COLUMN ONE : Asians Give Vegas Full House : ‘Sin City’ has embraced the Far East, using entertainers and farflung tourism offices to court gamblers. One casino has even built a Buddhist shrine.

LAS VEGAS —  While Lou Rawls performs at the Golden Nugget and exotic showgirls romp at the Stardust, a packed showroom at the Desert Inn Hotel and Casino is anxiously awaiting the arrival of Mr. Cucumber from Taiwan.

“Ladies and gentlemen!” the emcee barks in Chinese as the band cranks up. “That superstar king of Taiwan comedy, Hu Gua!”

The crowd cheers. The tuxedo-clad Chinese performer, whose stage name means cucumber in Chinese, storms onto center stage through a flood of pulsating lights and billowing stage smoke.

Hu Gua, the “Johnny Carson of Taiwan,” launches into a snappy Chinese tune. “Oh, he’s good,” one woman swoons. “He’s the king.”

It is a sign of the changing times on the Las Vegas Strip that where Liberace, Wayne Newton and Sammy Davis Jr. once ruled, the marquees now blaze with names like Hu Gua, Ma Shih-li and Yang Lieh.

Las Vegas--that paradigm of American excess and decadence--has embraced Asia.

Stung by seesawing oil prices, competition from Atlantic City, N.J., and a moribund U.S. economy, “Sin City” has turned its attention toward Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan and other booming Asian locales in search of gamblers.

Instead of Middle Eastern potentates or Texas oil barons, the Asian gambler has become the most sought after high roller of the ‘90s. The growing Asian community on the West Coast has been a source of valued “low rollers” as well.

“They gamble every day, they wager against each other, they play hard,” said Terry Lanni, president of Caesars World Inc., which owns Caesars Palace in Las Vegas.

Asian gamblers are being courted with everything from $6 overnight bus tours from Los Angeles’ Chinatown to all-expense-paid junkets out of Jakarta, Taipei and Seoul.

The largest casinos, such as Caesars Palace and the Mirage, have opened year-round marketing offices in the Far East and most have added Asian games such as pai gow and sic bo to their repertoire.

“The business from Asia has just exploded incredibly,” said Desert Inn President Kevin J. Malley.

The U.S. Travel and Tourism Administration reported that the annual number of visitors from Asia to Las Vegas increased from 121,000 in 1985 to 286,000 in 1989. The Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority is reaching out for more with branch offices in Japan and Taiwan.

The increasing flow of Asian visitors has not only had an effect on casinos, but on the city of Las Vegas as well.

The population of Japanese, Chinese and Koreans in town has increased with the demand for bilingual casino workers. Tour companies, hotels, restaurants and even escort services regularly advertise in Asian languages.

The renowned Chicken Ranch brothel outside of town recently had its sex menu printed in Japanese, leading to such translational challenges as “Fantasy Session” and “Y’all come back now--ya’hear.”

Old-timers around Glitter Gulch say that the importance of the Asian gambler to Las Vegas has been mounting for the last two decades.

They have enjoyed a longstanding reputation as enthusiastic players, which Far Eastern businessmen say is an outgrowth of the risk-taking entrepreneurship that created the Asian economic boom, but others say is simply cultural.

“Gambling is a tradition. Just look, every child knows how to play ma jiang (commonly spelled mah-jongg),” said tour guide Alex Liu.

But it was only in the 1980s, as the Japanese gross national product grew by 78% to nearly $3 trillion and the Taiwan stock market index grew eight-fold in four years, that the pursuit of the Far Eastern gambler reached fever pitch.

The last five years have seen casinos scurrying to outdo one another with ever more opulent Asian parties, Asian gaming areas and Asian restaurants. Next to its Roman temple, Caesars Palace even installed a Buddhist shrine for convenient prayer. The shrine was donated by Thai newspaper tycoon Kamphol Vacharaphol and Hong Kong shipping magnate Yip Hon.

Las Vegas also exerts a powerful allure for Asian visitors, fascinated by not only the city’s casino gambling (illegal in much of Asia), but also its glamour, which some visitors say is missing from Far Eastern gambling resorts, such as those in Macao and Korea.

“Everyone wants to come to America to become wealthy,” said Ling Chuang, a 24-year-old Alhambra student from Taiwan who was on her first visit to Las Vegas. “This is America. It is so prosperous, like an illusion.”

Although the number of Asian gamblers is only a fraction of the 20 million tourists who visit Las Vegas each year, they exert economic power that far exceeds their numbers.

Malley estimated that 90 of the Desert Inn’s top 100 gamblers are Asian and about 45% of the casino’s revenue comes from gamblers from the Far East or such West Coast cities as Los Angeles, San Francisco and Vancouver.

“It’s not just limited to the Desert Inn,” Malley said. “The same is true of Caesars, the Mirage or whatever.”

In fact, on the weekend of Hu Gua’s performance, billed as “Chinese Christmas,” Caesars Palace and the Mirage also hosted their own Asian parties, although the Desert Inn’s was one of the largest, with more than 600 people in attendance.

