If you want, you can take a sneak peek at the latest jurisdictional gaming summary I’ve done at the Center for Gaming Research, Macau: http://gaming.unlv.edu/abstract/macau.html

I’m still honing it, so any suggestions are appreciated.

I’ve got a new Las Vegas Business Press column up, in which I discuss the historical context behind Wynn’s musings about moving to Macau.

Steve Wynn made headlines when he suggested he might consider moving the headquarters of Wynn Resorts Ltd. to Macau from Las Vegas. As always, Wynn's forthrightness points the way to a larger truth about the future of the casino industry.

Wynn Resorts is a Las Vegas success story. Since moving here in 1967 as a part-owner of the Frontier, Steve Wynn has been one of the city's prime movers.

He began making a mark in 1973, when he became the chief executive officer of the Golden Nugget, then a small downtown casino with no real distinction.

Wynn's aspirations outside of Las Vegas have always been an important piece of the puzzle.

via Las Vegas Business Press :: David G. Schwartz : When Wynn speaks, gaming listens.

I think that many of the so-called pundits have reacted more emotionally than rationally to Wynn lately, particularly since he’s become critical of the current administration, and that’s what’s driving some of the comments out there. We talked about this a little on the latest Vegas Gang.

Wynn’s political opinions and the possibility of his moving the headquarters of his company are, I think, two separate issues. It’s not like he’s threatening to go John Galt on us: he’s just saying that he might move more elements of Wynn Resorts to the city that is its top market. People give another prominent CEO grief for not living in Las Vegas, since that’s where the action is, and by this logic they should be demanding that Wynn spend more time in Macau.

The most fascinating thing about Wynn is that, like Jay Sarno, his career doesn’t have a single, predictable arc. If he did, he’d have just kept expanding the Golden Nugget or, at the very least, staying with that brand. Instead, you’ve had forays into Atlantic City, Mississippi, and Macau, with the sale of Mirage Resorts along the way. All the time, he was reacting to changing conditions. If things had gone differently in Atlantic City, he might not even have built the Mirage, or at the very least would have built it in Atlantic City, and casino history would be much different.

So it wouldn’t entirely surprise me if the next stage of Wynn’s career takes him in a completely different direction. It’s happened before and there’s no reason to think it won’t happen again.

My piece in the Las Vegas Business Press about the beginning of the end in Atlantic City is out:

Historians have taken the date 476 A.D. and the deposition of Romulus Augustus, the last Roman emperor, as the “official” date of the fall of the Roman Empire, even though at the time most Western Europeans were too preoccupied with daily survival to take much notice of events in the far-off capital.

When historians look back at the history of casino gaming in Atlantic City, they may decide that 2010 marks the beginning of the end of that city's reign as one of the country's leading gaming destinations, and they might focus on a single event: The decision by MGM Mirage to abandon its holdings in the city after the New Jersey Division of Gaming Enforcement found Pansy Ho, the company's partner in its MGM Grand Macau casino, “unsuitable.”

via Las Vegas Business Press :: David G. Schwartz : The beginning of the end for Atlantic City?.

I don’t think this is hyperbole. The revenue trends are showing a decline that started slightly before the recession that is more due to competition than the economic slowdown, although the recession hasn’t helped. There are real problems in Atlantic City.

Are there solutions? Yes, and they go beyond making Pacific Avenue a one-way street. As I see it, the city has to be reinvented to appeal to two groups: investors, who will buy or build new casinos and attractions, and visitors, who will fill them. These groups aren’t mutually exclusive, but they require different approaches. The average gambler doesn’t really care about how many levels of scrutiny casino vendors go through before they are licensed, but this sort of thing makes a difference behind the scenes.

It’s not impossible. The city’s been through worse, and the right forward-thinking people can help get it on the right track. The time for action, however, is now. If AC just continues to coast for a few years, it may be too late, at least for this generation.

Checking the headlines in the AC Press as of 2PM Pacific time, I couldn’t find a word about the seemingly-momentous decision of MGM Mirage to sell its stake in Borgata. This is curious, since you would think that having one of the biggest casino companies in the world, which at one point had billions of dollars in the development pipeline in AC, officially announce it’s selling out would be at least DEFCON 2-level news.

