Borgata and Revel midweek weekend
September 23rd, 2012 at 11:15:04 AM
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tl;dr: Borgata is nice, Revel is cold. Food at Borgata is excellent, the rooms are nice.
We spent some family time in AC this week, Mrs and I took my dad and his girlfriend to visit with my older sister and her husband, who flew in from Chicago, and with my younger sister who lives in Ocean City NJ. We left NE PA around 4:30 Wednesday, and walked in the front door of the property at almost exactly 8PM. It took about 45 minutes to get through Philadelphia via The Schuylkill Expressway, from 6:15 to 7PM. I probably should have gone down to 95 and up along the river, but the last time I did that traffic was backed up from the airport to the Walt Whitman Bridge, so, 6 of one half a dozen of the other. Who knows?
We had comped rooms at The Borgata, 2 in the Water Club tower and 1 in the Borgata tower. We stayed in one of the Water Club rooms, and I liked that room very much. It's the little things, because rooms are rooms, after all. The TV is 46" and the reception is HD. Our room was marina view, so it opened onto The Golden Nugget, the marina, and the upper boardwalk, which was pretty nice at night. The bed and pillows fit my preferences perfectly, and I slept well. The shower is spectacular, with both a rainshower head coming from the center of the ceiling and separate hand-held nozzle from the wall, and water pressure on the 18th floor was generous. To the negative, the refrigerator was full of minibar items. Knowing this in advance, we brought along a couple of thermal bags and ice packs, along with our own refreshments. Elsewhere someone mentioned that they were prevented from doing this, but I don't think anyone even noticed in this instance.
Gambling went well for me. It was one of those trips where almost everything I touched turned to money. It didn't seem to matter what it was; I probably could have played the Big 6 Wheel and won. I started by putting my $95 in free slot play into one of the $5 WoF slots by the Borgata entrance and hitting a $500 spin; from there on, I never tapped into the money I actually brought to gamble, playing the entire time above the line. I went with Mrs to play penny slots and got the redheaded mermaid Mermaid Bonus game, and inside that bonus got the 3 bonus chests for the other bonus game; $95 times 7x! At the tables, I kept my bets at the $10 level; I went off to play 4 Card Poker, and got 3 of a kind twice in my first 5 hands. Went to Let it Ride Bonus and hit a bunch of little winners. (An aside: gambling for me is much more of a social venture than it is a competition or challenge. I enjoy blackjack and craps as much as I do the carnival games, but most of all I enjoy playing alongside friends.) Roulette was an exception: I blew through $105 @ a $15 minimum table without hitting anything, and colored up. Mrs and I played some more slots for a couple hours at about even, I probably lost $100 there. Ended the day up almost $900. Everyone else lost. My dad was losing, but at Let it Ride he stopped playing and started topping off my Bonus bets, and won about $150 when I hit flush-flush-straight-pair-pair, and he finished the night down about $50.
The next day we went to the breakfast buffet, and used our comps. This is one damn good breakfast buffet, maybe the best I've tasted. The fruit is fresh and sweet, the juices are fresh, the coffee is excellent, the main dishes are high quality and don't sit out too long. I'm not sure if it is unintentional or attention to detail, but some of the bacon is crispy and some of the bacon is chewy. The sticky buns are AWESOME.
After breakfast we drove over to Revel. It's beautiful, but if I had to describe it in one word, that word would be "cold". There's no other way to say it; the place doesn't feel inviting. You enter a two story high lobby with no soft surfaces, all chrome and red and concrete, and take a two story high escalator to the casino level. In the casino, the color scheme is dark and foreboding: blue at eye level, red when you look up, and steel/chrome/concrete gray when you look off into the distance to the walls or the windows. Lighting is stark. Revel is flooded with LED lighting, but with almost no light colors or reflective surfaces it still seems dark. It is a real contrast to Borgata, which is done in gold, and cream, and soft light, with a high light colored ceiling.
