Driving the roughly 60 miles from Philadelphia to Atlantic City can be exhausting. The good news is that once you get there, you don't have to get up again to gamble. In a dubious first, Atlantic City's Borgata Hotel Casino & Spa has announced that as of February 18th, it will be the first casino in the United States to give guests the ability to gamble over hotel room TV sets.
The Borgata's e-Casino pilot program is an experiment of sorts, and apparently not one that's expected to add much to the daily haul from the casino floor. The 90-day in-room gambling trial is designed more as a convenience for guests who made the trek all the way to the Atlantic City casino's swanky suites, then decided it was just too much effort to take the elevator down to the casino floor too.
It's kind of the gaming equivalent of the giant point-of-purchase Snickers bar you grab at the Wawa counter when you really came in for an overpriced bottle of Deer Park.
But this is probably just the beginning. The Borgata didn't get to be one of the least struggling hotel casino spas in Atlantic City by thinking small. It's a safe bet that eventually the e-Casino program will smoothly segue from slots and video poker offerings to integrating the gaming action with TV programming.
Is there an automatic cash prize every time a Time-Life album commercial pops up featuring Kenny Rogers (and his old face) singing The Gambler? How many Republicans will make over-the-top "Who pooted?" faces during President Obama's State of the Union address? What wacky props will your favorite sitcom use to hide its second female lead's real life pregnancy? How many episodes of the new set-in-Philadelphia NBC series Do No Harm will air before it's cancel—Oh. Already? Well, we definitely would have
lost that bet. Thank goodness the Borgata caps daily TV gaming losses at $2,500.
· Borgata: First Casino to Allow Bets from TV [Philly.com]