Monthly Archives: April 2007

Sands ends with a garage sale

April 30, 2007 10:56 am

It seems apropos. From the AC Press:

Actually, hundreds of thousands of items will be up for grabs as the old Sands Casino Hotel clears out its vast contents in an “everything must go” sale beginning 10 a.m. Thursday. The public sale will continue for the next 30 to 45 days until the place is bare.

“Virtually everything that you see will be sold,” said Donald J. Hayes, vice president of National Content Liquidators, the company overseeing disposal of the estimated $1 million inventory. “Nothing will be held back.”

Where legions of gamblers played the slot machines and blackjack tables only six months ago, the former casino floor is now crowded with a sea of kitchen equipment and household items. Television sets, stereos, pots, pans, silverware, toasters, dishwashers, coffee makers, chairs, tables and much, much more have been tagged for sale.

The Sands is also liquidating the furniture from its 500 guest rooms. Beds, sofas, love seats, armoires, nightstands, lamps, pictures, chandeliers, marble vanities and even the Jacuzzi tubs are being sold off.

If you’ve ever fantasized of living like a high roller but couldn’t afford it, now is your chance to pick up some posh stuff at heavily discounted prices. The Sands is also selling the contents of its VIP suites where the high rollers and stars like Frank Sinatra once hung out. In the ultra-luxe Hollywood Suite, for example, a king-size canopy bed is being sacrificed at $2,250, a marble-top bar is going for $1,500 and a sprawling tub with waterfall jets could be yours for $1,495.

“It’s all very Frank Sinatra-like,” Sands spokeswoman Carmen Gonzales said of the lavish decor. “You’re not getting junk or over-used items.”

The most expensive items in the Sands likely will be bought by hoteliers or other business owners. Hayes said that two emergency generators are on the block for $35,000 each and an escalator will be sold for $10,000. Other big-ticket items include a video jukebox for $10,000 and pianos priced between $4,500 and $5,000.

There also will be lots of Sands memorabilia stamped with the casino’s legendary logo. Nothing, perhaps, could be more uniquely Sands than the towering, gambling-themed icons that decorate the outside of the building along Pacific Avenue. Hayes said the icons will be sold, but buyers will have to bring construction crews to remove them from the building facade.

After a 26-year run, the Sands closed for good Nov. 11. The casino and its 21-story hotel tower are being emptied in preparation for demolition in the fall. Pinnacle Entertainment Inc., which bought the Sands last year for $250 million, is clearing the site for development of a new $1.5 billion megacasino.

Atlantic City’s largest garage sale coming soon to Sands

Wouldn’t a garage sale-themed casino be a great idea? Just imagine a whole resort built with the cast-off bits of closed casinos, with fixtures of varying quality and wildly divergent design. Naturally they’d patch together the carpet from bits of remainder. I’d assume that they’d want to spluge and buy new for things like structural steel, though.

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Frank introduces anti-ban bill

April 26, 2007 9:32 am

In what might be the opening salvo of a campaign to reverse 46 years of federal anti-cross-border gambling action, Barney Frank has introduced a bill to legalize Internet gaming. From Marketwatch:

Attempting to roll back a ban on online gambling, House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank introduced on Thursday a bill that would permit Americans to place bets over the Internet.
Frank’s bill would enable companies to be licensed to accept bets and wagers online from individuals in the U.S.
The bill would exempt the operators from current restrictions on online gambling and would require licensed companies to have protections in place against underage and compulsive gambling, money laundering and fraud. Read text of the bill.
Frank, a Massachusetts Democrat, called existing Internet-gambling law “an inappropriate interference on the personal freedom of Americans” that should be undone.
Current law prevents U.S. banks and credit-card companies from processing payments to online-gambling businesses outside the country.
…
Speaking to reporters at a Capitol Hill news conference, Frank said he doesn’t gamble himself but said the bill is meant to address personal choice.
“This [current bill] is an intrusion on individual liberties,” Frank said. On Wednesday, Frank called Internet gambling a “victimless crime.”
The estimated 12 million to 20 million online gamblers in the U.S. contribute more than half the industry’s estimated worldwide annual revenue of $12 billion, according to the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Public Policy Center.