But there is this separate yet equally compelling story about an imminent state monitoring of the city:

State intervention in Atlantic City government could become a reality if the city doesn’t “get its act together” within two to three months, a state senator said Monday.State Sen. Kevin O’Toole, R-Bergen, Passaic, Essex, said he would be willing to push for a state monitor with veto power over City Council minutes if the local government doesnt return to the Senate State Government, Wagering, Tourism & Historic Preservation Committee with a good-faith response to a recent state audit report.State Comptroller Matthew Boxer answered questions and described some of the findings in his offices report on Atlantic City’s fiscal management, which outlined more than $23 million in waste and inefficiency .

via Atlantic City warned to “get its act together” or face state intervention – pressofAtlanticCity.com : Latest News.

This isn’t directly linked to the Division of Gaming Enforcement’s decision re: Pansy Ho, but it shows the heavy hand that state government has in the city itself, not just its biggest industry. And with $23 million in tax money apparently being flushed down the toilet, it’s hard to say that there’s no justification there.

The irony is that, if Pansy Ho had been suitable, MGM Mirage might have found itself doing business in two “Special Administrative Regions.”

I’d guess that, on the strength of the $60 million a year MGM Mirage gets from the Borgata and the value of the real estate the company controls (which I assume would be part of the sale), the company might fetch something $200-$500 million. I haven’t run any numbers to confirm this; that’s just my first impression based on about 6X EBITDA, which is right in the middle of those numbers, with some degree of flexibility for the value of the real estate (on the high side) and the depressed state of the general market (on the low side).

The problem, of course, is finding someone willing to pay big bucks for an asset (albeit the top-performing one) in a regressing market, particularly when the seller is very publicly identified as “motivated.”

Most people are assuming that Boyd will be the suitor, which makes sense, though this wouldn’t necessarily be a bad buy for an equity firm if they went into it with realistic expectations.

It likely wouldn’t be anyone else already in the market, since Harrah’s is already far too exposed in AC, Trump has its hands full with its existing casinos (though 1/2 of Borgata would actually be better than 100% of the Marina right now), Colony Capital has lost one casino to its lenders already, and Carl Icahn’s plate is presumably full with turning around Tropicana Entertainment and the Fontainebleau.

Anyone not in the market would have to do some serious soul-searching about their licensing, since the state has made it clear that they consider no company too big to show the door to. Even if Borgata can retain its market share (which might be difficult when Revel opens), it’s still piece, though a big one, of a nonetheless shrinking pie.

For a while, the Big Story was how hot Las Vegas was. Then it was Macau: The Next Generation. Now that Vegas has cooled off a bit and Macau’s hitting a plateau, we’ve got a new story: Macau is in dire straits. Even Time has picked it up:

But in the wake of the faltering global economy, Macau is not such a sure bet anymore. The problem is that some of those giants embarked on overzealous building sprees — since 2004, the number of casinos in Macau has more than doubled to 31 — and now the global credit crisis is threatening to topple at least one of them. Adelson's company, Las Vegas Sands, has undertaken an aggressive expansion plan over the past few years, winning the bid to build the $4.6 billion Marina Bay Sands casino-resort in Singapore and developing a $743 million casino-resort in Pennsylvania, among other projects. The credit crisis has left the overextended company in danger of defaulting on $5.2 billion of loans secured by its Las Vegas operations. Last week, the company said it would work towards completing the Marina Bay site, but Singapore's government is making backup plans to enact if the Sands fails to raise the necessary funds to complete construction. Then, on Nov. 13, the cash-strapped company announced that it would layoff up to 11,000 construction workers in Macau, after its decision to suspend work on part of the Cotai Strip — a $12 billion undertaking. On Thursday, Las Vegas Sands' share price closed at $5.58, down 95% from its peak last December.

Dark Days Ahead for Asia’s Las Vegas? – TIME.

If you factor out the visa restrictions and other extrinsic factors, it’s hard to argue against Macau’s growth in the long term. Of course, all those extrinsic factors are what makes Macau…Macau.

