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Maybe the Roman statues inside Caesars Palace seeped into my subconscious. Maybe I just played cards too long. Either way, I left Las Vegas convinced I had won a remarkable insight into human history.

Gambling speeds the decline of empire. Nothing is clearer. This came to me like an epiphany after I busted out of an all-night poker game a few weeks back. Leaving the cards and green felt behind, and walking past some square-jawed marble centurions in the nearly empty casino, I remembered something from Catholic school. When Christ was crucified, Roman guards — not unlike the effigies I was seeing — cast lots for his coat. Confronted with one of history's great tipping points, an empire-ending event right in front of their noses, they ignored it. They put their heads down — and rolled the dice.

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There's something telling in that. Gambling is simple, seductively short-term. Empires are complex, and play out over decades, centuries even. Still, there's a nexus, and if you've got an imagination, gambling through Vegas today can be like walking through history. On the skyline, pyramids bump up into Parthenons; the Eiffel Tower looms over the Statue of Liberty. Casino-resorts erected these gaudy simulacrums to draw visitors to the Las Vegas Strip, four miles of the world's most concentrated gambling action.

Now, however, the financial crisis is sucking the life out of the city, and it's like all these empires are dying all over again.

Everyone knows how America's great economic epicentres are suffering, after rampant real-estate speculation — society-sanctioned gambling, really — spawned a global financial meltdown. But forget Detroit. Leave aside Wall Street. Spare a thought for Sin City.

"What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas," the slogan goes. These days, what's happening is grim: Gaming revenues are down. Casino stocks and real-estate have plummeted too. Potential tourists are far more preoccupied with figuring out how to pay their mortgages than with heading to Vegas to arrange trysts.

The upside is that in this crisis lies opportunity. Supposing you still have any income left to dispose of, there's never been a better time to go: Vegas might be at its most affordable ever.

Trust me — I'm a compulsive gambler. I know. The flight was cheap, the hotel rooms cheaper. The casinos, competing for ever-scarcer dollars, were offering all kinds of deals. I hit just about every one.

The airport arrival area, though, almost fooled me. There was a half-hour lineup for a taxi, so at first it seemed like times were still flush. But LAS's development has always lagged behind the casino-resorts, which really tell the tale of the city's fortunes.

A couple of miles from the airport and up the Strip, the lower- to middle-end resorts are renting out rooms at flophouse prices: $25 to $55 for a weeknight. Don't be put off by this — sleeping at, say, a Bally's or the Stratosphere is akin to what you might find in a Quality Inn.

The rates are so low because the hotels bet they'll make their money back on their casino floors and restaurants, and when they jack up the prices on the weekend. They give out coupon books meant to induce guests not to stray. But nothing, of course, precludes you from leaving cheap lodgings to see the swankier places up the Strip.

It's inside the litter of newborn casino-resorts, the still-$200-a-night places, that you find garish opulence and witness the bloom coming off the rose. Before hitting the casino floors, you're greeted by rows of empty Prada, Gucci and Louis Vuitton stores — and window shoppers too intimidated to venture in.

"Where are all the high rollers?" you begin to wonder.

Questions like this can shatter Vegas's bluff. The illusion of conspicuous consumption is essential to the enterprise. Without it, the whole city starts to look as suspect as the sequined décolletage of certain cocktail waitresses. Sure, it's appealing at first — then it just seems freakish, as it dawns on you that behind the glitz and sparkles, everything's been built up way bigger than what the natural order would support.

A security guard at the Bellagio brought this home for me. When I stopped to ask him some questions, he ended up giving me a half-hour rundown on the billion-dollar casino-resort. It wasn't like he had much else to do.

Long story short, he said the Bellagio used to be packed all the time, to the point where three other guards were watching the same stretch of hallway. Now, he works it by himself.

But don't cry for the Bellagio. Of all the casinos, it should do fine. Outside, its dancing fountains astound. Inside, its poker room bustles, with card sharks lining up to play games you have never heard of.

I'm a Texas Hold 'Em specialist, so when I heard mention of "Badugi" at the Bellagio, I figured someone ordered a Korean entree. The big-money players the next table over set me straight: It's a low-card poker variant — and don't even think about sitting down with less than $10,000. Looking at the couple of hundred dollars I had stacked in front of me, I decided to stay far away.

The Bellagio is friendly to all gamblers, but it still draws the dwindling ranks of the high rollers. Some canny investments it has made over the years have helped. Take the multimillion-dollar stage it built for Cirque du Soleil's O. Seven dozen of the world's best contortionists, synchronized swimmers and acrobats do amazing things on a platform that's sometimes solid, sometimes water. Even at $300 for a pair of tickets, you leave feeling you got the better end of the bargain.

But here's the rub. More than a half-dozen Cirque shows and even a couple of knockoffs are playing at casinos around town, some to mixed reviews. They've proven such a draw that Cirque's founder, the Quebec-born street performer (and now billionaire poker player) Guy Laliberté, is credited with almost single-handedly revitalizing Vegas over the past 20 years. But now that the concept is more of a Vegas fixture than sequin shows and foul-mouthed comedians, you have to wonder about its shelf life.

That there are so many shows in the same vein here is telling. Vegas impresarios double down on their bets as casually as the punters playing $3 blackjack at old-school casinos such as Circus Circus. It's a strategy that works out great when you're on a run — but you can easily lose your whole stack when your luck ends.

Consider Steve Wynn, the casino magnate who built the Bellagio, had a falling out with the owners and then tried to one-up it. His glamorous (if immodest) namesake resort — Wynn — was built for a couple of billion and opened in 2005. It's onyx-black outside and gorgeous, bright red everything inside. Don't miss it. It is tastefully grand.