Internet gambling would be legal under Rep. Frank’s bill – MarketWatch

Online poker players will no doubt cheer the bill. I’ve got to confess that I don’t know enough about the political climate in Congress right now to handicap the bill’s chances. I just think we should keep in mind that we’re heading into what promises to be an extremely divisive poltical season en route to the 2008 presidential campaign, so you’ve got to think about how a yea or nay vote would help or hurt members of Congress and their respective parties.

I’m not sure that wrapping online gambling in the flag of personal liberty is the best tack for Frank to take, because there’s a fairly solid body of law that says gambling is not an inalienable right. Here’s why:

In 1960, the Nevada Gaming Control Board published it’s “Black Book,” or list of excluded persons. It had on it 11 men suspected of links to organzied crime–many hadn’t been convicted of anything–who were to be barred from all Nevada casinos. One of the men, John Marshall, was ejected from the Desert Inn after deliberately flouting the ban. Marshall sued just about everyone–governor Grant Sawyer, the Control Board, and the DI–and argued his case up to the federal 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, which ruled that Marshall’s exlcusion was justifiable and not a violation of his 14th amendment rights, though the court made it clear that the Control Board should follow regular procedures in putting people in the Black Book.

The upshot of this is that gambling isn’t a natural right: if a state or federal government can give a reasonable explanation of why you shouldn’t be allowed to gamble, you can’t gamble. And this is precisely the argument the Justice Department has used, arguing that “unregulated” online gambling is a conduit for money laundering and organized crime. You can disagree over whether they’ve proven that, but I’m not sure that you’d win in court.

The better rationale for legalization, looking at history, is dollars and cents: Legalizing online gaming will allow states to channel some of the money spent on it to the public good. A secondary argument should be that, by allowing already-regulated U.S. and European companies into the field, fly-by-night and criminally-linked competitors will be driven out. Regulation, rather than prohibition, may be a more effective regime for player protection and crime control, and it would definitely benefit states–at least those that chose to legalize it.

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In the news

April 25, 2007 11:05 am

Since my return, I’ve see Roll the Bones in the news twice. First, Chuckmonster at VegasTripping has posted a review of the book. Sure, that sentence doesn’t quite have the cachet of “Edmund Morgan reviewed it in the New York Review of Books,” but it’s good enough for me.

Second, I got the last word in Gary Rivlin’s New York Times piece on Vegas growth that ran today:

“People have been predicting dating back to 1955 that Las Vegas will reach a saturation point,” said David G. Schwartz, author of “Roll the Bones,” a history of gambling, and director of the Center for Gaming Research at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. “But me, I wouldn’t bet against casino growth.”

In Las Vegas, Too Many Hotels Are Never Enough

Who wants to bet that, since I sounded so confident there, casino growth begins to stagnate and even decline? Even if it did, I’d stand by what I said, since the historical evidence suggests that, all things being equal, even huge increases in supply haven’t glutted the market, though they weren’t too far off the mark in 1955, when they came pretty close to doing just that. The town survived by repositioning to appeal to business travelers as well.

So if in 2010 casinos discover that they bet wrong, and that the high-end market doesn’t absorb as much room inventory as they project, it won’t be a matter of casinos closing, but simply repositioning themsevles to the customers that are there.

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Return to Vegas

April 24, 2007 10:47 am

After a long break, I’m back in town. Suni and I went on our honeymoon to Italy, which was quite an experience–12 days of travel and fun, far away from the daily hubub of the Center for Gaming Research.

Of course, I couldn’t keep my mind totally off work stuff–not when the luggage carousel at the Venice airport was decorated as a ROULETTE WHEEL! As you might suspect, I had to sit and watch it go around once before saying, “Hey, it’s single zero roulette–that’s a house edge of only 2.7% if you bet on that one.” Luckily, though, I didn’t see too much other gambling stuff, even though this little place in Rome where I bought a cannoli (which, I learned is a misnomer: one of them is actually a cannolo, and the plural is cannoli) had a machine that said “blackjack” but looked like a video poker machine. I wasn’t curious enough to see if it was a full-pay jacks or better or not.