I just wish that we could get stories weren’t so extreme. It’s always “this is the best every” or “things can’t get any worse.” Usually, though, things can get better, and of course things can always get worse.

But I doubt you’ll see a story whose gist is: Macau is a promising market but it’s currently got challenges that only smart operators will be able to overcome. It’s too nuanced, and it probably requires too many value judgments.

If you’re not totally Macau-ed to death by the coverage of the Venetian Macau’s opening, here’s a great summary of what the big deal is. From the Economist:

Its construction involved filling in the sea between two of Macau’s islands to recreate the Las Vegas strip, and then carefully cutting out tiny canals to provide at least a hint of Venice. On August 28th the Venetian Macau, the world’s biggest casino, opened its doors to an ocean of people eager to get to its tables.

A packed ceremony in the casino’s 15,000-capacity arena culminated in Diana Ross singing “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough”—reflecting, perhaps, the hopes of both the gamblers with their stacks of chips, and the firm behind the casino, Las Vegas Sands. It would be hard to find a project more amenable to hype, or an industry less shy about disclosing its extravagance. The enormous building, Asia’s largest, required 20,000 construction workers and 3m sheets of gold leaf. Running it takes 16,000 employees and enough power for 300,000 homes. Construction costs swelled from $1.8 billion to $2.4 billion—more, the South China Morning Post pointed out, than Macau’s entire public-works budget for the past five years.

The Venetian has 870 tables and 3,400 slot machines in the world’s largest gambling hall, which is encircled by 350 shops, more retail space than any Hong Kong mall. That is also over twice as many tables as existed in all of Macau in 2002, when a local monopoly was broken and the Las Vegas operators were allowed in. This brought together American firms, with their business plans and architectural schemes honed in Nevada, and enthusiastic Chinese punters. Macau’s old casinos could not compete. Las Vegas Sands opened its first casino in Macau in 2004, and it became profitable overnight, as did casinos opened by fast-moving rivals. Investors took a while to understand the market’s potential, but between late 2005 and early 2007 shares in Las Vegas Sands doubled.

Chinese gambling | Macau wow | Economist.com

Is the Venetian really the largest building in Asia? I’m not saying it isn’t, but that’s a pretty grand claim.

I don’t even want to think about how they do table drops for 870 games. The next time I’m over there, I’ve got to get a tour and see how they can get a place that big to work. Scheduling dealers alone must be quite a task.

I wonder what Venetian Macau would have cost to build in Vegas? Considering that it was cheaper to build than Wynn Las Vegas and much bigger, I’m guessing that the costs might be prohibitive.

Interesting summary of the current state of Macau from Fortune, via CNN:

Hunter S. Thompson would have found much to fear and loathe in Macau, the former Portuguese colony rebranding itself as a gambling paradise. The good doctor (rest his soul) would have been vexed to discover that Macau, surrounded by water and crowded immigration checkpoints, is best entered by ferry, not gas-guzzling Caddy. No doubt he’d have been dismayed to learn that since Macau’s 1999 return to Chinese rule, hallucinogenic substances aren’t easily procured. But then again, when you can gaze at the Grand Lisboa casino, the newly built neon orb that throbs and pulses at the edge of the Macau peninsula like the Technicolor egg of some gargantuan radioactive monster, who really needs peyote?

Indeed, Western gamblers looking for something more exotic than Reno or the Riviera are in for a bit of a shock when they arrive in this smog-shrouded enclave. In Macau’s city center, the pastel façades of Senado Square and the ruins of St. Paul’s cathedral evoke Macau’s four centuries under Portuguese rule. But the frenzy of development elsewhere lends this Old World city the feeling of a frontier boomtown (albeit a relatively sober one: Macau’s hard-core gamblers prefer tea to liquor).

While Macau is now the world’s gaming capital last year revenue surged 22%, to $7 billion, vaulting the city ahead of Vegas – there are just a few decent restaurants and not much in the way of shopping or shows to speak of (yet). Still, Macau is a fascinating place to watch some of the most intense gambling around, both at the baccarat tables and amid vast, dusty construction sites, where high-rolling developers are betting billions.