The patrons of Revel seemed almost universally dissatisfied. The people at the tables I played complained, about anything and everything: not winning, slow cocktail waitresses, not the right drinks (no Jack Daniels, even though they had Jack Daniels), poor comps, you name it. I'm half tempted to say that the environment contributed to their mood, except that Revel didn't exactly go out of their way to make it any better, either. We went to eat at Amada, a very nice area laid out along the beachside, with window walls overlooking the boardwalk and the water. Along one wall, obscured by a shoulder high divider, my sister saw a row of heat lamps, and inquired of the hostess, "Oh, is this a buffet?" And the hostess answered, in a voice dripping with snottiness, "THERE ARE NO BUFFETS AT REVEL." To which my sister, who doesn't put up with shit, replied, "A simple "no" would have sufficed." The food was pretty good though.
It's pretty simple. Revel is a glamorous woman with a real attitude problem. It is an ice queen. You really want to like it, badly, but it just pushes you away and shrugs you off. And you walk away wondering how something so beautiful could be not sexy at all.
Regardless, I beat the shit out of Revel. Everything I walked up to, I won. I looked at a slot machine I never saw before: "Little Red". Bet it, beat it. Walked over to another one I never saw before, "Double Dinosaurs": played it like an ATM...
The wilds count double, the two dinos count double. I cashed out my ticket and went to Let it Ride Bonus (which by the way pays 40/30/6/4/1 on the three card) and hit 3 of a kind in hand. I played about an hour, up and down, and cashed in up about $400. I met up with Mrs Mosca and bled back about $200, and eventually we headed back to the marina side, I was up about $1100 for the day and $2000 for the trip. Everyone else was pretty pissed off, because they all lost. I kept my mouth shut on the drive back over.
Back at Borgata, I had my only really hard losing session. We had dinner reservations at Old Homestead for 6PM, and I wanted to hold on to what I had, so my dad and I went over to Pai Gow Poker. I figured to win/lose/push for 90 minutes and finish the session somewhere around +/-$50, but the cards were unkind. At $20 per bet I lost $280 before I saw my first white chip. Really. Over an hour of play at PGP without a single win. Dan, if you're reading this, they had EZ Pai Gow there, but I didn't play it because I didn't see it because I didn't recognize the table signs, which we'd approached from the rear. Anyhow, the session that I thought would be easy and relaxing turned out to be a correction of some pretty severe positive variance.
I can't say enough about Old Homestead. If you love steakhouses, this is for you.
Prime Rib, notice the knife for scale:
PETITE bacon wrapped filet, about 1/4 of an entire mignon:
Truly awesome. Dinner for 6, with dessert, after tax but before tip and no wine: $479.
After dinner we went up to the room and visited for a while with my sister who lives locally but doesn't gamble, and around 9PM headed back down to the casino. I stuck a Franklin into the $5 WoF and hit $750. Toldja, it was just that kind of trip. Mrs and I went off to the penny slots, and I gave her a couple hundred because she was tapped, and she lost that, too. I played even for a while, but bled back a couple hundred on this-and-that, over a couple hours. She went back upstairs and I stayed down, and played some Let it Ride Bonus, bought in for $300 but couldn't catch any cards and cashed out at $150. The guy next to my got dealt 3 kings, though, and the first up card was the 4th king!
I was pretty much done, but holding about $2000 of the casinos' money, which felt pretty good seeing as how I'd never tapped my own stash, had only bet minimums at the tables for two days, and except for the $5 WoF had only played penny slots. So I decided to stretch myself, if it was going to be lucky it was going to be lucky, so I ran $500 through the $25 WoF. Oh, well. I accepted that risk, and I'm satisfied with $1500 for the trip. I turned in around midnight, we had to leave early the next day because I had to be at work at noon. On a positive note, everyone else stayed up playing until around 2:30AM, and either won or got back to near even for the trip, so everyone except Mrs Mosca (who is still pissed about it) did OK.
And here we are. The drive home was uneventful. I banked the money, and there's enough so that we can go back again sometime between now and the end of the year, which is nice. I think overall I prefer having "gambling" as something I do as a destination, rather than having a local casino like we have here at Mohegan Sun Pocono. I'm used to having gambling locally, and it doesn't feel like fun any more. It doesn't feel like a good use of entertainment dollars. And even though I dis on Atlantic City, The Borgata is a really nice place, away from the boardwalk, with no buses bringing in the day players; it's a nice crowd, with a nice mix of young and old and US and foreign and men and women and business and blue collar. I don't go to Las Vegas often so I can't speak of it in comparison, all I can say is that it is a worthwhile casino destination.