My Venice airport observation brought to mind the question: why haven’t they done this at McCarran? Hey, if they’ve already got slots at the airport, why not have baggage roulette? They could slap down a layout and you could bet on which slot your bag lands on when it comes out. You could also put a dollar into a special progressive jackpot that hits if your bag never makes it out. At least you’ll get something for your lost luggage that way.

We had a great time together there (just like we have a great time together here), but it’s fun to get back to work, too. I’ve got some very exciting things that I’m working on that might really benefit the gaming research field, so stay tuned.

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Pseudo spring break

April 10, 2007 5:40 pm

I know that it’s not spring break here at UNLV, but like Sammy (Davis, of course, not Hagar) sang so well, I’ve got to be me, so I’m taking off for a bit.

I’m not going to be checking email or voicemail, so if you need to reach me, you’ll have to wait until I return on 4/22.

Suffice it to say that, until April 22, gaming research and history is going to be the furthest thing from my mind. I might be thinking a bit more about Italian history, though. Have fun while I’m gone.

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Book review: Bust

April 10, 2007 9:27 am

Adam Resnick with Todd Gold. Bust: How I Gambled and Lost a Fortune, Brought Down a Bank–and Lived to Pay for It. New York: William Morrow, 2007.

Another day, another review of what seems to be a burgeoning genre–the problem gambling memoir. Like Burt Dragin’s Six to Five Against, Bust is a story of a problem gambler’s downfall and quest for redemption.

There are key differences, though. While Dragin never got in too far over his head, Resnick lost about $8 million in one incredible session at the Hammond Horseshoe. And where Dragin used his journalistic skills–and genuine intellectual curiosity–to plumb the literary depths in search of a answer to the simple question, “Why do people gamble too much,” Resnick, who thanks the word “fuck” in his acknowledgments and cops to Howard Stern’s Private Parts being the only book he’d read cover to cover prior to 2004, just talks about gambling and losing, gambling and winning, and gambling and losing some more.

That’s pretty much the book in a nutshell. There’s a little bit of introspection, but not much that would verge on soul-searching. Resnick thinks that his OCD is to blame for his compulsion to gamble–and he may be right–and thinks that if he’d had a stronger father for a role model, or hadn’t been surrounded by enablers, he might have straigtened up before bottoming out.

He’s probably right about that. Resnick makes it clear that, early on, he can get what he wants by dint of his charisma and charm, and it’s clear that for a guy who’s read a total of one book before 2004 to swing a big press book deal for a memoir takes some fast talking.

That might be the book’s biggest problem. Resnick isn’t an immediately sympathetic protagonist: he’s a guy who by his own admission gambled irresponsibly and bought a house and car he couldn’t afford, squandering six-figure paydays from his deal-making business career. It’s not the sort of thing that’s going to make your average working stiff say, “Wow–that could happen to me.” That’s not to say that the reader won’t feel a certain amount of sympathy for Resnick and (to a greater degree) his family as they read about some of his lows, but, as he insists, he alone is responsible for his predicament.

Gambling and losing is a pretty bad experience, but watching someone gambling and losing is an even worse one. Trust me–given my experience in casino surveillance, I’ve spent more hours than I care to remember watching people win and lose. And in my experience watching other people gambling was profoundly, soul-suckingly boring. Granted, I was doing it on a small TV monitor with no sound, but the thrill of gambling just isn’t vicarious–watching someone else gamble and lose $1 million doesn’t make for entertainment. So reading about Resnick’s string of losses can be a little hard, particularly beacuse he’s losing progressively more as the book goes on. You might want to reach in and scream, “Stop gambling already!” but as a passive reader, you can’t. It’s very similar to being in surveillance, actually, in that regard. Don’t expect to feel the highs of big wins, just the tedium of endless cards being turned and the continuing drumbeat of steady losses.

In that sense, the book brilliantly captures the gambling treadmill–Resnick goes from bookies to blackjack trying not only to chase his losses, but for a thrill that can’t be described and doesn’t translate well to the written word.