The island was closed to all foreign competitors till 2002, when Beijing stripped local tycoon Stanley Ho of his monopoly over the island’s gambling concession, which he had held for 40 years. Faced with new competition, Ho (who also controls the lottery, dog and horse racing, the ferry and helicopter terminals, and the city’s largest land bank) rushed to gussy up some aging properties and build new ones. On a recent visit to his newest, the Grand Lisboa, a troupe of Russian street players performed slapstick routines beneath crystal chandeliers in the front lobby, while on the gambling floor upstairs, a trio of cabaret dancers shimmied in front of a giant oval of orange jade.

Ho’s offspring have also benefited from the boom: His son Lawrence partnered with James Packer, Australia’s richest man, and in May they opened the $500 million Crown Macau on the island of Taipa. MGM Mirage, owner of Las Vegas’s Mirage and Bellagio casinos, has teamed with Ho’s daughter Pansy to build a 28-story, 600-room hotel and casino set to open later this year on the waterfront.

Vegas entrepreneur Sheldon Adelson, however, is making the biggest wager that visitors here will want to do more than just gamble. After recouping his $240 million investment in the Sands Macau in just eight months (the cavernous casino set the world record for the largest number of gaming tables under one roof), he’s getting ready to throw open the doors of another Vegas outpost, the $2.2 billion Venetian Macau, on Aug. 28. The Venetian is the first phase of a truly mammoth complex slated for completion next year, which will include 20,000 rooms operated by five luxury hotel chains such as Four Seasons and Raffles. This so-called Cotai Strip (named for a bit of reclaimed land between the islands of Coloane and Taipa) will feature hundreds of yet-to-be-named restaurants and boutiques; a labyrinth of exhibit halls, performance stages, and conference rooms; and three Venetian-style canals plied by authentic Italian gondolas. The whole shebang will be sheathed in an air-conditioned biodome.

Around the perimeter of Adelson’s complex, Packer and Lawrence Ho have begun construction of City of Dreams, a giant casino and underwater theme park. Nearby, another group is building Macau Studio City, a casino-cum-multimedia-center that will include a boutique hotel designed by Shanghai Tang founder David Tang.

Macau now – July 9, 2007

It’s interesting to see how the idea that Macau is the leading gaming destination in the world is slowly filtering into the mainstream. I wonder if 10 years from now anyone will even have to say it.

It earns more in gaming revenue than the Strip, at least. It was either this or a post on Stanley Ho’s medical issues, and I honestly can’t think of anyway to properly blog on that one. From news.com.au:

MACAU says it has overtaken the Las Vegas Strip as the world’s biggest casino draw, raking in more than US$7 billion ($8.58 billion) in 2006.

The tiny southern Chinese enclave’s 22 casinos generated 16.7 billion patacas in the final quarter, taking the year’s total gross gaming revenues to 56.2 billion patacas ($8.83 billion).

By comparison, the 40-odd casinos on Las Vegas’ famous main strip – including the plush Venetian and MGM resorts – generated $US6.6 billion ($8.09 billion).

Macau’s renaissance from a crime-ridden territory with an ailing gaming sector was led by the Las Vegas Sands company, which opened the Macau Sands in 2004.

Other big American names to have taken advantage of the relaxed regulatory environment are Steve Wynn’s resorts and MGM.

Australia’s Crown casinos and Hong Kong’s Galaxy have also opened gaming centres.

Analysts tipped in October that the city had overtaken Las Vegas, based on earnings projections.

But today’s GDP figures are the first time that city officials have confirmed the historic development.

Gambling earnings have boomed in Macau since 2001 when the Government ended tycoon Stanley Ho’s 40 year monopoly on casinos in the city and allowed foreign operators to move in.

Macau punts Las Vegas in casino stakes | NEWS.com.au

There’s one thing I found very interesting: that in Australia, the Venetian and MGM are considered the major Strip casinos.

Another is that I wouldn’t describe Macau’s pre-2002 gaming sector as “ailing.” I’m going to quote from Roll the Bones here:

Rising from around 30% of the public revenue to nearly two-thirds of it, STDM’s gaming taxes kept Macau’s administration afloat throughout the 1980s and 1990, when Stanley Ho’s enterprises contributed around 80% of Macau’s tax revenue.

