Las Vegas

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The Most Famous Clock Fact in the World Is Probably Wrong

Everyone knows that Las Vegas casinos have no clocks and no windows, so that gamblers lose track of time and keep playing.

The first half is broadly true. From the 1950s to the 1980s, Strip casinos were built as enclosed, windowless environments with no clocks on the walls.

The second half — the why — is disputed by the person best placed to know.

Bill Friedman ran the Castaways and the Silver Slipper casinos in Las Vegas from 1977 to 1990, turning both from loss-makers into profitable operations, and wrote the two standard works on the subject: Casino Management (1974) and Designing Casinos to Dominate the Competition (2000).

Friedman has called it a myth that Nevada's operators removed clocks and daylight to manipulate players into gambling longer. His account is that serious players demanded their removal, because they wanted the fantasy uninterrupted. There is also a mundane reason: direct sunlight puts glare on cards and slot screens.

And the practice has largely ended anyway. Roger Thomas's "playground" design for Wynn Resorts, from the late 1990s, opened casino floors up with natural light, artwork and comfortable furniture. Architects now build windows in for energy efficiency. As one casino manager put it, everybody carries a clock in their pocket.

The clock: but Las Vegas has not stopped selling time. It has just moved it.

Nevada made marriage licences fast in the early 1930s — no blood test, no waiting period — in the same legislative moment that legalised gambling. The result is an industry built entirely on how quickly a date can be obtained.

And the dates themselves have become the product. The wedding trade calls them specialty dates: 12/13/14, 4/3/21, 12/31/23 — which reads 1-2-3-1-2-3.

When New Year's Eve 2023 produced that sequence, Clark County expected so many ceremonies that it opened a temporary marriage licence bureau inside Harry Reid International Airport, so couples could collect the paperwork as they came off the plane.

A city famous for removing clocks, where the busiest days of the year are chosen because of how the numbers look on a calendar.

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