But Mr. Wynn was so enamoured of his project that last year he opened a carbon copy casino next door. It's called Encore and it seems so superfluous that maybe it should have been called the Deja Vu.

It's not bad for the tourists: You can play table games for $10 a hand at the Encore, compared to the identical tables that start at $50 at the Wynn. But after a couple of hours of cards at the Encore, I left wondering if my $5 in losses were really going to help Mr. Wynn pay for his sparkling new resorts.

The tough times mean that investors, once bullish on Vegas's future, now bet on bleak. A share of most of any of the major casino corporations would have cost you close to a black chip — $100 — a couple of years ago. Now the same companies trade for a handful of white $1 chips. And yet somehow, as stocks head down, the Strip's skyline keeps going up. Crane operators, fuelled by inertia, slowly work away at new high-rises and luxury condos — even though many buyers, including Hollywood celebrities, are running away from their real-estate investments.

Developers put on a brave face. MGM Mirage, one of the suffering casino corporations, has just announced it's taking reservations for new luxury suites to open this fall — with rates to range from $150 to $2,000 a night.

That'll be good money if MGM can get it. Then, again, the company has also just announced a construction flaw is leading it to cut another planned tower in half. Effectively, MGM lopped 49 storeys into 28 faster than one of its peevish Pai Gow dealers cut down my chip stack — but this could be a blessing in disguise for MGM, since luxury condos aren't moving anyway.

The overbuilding of Vegas is worrisome for the aging casinos. Employee anxiety is palpable in some. One blackjack dealer at a 1950s-era resort — once home to the Rat Pack, now home to a $7 buffet — kept pausing to ask me how business was in the other places I had been hitting. You know, just in case she ended up needing a new job somewhere else.

You can't blame the locals for feeling antsy. Half the city's homes are worth less than what's owed on them. Fortune magazine reports that Vegas has edged Detroit as America's most abandoned city. So stick to the tourist traps, because the planned opulence doesn't extend very far from the Strip. If the casinos get to be too much, you can consider spending $200 to $300 and a full day on a bus trip to the Grand Canyon and the Hoover Dam, or blow $500 for a chopper ride if you're feeling flush.

But for me, there's nothing on Earth more grand than peeling the corners of cards off of green felt, and peeking at pocket aces that nobody else at the Hold 'Em table knows you have. And I find the best poker rooms are still downtown, not far from the strip, a $10 cab ride — or $3 on the bus known as "The Deuce." The appeal of the so-called "Fremont Street Experience" is really in what's been subtracted from the strip. There are no mini-Romes, mini-Parises, or mini-New Yorks in sight.

Instead you get 1950s-era casinos where the action really started, places that never aspired to be anything more than the garish and slightly seedy casinos that they are. This is vintage Vegas at its best — cards, coins and cash.

The Golden Nugget hosts the most relaxed poker room in town, putting the fun back into a game that too many players regard as a profession. Stick around long enough and you might see a real Vegas character, "The Duke." The rake-thin card player daily puts on his cowboy hat, heads downtown, and plops $10,000 cash onto tables where everyone else has bought in for $200.

And then, he never bets a hand. No one knows why.

Across the street, Binion's is where they used to hold the World Series of Poker. It's seen better days, but I'll always have a soft spot for it: It's where I beat 120 poker rivals in a tournament to claim $2,500. The money was great. But it was a real bonus to win in a place where the greats elevated cards into an art form.

Pictures of the legends at their peak are mounted on the walls. Some are of Doyle Brunson, a 10-time world champion from Texas, still going strong today in his 70s. More cautionary are the portraits of Stu Unger, a pipsqueak of a cocaine fiend fromNew York, who became a three-time world champion before he was found dead in a Vegas flophouse in his early 40s.

So many gamblers have come to Vegas to make their fortune. So many others have lost a lot more than money. The city has manufactured countless legends, and makes more every day.

There may be some longevity to this enterprise. After all, it has been more than a half-century since colossal casinos started popping up like incandescent weeds in the desert, decades since gangsters headed west to build the first gambling halls, placing huge bets on their ability to capitalize on a simple idea.

Given human nature, servicing greed will always be a growth industry. As empires rise and fall, you can bet there's something permanent in that instinct.

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Pack your bags

GETTING THERE

Westjet and Air Canada offer direct flights from Canadian airports to McCarran International.

WHERE TO STAY

THE BELLAGIO 3600 Las Vegas Blvd. S.; 888-987-6667; www.bellagio.com. From $173 $139.

THE WYNN 3331 Las Vegas Blvd. S.; 888-320-7123; www.wynnlasvegas.com. From $247.

BINION'S 128 E. Fremont St.; 1-800-937-6537; www.binions.com.

GOLDEN NUGGET 129 E. Fremont St.; 800-846-5336; www.goldennugget.com. From $129.

THE STRATOSPHERE 2000 Las Vegas Blvd. S.; 1-800-998-6937; www.stratospherehotel.com. From $65.

WHAT TO DO

Cirque Du Soleil's O At the Bellagio; www.cirquedusoleil.com. Tickets from $186.

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VEGAS NUMBERS

$0 Price of a drink (not including tip) for players in most casinos (all figures U.S.)

$3 Cheapest blackjack tables at Circus Circus, a 1960s-era casino

$35 Cheapest weekday accommodation at the Tropicana, built in the 1950s

$139 Cheapest weekday accommodation at the Bellagio, built in the 1990s

$11,600,000,000 Annual Nevada casino revenue in 2008

$12,800,000,000 Annual Nevada casino revenue in 2007

$951,500 Earmark for a "Sustainable Las Vegas" in the Obama "bailout budget"