I don’t have the absolute revenue numbers at my fingertips right now, but that sounds to me like Uncle Stanley wasn’t losing any money on his casinos.

And congratulations to Hunter at Two Way Hard Three, who has the top Google result for “macau gaming revenues.” I can boast the top result for “casino carpet.”

I’ll get some interesting Google hits from that headline, I’m sure. In any event, Stanley Ho has opened his new casino, the Grand Lisboa. It’s next to his old flagship, the Casino Lisboa, and is dressed to impress. From the Washington Post:

Thousands of gamblers on Sunday jammed into a new casino owned by a local billionaire who is trying to fend off an invasion by Las Vegas tycoons who have been gobbling up market share in the booming Chinese territory of Macau.

Many of the punters who crowded into the Grand Lisboa _ shaped like a huge lotus flower covered in blinking lights _ were big-betting mainland Chinese who helped push Macau past the Las Vegas Strip last year as the world’s gaming center.

The five-floor casino is owned by Hong Kong billionaire Stanley Ho, who held a monopoly on gaming in Macau for four decades until 2002. The former Portuguese enclave _ two islands and a peninsula off China’s southeastern coast _ is the only place in China where casinos are legal.

In the past four years, some of the biggest names from Las Vegas _ Las Vegas Sands Corp.’s Sheldon Adelson, Wynn Resorts Ltd.’s Stephen Wynn and MGM Mirage Inc. _ have been aggressively building casinos, luxury hotels and mega resorts in Macau.

Before he opened the 3 billion Hong Kong dollar ($384 million) Grand Lisboa on Sunday, the 85-year-old Ho acknowledged that his market share slipped to 63 percent last year, and analysts widely agree that it will erode further. But Ho, who has 17 casinos in Macau, said his new flagship Grand Lisboa would compete well with the Las Vegas-style casinos because of his long experience in the market.

“We are the leaders, not the followers,” he said. “We know the city well.”

Ho is battling a common perception that his casinos are stodgy, smoky and plagued with surly service.

His new five-floor casino was decorated with plush red carpet and silver light fixtures with strands of crystal beads. The gaming floors have 240 tables and 484 slot machines.

The 52-story building _ with a 430-room hotel that opens later this year _ has a round base that looks like a giant Faberge egg covered in lights the flash red, green and gold. The design of its tower was inspired by the long plumes of a Brazilian showgirl’s headdress. The lobby is decorated with 580,000 Swarovski crystals, gold plated leaves and crystal balls.

Tycoon Stanley Ho Opens Casino in Macau – washingtonpost.com

Later in the article, the reporter claims that the Venetian Macau will be the world’s largest hotel-casino. At 3000 rooms, it’d be squarely in the middle of the pack on the Strip, so this must be a reference to the number of gaming tables. I should probably keep a page on the UNLV website with the top ten casino resorts in the world by room count, gaming positions, square footage, gross revenue, and whatever other metrics they use. But, time being limited, I don’t…yet. If I were to keep a list, I’d have to make distinctions that the casino operators–or the PR people–might not like. For example, will Venetian/Palazzo be considered a single “integrated complex?” If so, it would be the world’s biggest by room count, but, by that logic, should Mirage/TI or, for that matter, Excalibur/Luxor/Mandalay Bay be considered “integrated complexes?” I don’t know, but I’d have to decide if I wanted to make the list authorative.

Also interesting that, even as Dr. Ho’s market share is slipping (“only” 63%), the pie is getting bigger, and since real estate is booming and he owns much of Macau, he’s got to be getting richer.

As far as the casino itself goes, it’s got about 3 times the tables of your typical Strip joint but one-fifth the slots, if you need a reference point.

There’s a very interesting story about Macau from the Independent:

The Grand Waldo is a large casino with 168 tables and 334 slot machines, but it also has restaurants, shops, a luxury hotel, spa, nightclubs, a fitness centre, a swimming pool, a children’s playground and, inevitably for a casino targeted at the Chinese, karaoke facilities.

There is no question where the punters come from. The discerning ear can pick out the distinctive dialects of Fujian, Beijing and Shanghai – this is a playground for mainland Chinese gamblers.