Following in that vein, the book’s biggest asset is its honesty. I described Resnick as a fast talker, and I’d sure think twice about lending him money, but it’s clear that frankly admitted his deceptions and his underlying gambling problem is therapeutic for him. Sometimes this honesty is painful. For example, an email that Resnick sends to his friends and family after being indicted o federal bank frraud and conspiracy charges, shows his mindset better than much of the book. “I want you all to know,” he writes, “that I am cognizant of the impact my current situation has on all of you….I will do my best to mitigate the preceding in any may possible.” It’s pretty sad that this kind of corporate boardroom talk intrudes on Resnick’s confessional letter, but I think it shows a lot about his worldview.

That said, those who’d like to lay the blame for Resnick’s gambling problems at others’ feet will be taken aback by his almost jealous declaration that he, and only he, is to blame. He doesn’t get much out of 12-step programs, but doesn’t bash those who do, though it’s clear that his own brand of absolution and treatment requires a very supportive group of family and friends and some deep pockets.

All in all, Bust is a useful document for those who want to see how gambling problems can lead some people to incredibly bad decisions (or is it the other way around), but it’s no literary tour-de-force. Maybe if Resnick had gone to classes during his undergraduate career (he seems rather proud of his having skated by with minimal effort and a smattering of fraud while in college), he might have had a baseline to judge his own story against–what would he think of Dostoyevksy’s The Gambler? I think that a man who lost $8.6 million in a single round of gambling might have something to say about that classic that the rest of us could learn from.

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WTO objections go mainstream

April 9, 2007 11:50 am

For a long time, I’ve been a little surprised that the US/WTO online gaming case hasn’t gotten more mainstream press. Now the tide may be turning. This LA Times editorial is a case in point:

ANTIGUA AND BARBUDA, former British colonies on the eastern edge of the Caribbean Sea, are smaller than Los Angeles and less populous than Burbank. Yet they may be able to force the world’s most powerful government to change its gambling laws.

Not since 1960 has it been legal under federal law to place or take bets on sports using interstate or international phone lines. The Federal Wire Act of 1961 and subsequent measures also have been interpreted to ban online gambling as well, or at least gambling on sports. At issue is whether those laws constitute “arbitrary and unjustifiable discrimination” against foreign firms.

Do they? Antigua and Barbuda argue that they do — and the World Trade Organization agrees. So do we.

…

So the U.S. faces trade sanctions from the WTO unless Congress does one of two things: Either acknowledge that betting on horses from overseas is no greater threat to the nation’s moral fiber than it is at an OTB parlor, or make OTB parlors illegal.

Maybe it doesn’t have the stomach for either. If so, then Antigua and Barbuda may want to ask the WTO to ponder why allowing the interstate sale of lottery tickets — a form of state-sponsored gambling — is any less hypocritical than the U.S. stance on thoroughbreds and trotters.

Get rid of gambling restrictions – Los Angeles Times

If this editorialist had read Cutting the Wire, he/she would have known that federal efforts to ban interstate gambling go back to the turn of the century, and that the Wire Act was the culmination of a half-century of agitation over the race wire.

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Don’t bother winning–you won’t enjoy it

April 6, 2007 9:49 am

To really appreciate that line, you got to read it with Marvin the Paranoid Android‘s voice in your head. This is my lead for an article in Scienfitic American about the fleeting nature of elevated happiness:

An experimental psychologist investigating the possibility of lasting happiness, Lyubomirsky understands far better than most of us the folly of pinning our hopes on a new car–or on any good fortune that comes our way. We tend to adapt, quickly returning to our usual level of happiness. The classic example of such “hedonic adaptation” comes from a 1970s study of lottery winners, who a year after their windfall ended up no happier than nonwinners. Hedonic adaptation helps to explain why even changes in major life circumstances–such as income, marriage, physical health and where we live–do so little to boost our overall happiness. Not only that, but studies of twins and adoptees have shown that about 50 percent of each person’s happiness is determined from birth. This “genetic set point” alone makes the happiness glass look half empty, because any upward swing in happiness seems doomed to fall back to near your baseline.

