Bet like Bond

The first words in the first ever James Bond novel describe a casino, so it seems like I should visit one on my quest – an increasingly hopeless one, at this point – to become Bond. Games of chance and casinos play a huge part in Bond books and movies, but Ian Fleming obviously wanted us to know that they’re part of the same dark, dangerous place where Bond works.

“The scent and smoke and sweat of a casino are nauseating at three in the morning.” These were the first worlds Fleming wrote at the start of Casino Royale, his first Bond novel. “Then the soul-erosion produced by high gambling – a compost of greed and fear and nervous tension – becomes unbearable and the senses awake and revolt from it.”

The gaming floor of the Fallsview Casino in Niagara Falls is open all day and night, seven days a week. It’s mid-morning when John Stamatakos, executive director of Table Games Operations, takes me on a tour of the operation, but it could be the middle of the night, and I doubt that the toxic atmosphere Fleming describes ever has much of a chance to descend, especially since the provincial smoking ban went into effect.

The casinos Fleming described, like Las Vegas in the mobbed-up Rat Pack era, are relics of a different age. The gaming floor that Stamatakos oversees is one of the most relentlessly monitored and government-regulated businesses in the world, but it feels almost otherworldly. The slot machines chime and ring in a low, consonant burble, and a small army of dealers, managers, wait staff and security silently scrutinize everyone from the little old ladies parked in front of the slots to the players – almost half of them Asian at this time of day – in the salons.

“The hardest thing for a customer to do when they're winning is stop,” Stamatakos tells me. “Think about it, when you're anywhere and you're winning in a sport or game, it's tough for you to say 'Know what? We've won six games in a row in hockey, I'm not going to play next week.' You want to win - you've got that inner drive.”

It’s illegal to take pictures on the casino floor, and no one wants to spook the more superstitious players, so John takes me to a room in the basement where they train dealers to give me a lesson in baccarat, the game of choice for Bond. It’s a big game for the Fallsview, growing in popularity along with Asian card games, and they’re been adding new variations like mini- and midi-baccarat. Three large tables alone in the baccarat salon contribute $25 million dollars a year to the casino’s coffers.

It’s a simple enough game – basically, four cards are drawn, and the player that ends up with a combination closest to 9 wins. “People look at the odds and say, out of a hundred hands, probability is 45.8 times to the bank, 44.6 times to the player and the rest is going to be a tie,” Stamatakos explains to me. “They like that better as opposed to another game where they’ve got six things I've got to think about.”

After paying for rent and my kids’ school tuitions, I’ve been broke, so I wouldn’t be likely to edge into a spot at one of the tables upstairs, even if I didn’t find the aggressive gamblers’ brotherhood so intimidating, so John sets me up with a pile of chips and plays the banker, drawing a few hands for me. I start small and get more reckless with my play bets, but I lose four times out of five, and I’m forced to admit that my natural faintheartedness when it comes to gambling, as much as being poor or out of shape or being unable to hit the side of a boxcar with a gun, has made me an ever more unlikely Bond.