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:
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.
Hey. This is a great batch of info to provide. I’ve never seen anything like it before and simply figured all this data was held in top-secret.
This is the first time I’ve known what the tax is…and always assumed it was much higher.
I intend to view all this data…but first wanted to view the Hotel Occupancy info…which I think is one of the best assembledge of business data around.
When I decided to go back to Business School in 1988 (to take a two year course in Computerized Accounting) our final test (mini-thesis?) was to find such ‘business statistics’ and turn it into computerized spreadsheets using ‘Lotus 1-2-3′ software (and making various graphs, pie charts etc.) from such data.
I first started with a report on the rise and fall of RCA stock since it made such a perfect use of accounting software (and also for making different graphic charts).
But I wanted a more obscure batch of data to use and decided on showing the Rise & Fall of the Sardine Canning Industry (using 1906-1955 stats on tons caught, factories built, cans produced, sales, etc).
This accumulation of Vegas & Gaming Statistics can likewise be very useful to business students for similar reasons (like my school project of showing how ‘computer software’ can crunch data and what analysis and lessons can be drawn from such “seemingly” dead or lifeless stats).
I wish I had such data as this to work with back in 1988.
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The hotel occupancy rate (for LV) is fascinating and great ‘bar charts’, etc can be made from it.
Most of all though…it is mind boggling to me to see that LV has consistently filled up 80-90% of its rooms for all those years.
This is great data Dave. It can be useful to a wide variety of study. And thank goodness the Internet makes it so easy to now access. The importance of these historical stats will be seen for years to come…in ways we might not even begin to imagine right now.
BTW. Going back to the Room Occupancy stats made me realize how useful this data would be in deciphering what months of the year have consistently been the best…or for tracking where, why and when variations occurred.
If I was a gaming analyst or in the industry…I’d consider this to be the Holy Grail of Statistics!
[:<O
Please excuse the multiple comments, but I’m known to get easily over-excited over new data. haha. I just wanted to comment about this one particular statistic though.
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It is interesting to see that Las Vegas ‘Gaming Revenue’ accounted for an average of 61% of Total Revenue from 1984-93.
I thought it was much higher (proportionally) than THAT…from the way people talk about how Vegas Revenue used to be more from ‘Gaming’… but NOW relies on generating its revenue from other Non-Gaming sources.
I assumed that earlier Gaming Revenue was closer to 90% than what the stats show to be 60%.
Over the last 8 years Gaming Revenue averaged about 50%. That 10% drop-down doesn’t seem too out-of-line from earlier averages of 61%.
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This now makes me wonder when Gaming Revenue was (proportionally) at its highest. I’d imagine during the 1940s or 1950s. But since Food & Beverage & Showroom Entertainment were around then…maybe Gaming Revenue never DID account for 90% of income.
Maybe the only time Vegas Gaming Revenue was at its highest (proportionally) was back in 1935…when the only Non-Gaming Income was derived from selling cheap breakfasts, beer or baubles (or souvenir Nevada Helldorado Pennants in some small, saw-dust casino gift-store) on Fremont Street.
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It seems Food & Beverage might have accounted for a greater portion of Post-War 1950s LV revenue than I once thought…or that sources led me to believe.
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All these stats can be analyzed in a number of ways. My way, of course will be different…but this only goes to show how useful these stats can be to people in the hotel or gaming industry once they begin to use these stats for different uses more pertinent to their special interests or sectors of the industry.
This is a Gold Mine of data for the gaming industry to analyze.
Basically…what it ended up doing for me was making me realize how far Vegas has come. It’s gone from just having rustic gift-stores to world-class shopping malls in little more than a few decades. Not bad for a once dusty, rinky-dink, train stop-over town sitting between LA and Salt Lake City.
Not bad at all.
IMO
Oh wait! Now I see the 1967 reports from Downtown LV…where it shows that Gaming Revenue accounted for 73% of Total Downtown Revenue.
