With apologies to the United States Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and every other good and noble document our blessed country has produced in the pursuit of fairness and decency, all men are not created equal.

At least not in Las Vegas.

Here in the Land of Anything’s Possible, a caste system as rigid and unforgiving as India’s separates the Worthy Few from the Unwashed Mob—and it’s got nothing to do with anything as spurious as patrician blood-lines or precinct of birth. It’s all about money. Old, new, ill-begotten, it doesn’t matter. You got it? Your limo is waiting! You don’t? Right this way to the back of the taxi line, pal.

Picture, if you will, an enormous pyramid—like Luxor, before they put that hideous ziggurat beside it. At the wide base is the foundation upon which the gambling economy is based: the low-rollers. They seek out the $9.95 steak-and-lobster specials, nickel slots, and buy-the-glass-get-free-refills drink deals. They bring a pre-determined amount of gambling money that they expect to lose and schedule their play around how long it lasts. If they see a headliner or dine at one of the gourmet restaurants, they generally pay full retail for the privilege.

Higher up the pyramid, where it starts to get a bit narrower, are the mid rollers, the $50-and-up bettors who stay in the tonier joints, get a discount (sometimes a 100% discount) on their room rate, and can often talk their way into free tickets to the house production show and a nice dinner in a room other than the buffet.

Then, near the pointy top, where angels fear to tread, are the vaunted high rollers.

Everyone claims to know a high roller or two; everyone has an aunt who gets invitations to no-entry-fee slot tournaments, or a colleague at work who gets all his rooms for free, or a buddy in the entertainment business who occasionally bets with black chips and gets VIP passes to Studio 54 and Club Rio.

The true high roller, however, is the gambler who has earned “RFB” (complimentary room, food, and beverage) status at a top Strip hotel, a gambler who signs-and-goes and never sees the charge show up on his bill. A gambler who enjoys the best of everything in Las Vegas, courtesy of the casinos.

Where the Luxor’s billion-watt light shines out toward the Mojave sky would be the highest-of-the-highs, known as “whales,” guys who are capable of betting $200,000 a hand. There are only about 50 of them in the world, and they don’t want to talk with an ink-stained wretch like me.

Though they’re the ones best equipped to pay for $300 bottles of wine, $500 fight tickets, and $1,200-a-night accommodations, high rollers typically pay exactly zero for the tastiest fruits Las Vegas has to offer. You could use any number of apposite clichés to explain this phenomenon—“the rich get richer”; “it’s good to be king”; “life ain’t fair”—but there’s a simpler way to look at the life of a Vegas high roller: “You get what you pay for.”

Just ask Buddy.

All-you-can-gorge buffets do not interest him. Two-for-one tickets to the afternoon Elvis show do not interest him. Discounted weekend room rates of $49 per night do not interest him. Yet Buddy MacDonald [some names and identifying details have been changed] will tell anyone who will listen that Las Vegas is “the greatest entertainment value in the world.” His thinking goes something like this: Where else can an ignorant degenerate fool like me be treated like an esteemed head of state, a member of visiting royalty, a distinguished man of letters and science? A celebrity?

Vegas has mastered the art of making a regular Joe feel as though he’s someone he isn’t. If only for a weekend, the real-estate agent from Milwaukee can be James Bond; the divorced mother of two from Seattle can be Grace Kelly; Buddy MacDonald, wildly successful owner of a decidedly un-sexy Orange County, California, electrical-contracting business, can be the sexiest dude on the Strip, flush with a penthouse suite, gourmet meals, knee-weakening escorts, and the kind of fawning “yes, sir!” attention typically reserved for members of the better country clubs.

“They make me feel like I’m appreciated,” Buddy confirms.

The dirty little secret, though, is that the marketing executives and hosts and maitre d’s who shower Buddy with love are not much different than the expensive prostitutes he hires during his weekend bacchanalia: What they “appreciate” is Buddy’s money—particularly his uncanny ability to lose it at the gambling tables. High rollers—a term originally applied to big-betting dice players—are to Las Vegas what Vermeer paintings are to museum curators: rare highly prized acquisitions that add luster (and profits) to the endowment. Buddy MacDonald is wanted. And any Las Vegas casino lucky enough to have him as a customer is eager to show Buddy just how well-loved he truly is.

