The Super Bowl is an odd event. Nominally, it is the culmination of the NFL season, when the two best American football teams in the US go head-to-head. But 35 years of hype and television dollars have turned it into something more than a mere sporting event. The Super Bowl is now the biggest show in the world's showiest country. The pre-game and half-time shows are kicked off by massive names. This year saw the Rolling Stones with their album A Bigger Bang. The commercials have Hollywood budgets, while helicopters and gunships patrol the skies and waters outside the stadium. Nearly 100 million people tune in, and the event sees Americans shovelling more food down their throats than they do on Christmas Day.

So what better place to watch this feast of excess than in the city that has elevated excess to an artform: Las Vegas. The first glimpse of Vegas from the plane is priceless. Miles and miles of sterile desert, then all of a sudden, rearing up in the middle of nowhere you see the Eiffel Tower, the New York skyline, Camelot and one of the great pyramids. It's obscene, ridiculous and utterly hilarious.

But luckily it's not just British people coming to sneer at America's crassness in Vegas on Super Bowl weekend. There's a carnival atmosphere as Americans, attracted by Nevada's relaxed gambling laws, flock to Sin City to bet on the big game. And the Super Bowl is a brilliant game to bet on. You can put money on anything - the number of interceptions in the first half, the first player to score, the last player to score and, for the real expert, the coin toss.

Having led the mighty New York Jets to no less than four consecutive Super Bowls on my PlayStation 2, I was pretty confident with the depth of my football knowledge, so I put $100 on three different bets. Seahawks to score first with a field goal (I didn't see there being a lot of touchdowns in the first half), the Steelers to win by a margin of seven to 12 points (they were on a roll, and I thought their defence would be too strong for the Seahawks), and Hines Ward to score the first touchdown (he's got a funny name).

Vegas looks after its own in three very important ways during the build-up to the game. First, it provides the gambling. Second, every casino worth its salt provides a decent range of eating options: $12 all-you-can-eat at the Pharoah's Pheast in the Luxor ensured I didn't need to eat again for the next 36 hours. Meanwhile, my brother, his eyes glazed and his conversation repetitive, took advantage of the third important Super Bowl tradition: drinking. In Vegas, you can carry alcohol out of bars and onto the streets. Although the combination of gambling, sport and alcohol may sound like a recipe for trouble, the atmosphere over the weekend was exuberant rather than aggressive. The emphasis was on whooping and high-fiving rather than punching and head-butting.

In fact, whooping turned out to be one of the highlights of the weekend. In a city where thousands of dollars are won every second, there's no end of "c'mons", "hell, yeahs" and "yeah, babys". Joining in is a rare pleasure for a visitor from a quieter country. Nobody bats an eyelid if you shout at the top of your voice. It's like primal scream therapy with roulette tables close at hand.

As for the game itself, most people gather in the bars or their hotel rooms. One of the joys of Vegas is that you can get a relatively large room for a shockingly low price - the casinos know they'll take more than enough from you once you're on the gaming floor. The quality of the gridiron game is almost irrelevant - if you've put enough money on you're more than likely retain some interest in the game until the end of the fourth quarter.

The day after the Super Bowl, many visitors head home, their appetites sated. And that's the best thing about Vegas. The place is so expert at providing you with what you want as quickly as possible that you can fit in two weeks of entertainment in two days. On our first day, we flew over the Grand Canyon in a helicopter, rejected three offers of prostitutes, saw Coldplay live, strolled the (fake) streets of Paris and Venice, watched a couple of movies and lost a respectable sum of money on roulette.

I also learned a valuable lesson. My bets came in and I was $400 up. I knew those hours on the PlayStation hadn't been wasted.

Way to go

Virgin Atlantic (08705 747 747; www.virginatlantic.com) flies direct to Las Vegas from Gatwick six times a week. Return prices start from £486 including taxes.