We spent some family time in AC this week, Mrs and I took my dad and his girlfriend to visit with my older sister and her husband, who flew in from Chicago, and with my younger sister who lives in Ocean City NJ. We left NE PA around 4:30 Wednesday, and walked in the front door of the property at almost exactly 8PM. It took about 45 minutes to get through Philadelphia via The Schuylkill Expressway, from 6:15 to 7PM. I probably should have gone down to 95 and up along the river, but the last time I did that traffic was backed up from the airport to the Walt Whitman Bridge, so, 6 of one half a dozen of the other. Who knows?
We had comped rooms at The Borgata, 2 in the Water Club tower and 1 in the Borgata tower. We stayed in one of the Water Club rooms, and I liked that room very much. It's the little things, because rooms are rooms, after all. The TV is 46" and the reception is HD. Our room was marina view, so it opened onto The Golden Nugget, the marina, and the upper boardwalk, which was pretty nice at night. The bed and pillows fit my preferences perfectly, and I slept well. The shower is spectacular, with both a rainshower head coming from the center of the ceiling and separate hand-held nozzle from the wall, and water pressure on the 18th floor was generous. To the negative, the refrigerator was full of minibar items. Knowing this in advance, we brought along a couple of thermal bags and ice packs, along with our own refreshments. Elsewhere someone mentioned that they were prevented from doing this, but I don't think anyone even noticed in this instance.
Gambling went well for me. It was one of those trips where almost everything I touched turned to money. It didn't seem to matter what it was; I probably could have played the Big 6 Wheel and won. I started by putting my $95 in free slot play into one of the $5 WoF slots by the Borgata entrance and hitting a $500 spin; from there on, I never tapped into the money I actually brought to gamble, playing the entire time above the line. I went with Mrs to play penny slots and got the redheaded mermaid Mermaid Bonus game, and inside that bonus got the 3 bonus chests for the other bonus game; $95 times 7x! At the tables, I kept my bets at the $10 level; I went off to play 4 Card Poker, and got 3 of a kind twice in my first 5 hands. Went to Let it Ride Bonus and hit a bunch of little winners. (An aside: gambling for me is much more of a social venture than it is a competition or challenge. I enjoy blackjack and craps as much as I do the carnival games, but most of all I enjoy playing alongside friends.) Roulette was an exception: I blew through $105 @ a $15 minimum table without hitting anything, and colored up. Mrs and I played some more slots for a couple hours at about even, I probably lost $100 there. Ended the day up almost $900. Everyone else lost. My dad was losing, but at Let it Ride he stopped playing and started topping off my Bonus bets, and won about $150 when I hit flush-flush-straight-pair-pair, and he finished the night down about $50.
The next day we went to the breakfast buffet, and used our comps. This is one damn good breakfast buffet, maybe the best I've tasted. The fruit is fresh and sweet, the juices are fresh, the coffee is excellent, the main dishes are high quality and don't sit out too long. I'm not sure if it is unintentional or attention to detail, but some of the bacon is crispy and some of the bacon is chewy. The sticky buns are AWESOME.
After breakfast we drove over to Revel. It's beautiful, but if I had to describe it in one word, that word would be "cold". There's no other way to say it; the place doesn't feel inviting. You enter a two story high lobby with no soft surfaces, all chrome and red and concrete, and take a two story high escalator to the casino level. In the casino, the color scheme is dark and foreboding: blue at eye level, red when you look up, and steel/chrome/concrete gray when you look off into the distance to the walls or the windows. Lighting is stark. Revel is flooded with LED lighting, but with almost no light colors or reflective surfaces it still seems dark. It is a real contrast to Borgata, which is done in gold, and cream, and soft light, with a high light colored ceiling.
