whole time we were there.

From there you get to Resorts. In my opinion its the dirty duckling of all the Boardwalk Casinos. Dated, worn, the outside was a little beaten in and the inside had a lot of degenerates walking around. This is how my walk through went. "No I cant give you a dollar" "No I cant spare a smoke" "No I don't want to hear that you are on a work release from prison and need some help".

No pictures of Resorts, since I didn't want to pull out my camera and have someone try to steal it. They had a roaring 20's theme, very loosely, throughout the property. I think it was supposed to be Hollywood inspired but not very consistent.

Quick walk through no mans land, with plenty of massage ladies trying to get us inside, and a bargain palm reading for $1.00 (we passed) and it was back to Bally's for the night. I was down and a few good hits got back all my money. KB lost his bankroll again.

Day 3

It's Friday and the Boardwalk starting hopping early!

So we took an $8.00 cab ride from Bally's to the Borgata. I'd say the Borg is nice, but that is selling it short. Its insanely nice. Dare I say Wynn nice. Very sexy and Huge! Everything you could ever want to play. Both old and new games, wide open spaces it was just gorgeous.

I've played in Casinos in 7 states and this was probably the nicest I have seen. I loved it. Pictures wont do it justice. The Marina Dist is the bomb!

I was getting hammered on the slots though. I was down to $2.25 from my $100 bill and turned that into $20.00 on a 2X5X10 machine. Cashed it out and won a hundo on a diamond line machine took that over to the new Lord of the Rings (that killed me at NY NY in Vegas) and got a line hit for $75.00 pretty fast. So I turned a hundo into 2 bucks and 2 bucks into almost $200 in a matter of minutes.

I liked this place, but we had more exploring to do. Supposedly there is a path that runs from the Borg over to Harrah's. I didn't see it. I walked out the doors by the poker room and we decided to cut through a field and run across traffic. The path we took was unofficial, but looked like it was traveled before us, and it worked.

Within 10 minutes we were at Harrah's. I never thought I would type these words... Harrah's was beautiful! The one in Vegas should be ashamed of itself for sharing its name with this gem.

Huge Casino floor, top notch dining. Great check in desk with giant fish tanks like Mirage. Everything about it screamed class. Not stuffy like Bellagio. More like Mandalay Bay but with actual people inside! Nice little mall, great indoor pool. I could see just staying here if I wasn't such a casino hopper when I vacation.

From here its pretty easy to get to the Golden Nugget. It was once the Trump Marina but supposedly GN bought it cheap and dumped a lot of money in it. It was OK. Not nearly as nice as its neighbors. The casino was smaller and dark and not many people in there. I guess they are trying, but I won’t be back. Not because its a shit-hole or anything. But there are so many better options around it.

Took the Jitney back to Bally's and played on some more there to pay off our room. Yet another buffet for us and we called it a day by midnight. I lost all my money for the day (Damn you Harrahs!) and KB made a killing. Almost enough to get back all his losses so far from the trip. He did very well at Borgata.

Day 4

Last full day, we pretty much went back and did the stuff we liked again. Another visit to Revel. Back to Taj. It was check out day and we didn't want to log in a visit at a CET property and hurt our averages. But since we pretty much stole from Trump the entire trip it wasn't going to hurt us there, not expecting any offers from him.

The boardwalk is covered in cats. They have signs everywhere saying to leave them alone, and they do daily feedings which is a site to see. Hundreds of pussy cats popping out from under the boardwalk to get a free meal. I didn't take pictures, since I socked the camera away on the last day.

The walk from Bally's to Revel really wasn't that bad. Took about 20 minutes or so for us. We both lost a little by the end of the day, but overall we kept 1/2 our bankrolls and logged in a ton of play.

One Day is not enough to see AC, 3 days might get it done. I think our 4 days was perfect. Is it like Vegas? I think so and I would definitely come back. I'll never get tired of Las Vegas, but to spice things up I'd take another cheap trip to AC.

The gambling seemed good, the slot floors are huge, the resorts are top notch, all our food was free. Whats not to love?

Speaking of the slot floors being huge, everything is well spaced out in AC, so the huge slot floors are even bigger than their numbers appear. I looked up these fun Facts. The Borgata has 3,474 slot machines and 161,000 SQ FT of gaming space. The MGM Grand in LV has 2,470 slot machines 171,000 SQ FT the largest in all of Vegas. So just using that giant slot floor in Vegas and the fact that even Caesars Palace LV only has 1,460 slot machines these numbers will shock you in AC.

When I say the casinos are huge, I mean huge! Every game you could ever want to play you will probably find here. We saw so many games we never even knew existed.

Ballys 2,983 slots, Showboat 2,600 slots, Caesars 2,337 slots, Harrahs 2,776 slots Taj Mahal 2,648 slots, Tropicana 2,594 slots. Compare that to places like Excalibur and their 1,550 slots and you'll see what I mean.

So if you were ever on the fence, take it from Grid and Go! You'll love it, as long as you get over the fact that its not Vegas. In some ways, its even better!

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