The affection begins with his arrival at McCarran Airport, where a uniformed driver meets Buddy at the baggage claim. (Buddy is a very big bettor—but not quite big enough to warrant a chartered jet; instead, the casino asks that Buddy purchase a first-class ticket on the airline of his choice and let them reimburse him for travel expenses at the end of his stay.) Rather than departing through the street-level doors that most Vegas visitors use, Buddy and his chauffeur go down one level to an area known as “Ground Zero,” where a fleet of limousines awaits, like so many golden chariots ready to whisk Roman generals off to their next conquest. Buddy’s car this spring evening has a television and a bar and a stereo, all of which might come in handy if the trip to the hotel were more than five minutes.

Tonight, Buddy is headed for Bellagio, his current “home away from home” in Las Vegas. He has previously been a guest of MGM Grand, Caesars Palace, and the Venetian. Indeed, whenever a new property opens in Las Vegas, Buddy gets a call inviting him to be part of the festivities. “I don’t know how they get my number,” he says, chuckling. “I guess I have a reputation.” In the past, Buddy admits to having played one casino off the other, seeing who would “take the best care of me, who wanted my business the most.” Soon, he discovered, every place would take extraordinarily good care of him, including granting him a small rebate on his gambling losses. “I’m happy at Bellagio,” he says. “They take care of everything. It has great restaurants, great rooms—and great golf.”

One of the perquisites that MGM Mirage properties can offer its customers is a round at Shadow Creek golf club, the super-exclusive North Las Vegas fantasyland created for the pleasure and privacy of Steve Wynn’s friends and honored guests. Up until a few years ago the only way to enjoy a round at this vaunted playground was by invitation—and that came only if you were a friend of the corporation or an RFB player at one of its casinos. Now, any old hacker with a credit card can play the course, assuming he’s willing to pay the $1,000 green fee. (Hey, it includes a room for one night and limo transportation to and from the links.) Buddy, like every other RFB guest at MGM Mirage properties, is entitled to visit Shadow Creek whenever he likes without any charge, and before the weekend is over he will avail himself of the Creek’s pristine sod.

Upon arrival at Bellagio, Buddy skips the usual check-in procedures most Vegas visitors must endure. A smartly dressed (and absurdly attractive) young woman from the VIP Services office greets Buddy at the door, holding a small packet containing his room keys and a “welcome-back” note from the casino manager. (Buddy’s “details” are already on file, as is his excellent credit history. Indeed, the bulk of the funds with which he will gamble has already been wired to the cage directly from one of Buddy’s bank accounts, and if he needs more he’ll just sign readily proffered markers.) His suite this weekend—“my usual place” he calls it—is a one-bedroom, two-bathroom, six-telephone spread, as large as many single-family homes with significantly more furniture. After glimpsing Buddy’s weekend digs, the old myth that “they build Vegas hotel room small so you won’t want to stay in them” has never seemed more ridiculous: You could host a party for 100 fabulous friends here, if only you knew that many people who would appreciate the view of Bellagio’s faux Lake Como and the dancing waters below.

Instead of ordering complimentary room service and soaking in the Jacuzzi, Buddy is eager to visit the gambling tables. Without unpacking his suitcase—“they got a butler who will do it for you,” he reports—Buddy grabs an apple from the enormous fruit basket the hotel has waiting for him on his suite’s dining room table and dashes for the private elevator.

As on most Friday evenings, the casino is crowded, frenetic with the hum of clattering chips and buzzing slot machines and the staccato yelps of inspired gamblers. But where Buddy plays, the high-limit baccarat salon, there’s an air of refinement and sophistication. The croupiers wear tuxedos; floor supervisors welcome players deferentially and speak in hushed tones; the lighting is indirect and soothing. You could almost imagine you were in some ethereal corner of Europe, except for the presence of two well-capitalized Texans chatting loudly about the NCAA basketball tournament.

Buddy signs a marker for $100,000 in chips. “Just to get my feet wet,” he jokes nervously. He’s a millionaire many times over; were he to lose every one of the colorful discs before him—which he has done often in his gambling “career”—it wouldn’t change his lifestyle in the slightest. (In fact, he’d just sign for more and try to recoup his losses.) But it’s enough money to “get my heart beating, get the adrenaline flowing.” And, perhaps equally important, enough to afford him “the treatment.” Within twenty minutes of settling into a plush high-backed chair at the baccarat table, Buddy’s host strides into the room, all smiles and twinkling eyes, toting a day-timer as thick as a prime steak. “Mr. MacDonald,” the host says, extending a hand, “just wanted to say hello, and, you know, make sure everything was all right. The room? It’s all—everything’s fine, right?”

