Louie Lindsay tosses a ball during a beer pong game with Richard Sandoval, right, at O'Sheas Casino... 
(AP)
It's back to the buffet, bargains and customer bonuses for Las Vegas casinos.
Fast food is up, fine dining tabs are down and hotel rooms are available for under $50 in a city that has been calling on recession-weary tourists to come back and play the quarter slot machines.
Value is the hippest thing on Las Vegas Boulevard this year.
At O'Sheas Casino, the president of five Harrah's Entertainment Inc. hotel-casinos on the Las Vegas Strip is poking fun at the economic downturn and the excesses that built Sin City's anything-goes reputation.
Don Marrandino points at a sign pushing $45 bottles of Jack Daniels whiskey or Smirnoff vodka, and says the promotion parodies the not-too-distant past when the gambling resorts marked up liquor by hundreds of dollars a bottle and patrons couldn't empty them fast enough.
And then it all changed.
"I don't get scared too often," said Marrandino, who oversees the Imperial Palace, Flamingo Las Vegas, Harrah's Las Vegas and Bill's Gamblin' Hall & Saloon. "In January, I was scared."
Across Las Vegas, casinos found consumers unwilling to pay premium prices for just about anything, from meals to hotel rooms, drinks and entertainment. Occupancy citywide dropped to about 72 percent in January, far below the 90 percent-plus normally enjoyed by Las Vegas hotels.
Now a strategy that casino executives laid out earlier this year is taking shape — offering bargains and fighting for visitors without spending much to build the next big attraction.
"Our challenge, like everyone else, is how do you create things without capital?" Marrandino said. "You're dealt a hand, and you gotta play it."
The story is much the same for casinos across the country, which are looking for different ways to get gamblers in the door and keep them and their dollars there.
The Borgata Hotel Casino & Spa in Atlantic City, for example, offered a one-week-only special for the first time this month that combined a room with a 50-minute spa treatment for $210 per night.
