The Best Game in Town
In early anticipation of next August’s race season, our crack team of Saratoga experts propose an exciting new pastime

By Metroland’s Saratoga Bureau

All current meteorological evidence to the contrary, summer must come to an end. We’re fast approaching the leaf-peeping season, and soon enough the area will be inundated with Sunday-driving slowpokes all agog at the leafy light show. Sweat-slick and surly as you are, you may find this difficult to believe, but the telltale signs are falling into place: The college kids are back, hogging up your parking spaces and transforming formerly quiet, favorite watering holes into cacophonous petri dishes of sexual confusion and urban slang; your own younger children are being sent back to their daytime custodial institutions (just in time to prevent a longer-term institutionalization for mom and pop); and the Saratoga Racetrack is preparing to end its summer season, thereby freeing up the casual gambler’s cash for the rest of the year for stuff like groceries and insulin.

Now, the dedicated hardcore gamblers will be just fine: There’s always something to bet on—J. Lo’s marriage, say, or the preservation plans for downtown’s Wellington Hotel (lots of folks took a beating on that one). And the billion-

aire set will hold up alright, because . . . well, specifically, because of complicated synergy between the NASDAQ, trickle-down economics and the Rent-a-Center corporation—but basically because they’re billionaires. But for the rest of us, the workaday slobs for whom a trip up the Northway can provide a much-appreciated sliver of glitz and glamour, the close of the season can be a little sad.

So, as both nostalgic sendoff to this season and a hopeful (with any luck) look forward to the next, the members of Metroland’s Saratoga Bureau have rifled the files, racked their brains, consumed several small buckets of Pineapple-tinis in tribute, and devised a pastime sure to become a staple of upcoming Saratoga Augusts: Spa City Bingo.

The game is simple: Gather some friends, clip the accompanying card (one per player if you’re truly competitive, or per team if you like to roam in packs), head to Saratoga and keep your eyes peeled. First player, or team, to check off every box on the card wins. Wins what? Well, that’s up to you. High rollers could stake the winning team a night at the Adelphi, complete with breakfast; hipsters might offer to pick up the winner’s tab at Desperate Annie’s, inclusive of all the winner’s selections on the jukebox; cheap bastards might wait ’til midway through the season and hold out as incentive last Sunday’s totebag, T-shirt, umbrella or other such Racetrack swag. Feel free to modify the rules in accordance with your situation—play over the course of August, or focus a game into a frantic daylong sprint, for example. If you want to increase the degree of difficulty, you could establish a set order in which the sights must be obtained—or you could play in February, when these sights are going to be fewer and farther between.

Horses and/or horse iconography/are a given. Pretty much year-round, you’ll be able to fill those “gimme” boxes on your card. (So even your less-observant or drop-down pissed friends will have a minor sense of participation and accomplishment at game’s end). And the brazenly cigar-smoking dufus is prevalent—almost ubiquitous—in modern nightlife, smoking ban or no. Those shouldn’t be too tough. The lawn jockeys tend to be pretty stationary (though you can treat that panel as merely representative during track season, if you like, and force players to capture the real deal—metaphorically, of course. They are awfully cute, true, but that doesn’t mean you get to take ’em home like Beanie Babies, OK? Just make an “X” on the card.)

Celebrities will be harder to acquire, though not necessarily limited to the balmier weather. Rumor has it that David Cassidy’s got a place in Saratoga; he may woodshed away his winters from time to time. Members of the cast of The Sopranos, on the other hand, who have made appearances over the last couple of weeks, don’t strike us even remotely as cross-country skiing types.

And the funny hats—the really funny hats, the parade-float hats—that’s summer all over. And the savvy and opportunistic room/apartment for rent signs posted by year-round residents salivating at the prospect of pocketing a spare leisure-class $5k—August, again. The guy who plays what seems to be the same song on the banjo over and over on Broadway may hone his chops in the chillier air, but chances are you’ll have better luck with all the buskers when the town is truly bustling. The drum circle kids are a little heartier, in general, but given the fact that at least one member of a drum circle is required by some secret code of djembe ethics to be barefoot at all times, think summer. Same goes with the condescending hippies, whose self-esteem is inextricably linked to the running of the ponies, as one of Metroland’s Saratoga research assistants pointed out: “They think they’re better than you based only on the fact they don’t go to the track.”

Fortunately, that type of mean-spirited judgment represents only a minority’s reaction to the draw of the August Place to Be. But given the centrality of the racetrack to Saratoga’s personality, it’s inevitable that there might be some backlash, some negativity—well, to each his own. With the addition of Spa City Bingo to the town’s repertoire of entertainments, perhaps, attention will be called to the richness and variation of Saratogian summer life, the great, human pageant that is Saratoga Springs in August.

Or, maybe it’ll be perverted into a killer drinking game by smart-alecky Skidmore students—which would be OK, too.