“Yeah, very nice,” Buddy says, barely looking up from the table to shake his host’s hand.

“And let’s see,” the host thumbs through his day-timer, “I’ve got you down here for a late dinner at Picasso tonight. Table for two, right?”

“Yeah, great,” Buddy says. “I’ve been hearing some good things about that place.”

“Oh sure. Great reviews. Lots of awards,” the host chirps. And he can’t help adding, “Very tough table these days.”

For a customer like Buddy, however, nothing is too tough. If he wants something he gets it—which is a delightful difference from the real world, where instant gratification isn’t necessarily the way things work, no matter how wealthy you are. The host departs, saying, “I don’t want to disturb you any longer”—code for “The longer I chat with you the less you gamble.” This leaves Buddy to the crucial business of trying to pick which hand will have a point total closest to 9. Buddy says, “You gotta love it, huh?”

Yes, you do. Just as the casino has “gotta love” a customer like Mr. MacDonald.

He wagers between $1,000 and $10,000 a hand, including frequent plunges on the “tie” proposition, a sucker bet that gives the house a hefty 14.4% advantage. (The “player” and “bank” bets at baccarat give the house closer to a 1% edge.) There seems to be no rationale to explain why Buddy sometimes bets a little and sometimes a lot. Like other baccarat players, he studies a chart in which he tracks the results of past hands, staring at it intently as he bites his lower lip, somehow convincing himself he can divine a pattern in the random succession of wins and losses. Anyone with a high-school-math-student’s understanding of rudimentary probabilities should be able to figure out that no amount of chart analysis can turn a negative expectation game like baccarat into a winning proposition, that the past results have no bearing on future results. But Buddy—and every other high roller in the baccarat pit—seems willfully ignorant of this basic truth. Or willfully unwilling to care. Sometimes he wins; sometimes he loses. But in the long run the house gets the money.

And this is why Buddy MacDonald is entitled to the treatment he enjoys. According to Max Rubin, author of Comp City, an expose of the Las Vegas comp system, a player like Buddy, who averages about $4,000 a hand at baccarat, is “worth” more than $50,000 in expected losses over a typical weekend. Since the casinos are usually willing to return around 30% of his losses in the form of complimentaries, Buddy, according to Rubin, has “earned himself quite a few fun tickets at the carnival.”

Literally. There’s a big fight card over at MGM Grand. When Buddy decides he wants to go, six hours before the bouts begin, he’s furnished with ringside center seats, directly behind Goldie Hawn, Kevin Costner, and the fight’s promoter Bob Arum, not to mention the best customers of every other casino in town. Most of the high rollers in attendance—including Buddy—have in tow what look to be terribly expensive companions who, contrary to a popular misconception, are not paid for by the casinos. (The casinos will gladly, shall we say, “make introductions” for their best customers, but in the modern, publicly traded, corporate Vegas, the fees for services rendered are strictly the client’s responsibility.) Buddy’s “date” is a dead-ringer for Sarah Jessica Parker, with slightly larger breasts and, based on the cocktail-napkin-of-a-skirt she wears, an even shapelier derrière. According to the high roller from Orange County, she is worth “every penny” of the $2,000 he pays her for the pleasure of an evening’s company.

It’s all worth it. He may lose a little. He may win a little. He might win a lot. He might very well lose even more. But no matter what he does or where he goes when he’s in Las Vegas, it always feels good.

Every time he sips the first-growth Bordeaux at Picasso and occupies the fifth-row-center seats at Cirque du Soleil’s O and fills a bubble bath in his suite out of the bottles of Dom Perignon shipped to his room like so many fresh flowers, it’s all courtesy of the casino. Every time he orders a floorman to scrounge up a good Cuban cigar or has a cocktail waitress bring him another glass of the $100-a-shot single-malt whisky or requests ever so ingenuously if his host might secure a last-minute reservation for him and Sarah Jessica to Le Cirque—it all feels good. For 48 hours Buddy MacDonald isn’t a successful electrical contractor with a wife and three children and two dogs and a gerbil. He’s a Las Vegas high roller, and there’s nowhere else he’d rather be.