I’m gobsmacked

Breaking news from the LVRJ:

Penn National Gaming will not submit a bid for next week’s planned bankruptcy court auction of the shuttered Fontainebleau project, a company spokesman said Thursday.

via Penn won’t pursue Fontainebleau – Breaking News – ReviewJournal.com.

What? I don’t believe this. It was supposed to be a sure thing! This is shocking news. Now, if this was a company that had been talking about getting on the Strip for years and had failed to pull the trigger on more than one deal in the buyer’s market of late 2008/early 2009, I could see why people would be skeptical, but…

Oh, right.

Keeping busy

One of the things that’s been keeping me from rolling out that slot hold survey is the jurisdictions section of the Center for Gaming Research website. During the podcast I did with Steve Bourie, I talked a bit about how the section was a work in progress. Since then, I’ve been trying to get it somewhere close to what I envision for it.

Optimally, I want the section to become a starting-point for research into gambling in all the US states, with historical info and stats on lotteries, pari-mutuel wagering, commercial casinos, and Indian casinos.

I’m posting the first jurisdictional summaries with less than this–mostly lottery and commercial casino info–because I figure it’s better to get started and get some of the info out there than to have nothing at all.

So, here are a few summaries that you can browse:

Nevada

New Jersey

Pennsylvania

Delaware

Iowa

Colorado

Illinois

Mississippi

I’m in the process of doing the Delaware summary, and it’s a lot of fun. The regulators post the monthly slot data, but no annual summaries, so there’s a lot of math involved, with plenty of room for error, which means I have to do a lot of double-checking. It keeps me off the streets.