Guess which city earned runner-up to Vegas?
Pandemic? Please. Recession(s)? Whatever. Not even an “Army of the Dead” style zombie-pocalypse can take down Las Vegas (for real, didn’t you see how much fun those zombies were having?).
So it really doesn’t raise eyebrows to hear that 888Poker.com ranked the Entertainment Capital of the World No. 1 on a list of Earth’s greatest party cities, though it is surprising they even bothered to go through the exercise and rank us against the rest of the so-called competitors.
How did Las Vegas do it? This time, we had a little help from our friends in the cannabis industry. When you combine our world-class hotels, restaurants, shows, nightclubs, festivals, and don’t forget, citizens, with recreational marijuana, Las Vegas not only maintains its pole position, but it runs a few dozen laps ahead of the competition.
The 888Poker.com list gave Las Vegas an 8.75 (out of 10) ranking. Here’s what the site had to say:
In first place is the world-renowned Las Vegas, with a party score of 8.75. This incredibly high score has been well earned, just as Vegas’ party credentials have earned it numerous nicknames from Sin City to America’s Playground, with the city often being referred to as the Capital of the World for gambling, marriage and entertainment. The saying “What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas” tells you all you need to know.
Next time we’re going for that perfect 10 ranking, but 8.75 is good enough to bring shame on second place city New Orleans, which managed a measly 6.12. Prague checked in at No. 3, followed by San Francisco, with Amsterdam rounding out the top five. That’s right, Las Vegas is better than Amsterdam, according to 888Poker.com, and also everyone who lives here.
So what’s next? What hill shall Las Vegas conquer in the future? We’ve won the battles on almost every front. It seems the only thing that eludes us now is that “Titletown U.S.A.” distinction, which would require two or more of our sports teams taking their respective championships.
The Golden Knights and Aces are up to the challenge. We’ll see if the Raiders can get out of their own way long enough to gain the same respectability.
The Methodology (via 888Poker.com)
We wanted to find out which cities in the world are the best destinations for partying. To do this, we scoured the internet for articles, lists and sources that promoted different cities as being great for partying. We compiled this list of cities and picked several factors to measure them by. These included the legality of marijuana in each city, the number of nightlife venues listed on Tripadvisor, the number of budget hotels listed on Tripadvisor, and the number of casinos in each city.
We then calculated the rates per 100,000 people for nightlife venues, budget hotels and casinos using population data from World Population Review. This made the numbers for each city comparable, so we could use them when formulating the overall party score. To turn the legality of marijuana into a usable score, we attributed each level of legality a score from 1 to 4. If marijuana was legal we gave the city 4 points, we gave 3 points for decriminalisation, 2 points for only medicinal use, and 1 point for illegality.
Cities that scored 0 or close to 0 for these factors were removed, as they would populate the bottom of the results table due to data that was probably incomplete and not representative of the city. We also removed cities that had a population of less than 100,000 people.
Now that we had all four metrics in a usable condition, we combined them in a formula that gave casinos, budget hotels and marijuana laws equal weighting, while giving nightlife scores a weighting of 1.5 in comparison. This is because nightlife is usually the common denominator for any party city, whereas people are more likely to differ in their wants and needs when it comes to accommodation, casinos and drug use.