The patrons of Revel seemed almost universally dissatisfied. The people at the tables I played complained, about anything and everything: not winning, slow cocktail waitresses, not the right drinks (no Jack Daniels, even though they had Jack Daniels), poor comps, you name it. I'm half tempted to say that the environment contributed to their mood, except that Revel didn't exactly go out of their way to make it any better, either. We went to eat at Amada, a very nice area laid out along the beachside, with window walls overlooking the boardwalk and the water. Along one wall, obscured by a shoulder high divider, my sister saw a row of heat lamps, and inquired of the hostess, "Oh, is this a buffet?" And the hostess answered, in a voice dripping with snottiness, "THERE ARE NO BUFFETS AT REVEL." To which my sister, who doesn't put up with shit, replied, "A simple "no" would have sufficed." The food was pretty good though.
It's pretty simple. Revel is a glamorous woman with a real attitude problem. It is an ice queen. You really want to like it, badly, but it just pushes you away and shrugs you off. And you walk away wondering how something so beautiful could be not sexy at all.
Regardless, I beat the shit out of Revel. Everything I walked up to, I won. I looked at a slot machine I never saw before: "Little Red". Bet it, beat it. Walked over to another one I never saw before, "Double Dinosaurs": played it like an ATM...
The wilds count double, the two dinos count double. I cashed out my ticket and went to Let it Ride Bonus (which by the way pays 40/30/6/4/1 on the three card) and hit 3 of a kind in hand. I played about an hour, up and down, and cashed in up about $400. I met up with Mrs Mosca and bled back about $200, and eventually we headed back to the marina side, I was up about $1100 for the day and $2000 for the trip. Everyone else was pretty pissed off, because they all lost. I kept my mouth shut on the drive back over.
Back at Borgata, I had my only really hard losing session. We had dinner reservations at Old Homestead for 6PM, and I wanted to hold on to what I had, so my dad and I went over to Pai Gow Poker. I figured to win/lose/push for 90 minutes and finish the session somewhere around +/-$50, but the cards were unkind. At $20 per bet I lost $280 before I saw my first white chip. Really. Over an hour of play at PGP without a single win. Dan, if you're reading this, they had EZ Pai Gow there, but I didn't play it because I didn't see it because I didn't recognize the table signs, which we'd approached from the rear. Anyhow, the session that I thought would be easy and relaxing turned out to be a correction of some pretty severe positive variance.
I can't say enough about Old Homestead. If you love steakhouses, this is for you.
Prime Rib, notice the knife for scale:
PETITE bacon wrapped filet, about 1/4 of an entire mignon:
Truly awesome. Dinner for 6, with dessert, after tax but before tip and no wine: $479.
After dinner we went up to the room and visited for a while with my sister who lives locally but doesn't gamble, and around 9PM headed back down to the casino. I stuck a Franklin into the $5 WoF and hit $750. Toldja, it was just that kind of trip. Mrs and I went off to the penny slots, and I gave her a couple hundred because she was tapped, and she lost that, too. I played even for a while, but bled back a couple hundred on this-and-that, over a couple hours. She went back upstairs and I stayed down, and played some Let it Ride Bonus, bought in for $300 but couldn't catch any cards and cashed out at $150. The guy next to my got dealt 3 kings, though, and the first up card was the 4th king!
I was pretty much done, but holding about $2000 of the casinos' money, which felt pretty good seeing as how I'd never tapped my own stash, had only bet minimums at the tables for two days, and except for the $5 WoF had only played penny slots. So I decided to stretch myself, if it was going to be lucky it was going to be lucky, so I ran $500 through the $25 WoF. Oh, well. I accepted that risk, and I'm satisfied with $1500 for the trip. I turned in around midnight, we had to leave early the next day because I had to be at work at noon. On a positive note, everyone else stayed up playing until around 2:30AM, and either won or got back to near even for the trip, so everyone except Mrs Mosca (who is still pissed about it) did OK.
And here we are. The drive home was uneventful. I banked the money, and there's enough so that we can go back again sometime between now and the end of the year, which is nice. I think overall I prefer having "gambling" as something I do as a destination, rather than having a local casino like we have here at Mohegan Sun Pocono. I'm used to having gambling locally, and it doesn't feel like fun any more. It doesn't feel like a good use of entertainment dollars. And even though I dis on Atlantic City, The Borgata is a really nice place, away from the boardwalk, with no buses bringing in the day players; it's a nice crowd, with a nice mix of young and old and US and foreign and men and women and business and blue collar. I don't go to Las Vegas often so I can't speak of it in comparison, all I can say is that it is a worthwhile casino destination.
