Before casinos, international spies were forced to confront their nemeses at community bingo games. Add class to your showdown with today’s Groupon: for $40, you get a casino night for two at Empire Terrace Restaurant and Empire City Casino at Yonkers Raceway (up to a $126.85 total value). The night includes:

• One appetizer (up to a $14.95 value)
• Two entrees (up to a $45.95 value each)
$20 credit in the casino

Empire City Casino at Yonkers Raceway thrills patrons with casino games and live horse races, and keeps them filled with gourmet fare from Empire Terrace Restaurant's menu. Share a plate of Maryland crab cakes packed with lump crab meat or the beefsteak tomatoes and mozzarella, pillars of layered tomato and fresh cheese arranged to complement a balsamic-glaze pesto sauce and imitate Stonehenge's lunar chart. Chefs grill up 24-ounce prime porterhouse and 10-ounce filet mignon cuts from corn-fed beef naturally raised on Brant Farms. Filets of red snapper seal in their juices while sautéed in a mushroom, tomato, shallot, and garlic sauce before sidling onto plates alongside rice and the vegetable du jour. Diners unfold emerald napkins in the sweeping dining room bounded by a wall of windows that reveal an unblocked view of the raceway's half-mile dirt track, home to standardbred speed demons too hooved to get drivers' licenses.

After dinner, patrons can use their casino credit to play video poker, craps, keno, or one of 5,300 themed slot machines ($0.01–$100), which include glamorous Sex and the City games and round Wheel of Fortune units. Watch a ball fly in a game of electronic roulette ($5–$1,000) or merely gaze at the spinning wheel to build an immunity to hypnosis.