Scientific American: The Science of Lasting Happiness

If you’re an optimistic person, you can take solace in the fact that this process presumably works in both directions: no matter how crappy the hole cards you get dealt in that big Texas Holdem game called life, by the time you hit the river, you’ll be looking up.

On the other hand, if you prefer to see the downside, consider this: you’ll never be much happier than you are at this instant. Someone could hand you $10 million, and a month from now you’d find something to complain about.

I’m guessing that this article isn’t going to be reproduced in any casino promotional material any time soon. Why go through all thr trouble of coming down to gamble when you can get 2X points if it won’t make you happier in the end?

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Urban encyclopedia

April 5, 2007 10:36 am

In publishing news, I got my copy of the Encyclopedia of Urban History today. If you’ve got $300 burning a hole in your pocket and don’t want to get 15 copies of Roll the Bones, you might want to pick it up. Or you could just see if your nearest university library has a copy.

If you do, you can peruse my contribution–an entry on”Gambling” kicking off the “G” section, right after “Fresno, California” but before “Gangs.” Looking at the entry for the frist time, I see that my bibliography references a non-existent book–Uneasy Convictions, published by St. Martin’s Press in 2005. When I wrote this entry back in 2004, it looked like that’s where my next book was headed, but the work that ultimately became Cutting the Wire was instead published by the University of Nevada Press.

I’m just pleased to be included in a work that, according to its own review copy, “Offers both a referential and a reverential approach to produce a work that functions as a research tool and as a commemoration of scholarship.” I have a vague idea of what that means, and it seems an accurate description. If you don’t believe me, check out the blurb:

We are an urban nation and have been so, officially at least, since the early twentieth century. But long before then, our cities played crucial roles in the economic and political development of the nation, as magnets for immigrants from here and abroad, and as centers of culture and innovation. They still do. Yet, the discipline that we call “Urban History” is really a phenomenon of post-World War II scholarship.

Now, after a generation of pathbreaking scholarship that has reoriented and enlightened our perception of the American city, the two volumes of the Encyclopedia of American Urban History offer both a summary and an interpretation of the field. With contributions from leading academics in their fields, this authoritative resource offers an interdisciplinary approach by covering topics from Economics, Geography, Anthropology, Politics, and Sociology.

Yep–great things happen in cities, that’s for sure.

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Maybe this is why they went bust

April 4, 2007 2:05 pm

One of the most important keys to running a casino is the ability to monitor and account for your cash flow. In a business with no tangible products, the only way to tell if you are making or losing money–or have a leak somewhere–is to keep tabs on every cent that comes in.

Some casinos do this better than others, though with massive governmental oversight in some states, you’d think that it’d be pretty hard for casino money to go missing. Of course, in the real world things don’t always work out that way. Witness the goldmine of cash found under the closed Sands’ slot machines, via IHT:

It is the casino equivalent of reaching under your couch cushions and finding a bit of loose change.

Only the change collected from under or around slot machines at the former Sands Casino Hotel in Atlantic City, New Jersey, topped $17,000 (€12,700) worth of coins.

The casino was closed last November after 30 years and will be torn down later this year to make way for a new gambling hall. So when workers began removing the 2,350 slot machines for use at other casinos owned by the Sands’ parent company, they expected to find a bit of cash.
The money belongs to Pinnacle Entertainment Inc., the Las Vegas company that purchased the Sands last year. New Jersey gets 8 percent of the money in taxes — the same as it would had the money been won from gamblers.

The money was coins, casino tokens and even a $100 bill.

Some change had rolled into small spaces between machines, but most of it was found underneath them. The older-style machines contained buckets inside to hold coins that were deposited, and when they overflowed, sometimes coins rolled underneath.

But, $17,193.34 (€12,876.98) was a bit more than they had imagined.

“We never expected this much,” said Carmen Gonzalez, a spokeswoman for Pinnacle Atlantic City. “It was just shocking.”

$17,000 found under old Atlantic City casino slot machines – International Herald Tribune

Funny line: “New Jersey gets 8 percent of the money in taxes — the same as it would had the money been won from gamblers.” I’ve got news for you–it was won from gamblers. What did they think–the slot fairy tucked it under there?

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