A falling knife has no handle.
September 23rd, 2012 at 11:41:46 AM
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The buffet confrontation is funny, but can you
imagine how many times a day she's asked
'Where's the buffet?' How dumb is this casino
to have no smoking AND no buffet.
imagine how many times a day she's asked
'Where's the buffet?' How dumb is this casino
to have no smoking AND no buffet.
"It's not called gambling if the math is on your side."
September 23rd, 2012 at 12:01:24 PM
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Quote: EvenBobThe buffet confrontation is funny, but can you
imagine how many times a day she's asked
'Where's the buffet?' How dumb is this casino
to have no smoking AND no buffet.
It's almost like they wondered, "How can we spend the MOST money to appeal to the FEWEST people?" You'd have to see it, really Bob. It isn't even appealing to the people who would like no smoking and no buffet. WE like no smoking and don't care about the buffet, Barb's question was simple curiosity. It's just all wrong, uninviting.
A falling knife has no handle.
September 23rd, 2012 at 12:12:09 PM
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I would be incredulous that a casino that size
had no buffet. If anything, a buffet is a cheap
and welcome comp, and they don't have it.
People expect buffets in casinos, I know I do.
had no buffet. If anything, a buffet is a cheap
and welcome comp, and they don't have it.
People expect buffets in casinos, I know I do.
"It's not called gambling if the math is on your side."
September 23rd, 2012 at 1:23:08 PM
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deleted
Last edited by: sodawater on Oct 1, 2018
September 23rd, 2012 at 2:54:31 PM
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Quote: sodawaterThe Revel doesn't want to be the kind of place that has a buffet. It's GOING FOR the glamorous, high-end, hip feel. That might not appeal to a lot of people, but it does appeal to some people.
Personally, I hate smoking, I hate buffets, I hate the bus crowd. Revel is by far my favorite casino.
How about the cooler crowd? They're not exactly welcome either.
Many people, especially ignorant people, want to punish you for speaking the truth. - Mahatma Ghandi
September 23rd, 2012 at 3:45:36 PM
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We got the feeling that nobody was actually welcome. The hip crowd would be tolerated, everyone else was held in distain.
A falling knife has no handle.
September 23rd, 2012 at 4:40:27 PM
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Great and very thorough report, Mosca. Your father gets a sharp point for piggybacking on your LIR bonus bet -- one of the lowest HE% sidebets. I have to say my opinion of Revel is about 170 degrees opposite yours. I like the decor, the restaurants, and the rooms are superb. The gaming experience is only slightly better-than-average, however. The comps were really nice when I was there, and if they have the same promotional stance, you should be getting some good stuff in the mail if you didn't already while you were there. Try Mussel Bar next time.
"Dice, verily, are armed with goads and driving-hooks, deceiving and tormenting, causing grievous woe." -Rig Veda 10.34.4
September 23rd, 2012 at 5:25:54 PM
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Quote: MoscaWe left NE PA around 4:30 Wednesday, and walked in the front door of the property at almost exactly 8PM. It took about 45 minutes to get through Philadelphia via The Schuylkill Expressway, from 6:15 to 7PM. I probably should have gone down to 95 and up along the river, but the last time I did that traffic was backed up from the airport to the Walt Whitman Bridge, so, 6 of one half a dozen of the other. Who knows?
A decent alternative, especially at rush hour, might be to cross the Delaware at Morrisville and take I-195 over to the Garden State Parkway. It would really pay to listen to all-news and similar radio stations with an abundance of traffic updates if a GPS navigator with traffic reports isn't available.
September 23rd, 2012 at 5:57:18 PM
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I'm going to play slots at the Borg from now on!
(resistance is futile)
(resistance is futile)
Someday, joor goin' to see the name of Googie Gomez in lights and joor goin' to say to joorself, "Was that her?" and then joor goin' to answer to joorself, "That was her!" But you know somethin' mister? I was always her yuss nobody knows it! - Googie Gomez