I didn’t know the stats went back that far. There’s a lot to decipher on those pages, DGS.
Hee hee, I’ve done very similar data collecting from different states, and doing so *really* helped me appreciate format consistency and ease of access (both of which are severely lacking in a lot of states). I wonder if you (DGS) have had to get creative in your data collection, like when the data is all there but not linked from anywhere so you have to type in something like “big-long-address.com/important-gaming-stats/January_2006.pdf” and then change the end part for each month, sometimes having to try “03_06.pdf” or “3-2006.PDF” or other formats because there is no standard?
Or was that just me? Anyway, this is huge, and huge thanks are in order. Your work will make it a lot less frustrating for a lot of kids out there to just get the numbers–all in one place, like they should be. This is a dream come true.
If only this were done before I pulled all my hair out over scrounging/hacking stats for Delaware, one of the worst offenders! And Louisiana! I still have nightmares about them! Agh!
… And since we’re in multiple-comment mode, Erik, Lotus 1-2-3 sounds like a yoga position….
Lotus 1-2-3 was the biggest business software program of the 1980s. It was used to program such things as nearly every department store’s electronic cash register across the country. It wasn’t some tinker-toy or home-computing software program. It was the ‘industry standard’ for 1980s economic software used everywhere from Wall Street to your corner 7-11.
The 1980 VisiCalc program (the previous financial-software program) was the the first spreadsheet program. Its name stood for ‘Visible Calculator’.
Around 1984…two hippie guys developed the Lotus Software company and purposely called it Lotus (as a reference to Yoga). Lotus 1-2-3 came out around 1984.
Lotus 1-2-3 combined three computer programs. A database, a spreadsheet and the first business-graphics program. The graphics allowed people to enter in numeric data and the program then instantly converted that data into graphs. The graphs were ‘line graphs’ (those charts that look like mountain-peaks and valleys)….’bar graphs’ and ‘pie-charts’.
Though the program did the chart-making instantly…it DID require lots of programming entries which people no longer have to deal with now-a-days. BUT…now…just like before….the person who enters the data still has to do the hard work of compiling the data and checking its accuracy (like DGS is doing).
Lotus 1-2-3 was THE main software of the mid-80s. It was later replaced by Microsoft’s Excel program.
The reason I mentioned Lotus 1-2-3 (Schopen-Howitzer)…was to (perhaps) remind people that statistics can be converted to graphics very easily…and that graphic charts can allow people to make sense out of a bunch of numeric data.
If some of Dave’s statistics were analyzed thru graphic charts…certain people could see the “forest-for-the-trees”. Simply meaning that….if you were to take all the data for (example) room occupancy by month (thru the 20+ years)….and place it into a 12 section Bar Chart or Pie Chart…a person could easily see which months receive the most patrons. (etc, etc, etc).
I had a reason for mentioning Lotus 1-2-3. It WAS an important tool…which, judging by your not knowing about it…deserves to be mentioned.
There isn’t anything out-moded in charting. That particular software might be dead and gone….but ‘charting software’ is available almost everywhere now-a-days.
As a historian…I felt it was important to bring the history of ‘computerized data crunching’ into the picture….on this subject of stats.
As for the Hippie Names of computer products, such as hardware and software….that goes back to the beginning of the Personal Computer Industry in the early 1970s.
Early computer people…like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates are Mid-Boomers (born between 1950-58). They lived thru the Hippie & LSD Culture of their time. Their outlook on the computer industry was that it was controlled be behemoths like IBM and the Corporate Business Culture of that Time….which held virtual monopolies on the main-frame industry.
Computer products were often given Hippie-ish names as sort of an inside-joke among the ‘Homebrew Computer Club’…and as a little jab at the Old-School, corporate mentality of companies like IBM.
The Borland Company had a software program called ‘Buddha’.
