I try to get a gin and tonic at the center bar, but because of COVID, I have to sit at a table and eat a meal if I want a drink. It feels a little nicer than how I remember SugarHouse Casino in Fishtown, now known as Rivers. The center has a raised circular bar and layer-cake chandeliers hanging from the ceiling. It’s a big flat room filled with slot machines and table games, ringed by restaurants, a poker room, a discreet high-limit slot parlor, and more table-game parlors. I print out my ticket with a 30-cent balance and take a walk around. Mystical Unicorn swallows up $4.80, and I drain most of the remaining $10 on a machine called 8 Petals.

I lose a dollar in a slot machine called Eagle Bucks and another on Buffalo Rush. I put a $5 bill in a penny slot machine called Epic Fortunes that features a smiling infant riding a red-crowned crane, bet all 500 credits, and lose the $5 in one pull. I try to ignore the incessant “Live!” exclamation point found on branding throughout the joint, but the marketing department is clearly proud of it. One is perched upside down on a disco ball. Masked dancers in feathery red outfits are stalking around the slots parlor on stilts and dangling from hoops atop brass poles. As I enter South Philly’s Live Casino & Hotel on opening night, I decide it’s $47 - $40 from the ATM and the $7 in my pocket. A few hard nights taught me a different approach: Decide ahead of time how much you can lose. The first time I went to a casino, I drove all the way to Atlantic City with the windows down, smoking cigarettes and dreaming about how the money I was about to win would change my life. Now that we have two Philly casinos, what do we win? Illustration by Pete Ryan

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