Rooms for the highest of rollers

It has more than you could ever want in a place that's not your home: private entrance. Elegant living room with deep, soft couches. A formal dining room with intricate wooden inlay flooring. Piano. Jacuzzi. Silk soft linens on fluffy beds and more pillows than you could use in a week, all with an oceanfront view.

No, this isn't just any hotel room. It's the Alexander Suite, the fanciest of the free rooms offered to high rollers at the Trump Taj Mahal Casino Hotel in Atlantic City.

High-roller suites have been around as long as casinos have wanted to attract gamblers. Spend a lot of money in our casino? Here's a free room and a pass to the buffet. Spend really, really big? Here's the top of the line of everything in a space that's larger than most people's houses - at no charge, including a butler, plus some other amenities, courtesy of the casino.

The plush digs draw high rollers in, and make them want to stay and continue to play. "It gives them something special that other people can't get. It makes them feel rewarded," said David G. Schwartz, director of the Center for Gaming Research at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

Because of cutthroat competition for high rollers - especially in Atlantic City, as it combats newer gambling sites nearby in Pennsylvania and New York that have sucked gambling revenues down for the last 35 months - these special suites are reaching a new level of posh.

In July, Tropicana Atlantic City opened 26 swank new Cielo suites, converted from 88 individual rooms. Some have a pool table; some have a piano. Others come with saunas and workout areas. All have wet bars, plus 60-inch flat-screen TVs in a theater-style setting. With a decor done in warm browns and oranges, the suites are more modern than what the Tropicana previously offered. The hotel, which recently raised the limits gamblers can bet at its table games (which means more high rollers), didn't get rid of its previous high-roller suites. It simply added the Cielo suites to its current stock, in a location that's closer to the gaming floor.

"You can't have a high-limit strategy without the amenities that need to go with it," said Tony Rodio, president and chief executive officer of Tropicana Atlantic City.