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CASINO

Ok, this came from our room. But we couldn't take pics in the casino.

As we mentioned in our disclaimer, we won $654 on the Wheel of Fortune slot machine within an hour of arriving at the Borgata. We played the $1 machines by the Homestead restaurant and had spent about $6 before hitting some random combination. Needless to say, it was awesome.

The Borgata does have the loosest slots, as voted by the Casino Player magazine in 2005. And they have a lot of slots. Overall the casino floor totals 161,000 sq. ft. There are 210 table games and 4,100 slot machines. While we were there, there was poker tournament that was just beginning so the place was crawling with young dudes in shades and ballcaps. If you're a novice to gambling, the Borgata does offer private lessons on the card tables.

But what's interesting to us, is that The Borgata has smoke-free areas thanks to the new NJ law about indoor smoking. Each area--smoke-free or smoking--is labeled carefully and a hotel rep assured us that security is monitoring these sections to see who's violating the rules. Of course, our lucky slot machine happened to be in the Smoking section so when we went back to try our luck again the next day, some man had plopped down next to our machine smoking a long cigarette. Yuck.

Overall we liked the smoke-free areas. Some people raved about them and some people said it made no difference, you could still smell the smoke. But it's a heck of a lot better than a Vegas casino. We once got an ear infection from hanging around the MGM Casino. In addition, we hear the casino is pumping fresh oxygen into the area four times an hour. How about that? New Jersey cleaner than Vegas?