Larry Ellison named his company (Oracle) after the underground San Francisco, Psychedelic Street Rag called ‘Oracle Newspaper’ (though he probably won’t admit it now).
The founders of ‘Apple Computers’ (Steve Jobs & Woznizak) say they used they name and logo of Apple…because it would make their company name show up (alphabetically) ahead of Atari (another digital company of the time).
They also say ‘Apple’ refers to Isaac Newton and ‘the apple falling off a tree thing’. In their early days they even used an image and quote of Isaac as their logo.
Later, they chose to use an image of an apple as their logo (very much similar to the Beatles use of an apple logo…which was derived from Rene Magrite’s apple painting which Paul McCartney had recently purchased just before the Beatles came up with their name and logo for their 1968 launch of their (taxually beneficial to them) record company. The company was named ‘Apple Corps’ (another verbal-pun…and sort of joke on the words ‘apple core’).
Whether ‘Apple Computers’ intentionally used The Beatles ‘Apple Trademark’ is a matter that has been disputed in law-suits from the mid-1970s until about three years ago.
Like I said above….’Apple Computers’ originally was using the Isaac Newton logo. They also used an image of an apple which had a “bite” taken out of it. They used the slogan “Take a Byte out of an apple”.
The word “Byte” is a digital term…which they used as a sort of funny double-meaning ‘play on words’. (Hippies are funny people).
Apple Computers’ claimed that they used the Apple-Logo based on an Isaac Newton reference. And even util the 1990s…Steve Jobs liked that idea so much that he named (probably the world’s first good) PDA ‘The Newton’.
Whether or not the Computer company stole the Beatles’ trademark is an issue which became litigated by both sides over almost a 25 year span of time.
In the first lawsuit the Beatles won and received an unknown settlement. And Apple Computers was ordered to NEVER use that Apple trademark in areas of marketing any music products…to avoid customer confusion.
When Apple Computers began producing ‘synthetic music’ they got sued again by The beatles and lost. And when Steve Jobs come out with the IPod and began marketing music even more vigorously….The Beatles contested and won again.
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So yes. In response to your funny face remark…and to other remarks you make like “multiple comment mode” and “off on a tangent”…and to other remarks I hear like “rambling rant”, etc, etc. I thought I should take proper time to ‘clue-you-in’ on the meaning of my comments which you seem to like commenting on, zinging me about or finding amusing. :>)
If you think Lotus 1-2-3 sounds like a Yoga thing…you are correct. It was meant to. And that name and many other computer related names were meant to be funny ‘jabs’ against Big Business mentality of those times.
Jabs have been around forever it seems.
‘Off-beat names’ are now a part of modern business culture. Last night I read about a video-production company that decided to call itself “Pink Sneakers”.
Look at Starbuck’s Coffee. What is a Starbuck? The company claims it got its 1971 name from the character in Moby Dick. I think otherwise.
I first heard the name ‘Starbuck’ when I saw the 1956 movie called ‘Rainmaker’ a few decades after it came out. [A very good movie BTW, which I highly recommend to anyone interested in a story about a man who people think is nothing but a lying con-man].
You should watch it sometime. You might be able to relate to Katherine Hepburn’s character….in a way all women perhaps should.
Not every guy who uses strange language or whose ideas seem like he has his ‘head in the clouds’ is full of baloney.
Here’s a Wiki-Synopsis:
“Set in a drought-ridden rural town in the West in Depression era America, the film tells the story of a pivotal hot summer day in the life of spinsterish Lizzie Curry.
Lizzie keeps house for her father and two brothers on the family cattle ranch. As their farm languishes under the devastating drought, Lizzie’s family worries about her marriage prospects more than about their dying cattle. Even the town sheriff, File, for whom she harbors a secret yen, will not take a chance on plain Lizzie.
The arrival of a charming con man named Starbuck, promising to bring rain in exchange for $100, sets off a series of events which enable Lizzie to see herself in a new light.”