Malley watched the show from a box seat as Hu Gua, accompanied by singers Ma Shih-li, “the long-legged beauty,” and Yang Lieh, “the song king,” went through 2 1/2 hours of Taiwanese political jokes, Chinese dialect puns, Mandarin pop tunes and several animal, bird and gunfire imitations that had the crowd rolling in the aisles. “I don’t know what they’re saying, but it seems like we had a good act,” Malley said.

As a special gesture of welcome, a representative of Nevada Gov. Bob Miller presented Hu Gua with an official proclamation, declaring him an “honorary Nevadan.”

“For all of you who came from afar, we welcome you here to Nevada!” said Rozita Lee, special assistant to the governor. She added after the performance: “It’s in the name of getting business.”

On that account, the show was a smashing success. The Desert Inn was packed--particularly at the baccarat tables, where the maximum bet is $100,000 and it takes at least $100 a hand to get in the game.

Baccarat is the game of choice for the highest of the Asian high rollers. The card game is known in Chinese as “ bai jia le, “ or “100 families happy,” and is remarkably simple to play.

Nestled in a plush velvet chair with about $30,000 in chips on the baccarat table, Taiwanese shipping company owner Steve Tseng pushed forward a tiny stack of orange ones. It’s a $6,000 bet--his usual. “Gong! gong! gong!” a group of gamblers chant, demanding a face card as a dozen casino employees in formal attire mill around.

Tseng loses the hand, but is nonchalant. “Everyone loses to the casino,” Tseng said. “But if you lose within your capabilities, it doesn’t mean much.”

He figures his “capability” at about $500,000 in a week of gambling. “We come here to play, but don’t forget how hard we work,” Tseng said. “Every successful businessman should like gambling because business itself is a gamble.”

Casinos court the high roller with free air fare, meals and luxury accommodations. But the personal touch is also important. Lanni, of Caesars Palace, spends six weeks a year in the Far East wining and dining prospective customers.

The Asian market includes not just high rollers, but “middle rollers” and “low rollers” as well, providing a bounty for casinos and hotels of a more humble nature than Caesars or the Desert Inn.

Way off the Vegas Strip, past the Mirage’s exploding volcano and the extravagant “fantasy suites” at Caesars Palace, the no-frills Continental Hotel is trying hard to cash in on the Asian tourist.

The Continental is one of the most popular destinations for the bus tour crowd, which has grown enormously with the increasing Asian immigrant population in Southern California.

There are no high roller tables at the Continental; no ritzy teppan yaki restaurants here. Tiny Tim, who has lost his falsetto, is performing to a small but polite group of mostly senior citizens in the lounge.

Jim Calvello, director of marketing for the 400-room hotel, said the Asian market has been gradually building over the last five years and now, on weekdays, at least half of the rooms are rented to Korean, Japanese or Chinese tour groups from California.

Those who stay at the Continental are mostly small-time gamblers who play $100 or $200 a stay. But they are an important group for Las Vegas, which has discovered that it can make up for the dwindling supply of high-stakes gamblers with masses of players at the slot machines and $2 blackjack tables.

The lifeline feeding the cavernous, new slot parlors are the bus tours and at the very bottom of the bus tours are the $6 junkets out of Chinatown.

For less than the price of a tank of gas, a tour provides round-trip bus fare, three meals, a hotel room for the night and even a Chinese breakfast bun for the ride up to Vegas.

“It is very cheap,” said Willy Chua, a University of Utah student who sat quietly at the back of a 50-seat tour bus as it groaned its way up the Cajon Pass.

There is a sandstorm outside. The bus passes three highway accidents. Limbs are beginning to numb.

By the time the bus unloads at the Aladdin Hotel and Casino eight hours later, some passengers are visibly nauseated. Now, they have to gamble for five hours at the Aladdin or the tour company will forfeit its reimbursement from the casino. The tour guide suggests that the group go to a second casino afterward, but relents out of pity and finally takes them to the hotel.

As businesses have leaped into the chase to tap into the Asian market, there have been numerous missteps.

For example, the Mirage had designed a private gambling area with shelves of books along the walls, only to discover later that the Chinese word for “library” is pronounced the same as “room of losses.” The books were quickly removed.

But the cultural misunderstandings have been minor detours. Most casino executives say that the Far Eastern market will continue to build.

Others are more cautious, recalling how the big gambling money from oil riches vanished after the price of crude plummeted. They cite last year’s stock market crash in Taiwan as a sign that the same could happen with the Far Eastern gambler. The stock market lost 70% of its value at one point, crushing legions of paper millionaires. One estimate put the average loss of investors at $49,000.

Such swings leave Las Vegas ever sensitive to shifting fortunes in the world. Lanni, of Caesars Palace, believes a significant part of the city’s future may lie in Europe. “It’s going to be a tremendous market,” he said. “We’re going to open an office in Milan by July and then Greece and probably Germany.”