It feels as if a casino is being built on every bit of land in Macau, making one fear for the elegant ruins of churches built by 16th-century Portuguese missionaries. Where no land is available, it is taken from the sea. The Grand Waldo is merely the first to open on the Cotai strip, a £13bn neon avenue of casinos, hotels and shops on 200 acres of reclaimed land that connects Taipa and Coloane, two small islands off the southern Chinese peninsula.

Elsewhere on the strip, beneath scores of cranes, armies of hard-hatted workers are putting the finishing touches on the Venetian Macau, a 39-storey replica of the Doge’s Palace in Venice, with a huge statue of the archangel Gabriel on top and 3,000 suites inside.

The strip will raise Macau’s current tally of 12,000 hotel rooms to 54,000 in 10 years. The backers of the scheme, the single biggest tourist investment anywhere, are betting it will steal the gaming jackpot from Vegas.

Macau generated £3bn in casino-gambling revenues, just slightly behind the Las Vegas strip’s turnover of £3.2bn. But where Las Vegas beats Macau hands-down is on non-gaming income. In Vegas, visitors stay a lot longer, spend a lot more but gamble a lot less.

Many of the 19 million visitors lured to Macau’s balmy precincts are day-trippers, or gamble their way through their visit, or stay in a massage parlour. Nearly three quarters of all money spent in Macau goes on gambling, leaving just £12 per visitor for other activities. In Las Vegas, gaming makes up just 41 per cent of the spend, with the rest, an average of £128, going on hotels, food, shopping and entertainment. Cotai’s promoters hope the strip will solve the conundrum of how to make people stay longer. By injecting Vegas-style glitz, they aim to overcome the reputation for seediness and gang warfare that Macau has developed.

Independent Online Edition > Asia

It’s a good snapshot of where Macau is now, though I find it interesting that Stanley Ho is included almost as an afterthought.

Closings were in the news yesterday, but there was a big opening in Macau as well. From the AP:

Thousands of gamblers crowded into American billionaire Stephen Wynn’s new $1.2 billion casino resort on Wednesday in Macau — the Chinese territory that may soon unseat the Las Vegas Strip as the world’s most profitable gambling capital.

Fireworks showered the Wynn Macau with sparks just before its midnight opening. A huge sign lit up with red lights, while speakers blared Frank Sinatra’s “Luck be a Lady” outside the 600-room complex that hopes to lure China’s swelling population of gamblers.

Macau — a peninsula and two islands off the southeastern Chinese coast — is the only place in China that allows casino gambling. The tiny territory — less than one-sixth the size of Washington, D.C. — was a Portuguese enclave until it was handed back to China in 1999.

Zhu Jingqing, a middle-aged man from the central Chinese province of Hubei, was in the huge crowd that rushed into the casino when it opened.

“I feel that all mainlanders should come here to have a look,” he said.

Kong Ermu, 28, a Chinese tourist from the eastern province of Anhui, said, “It’s far better than what I imagined. It’s classier and comfortable.”

Wynn, 65, was one of two Las Vegas gaming tycoons who were allowed to open casinos here after the government in 2002 broke up a monopoly controlled by local mogul Stanley Ho for 40 years. Ho’s casinos were smokey, dingy venues — far from the glitz and sparkle of Las Vegas.

Ending the monopoly sparked a building boom that will bring an estimated 2,200 new hotel rooms into the market this year and another 15,000 in 2008.

“The speed of development is dizzying. The population it seeks to serve is expanding,” Wynn told reporters just hours before his resort’s midnight opening.

Many believe that Macau will soon overtake the Las Vegas Strip as the world’s casino capital. Last year, Macau was about even with the Las Vegas Strip, which had “win,” or net amount lost to casinos, of $5.3 billion. Experts see Macau’s gambling revenue growing quickly to $9 billion to $11 billion by 2010 and upward of $15 billion by 2012.

U.S. Mogul Wynn Opens Macau Casino

Of course, time will tell if Wynn is right–some, including Sheldon Adelson, say he’s not–but if the past is any predictor, he will be.

The day has arrived…after about a year of research and writing, I’ve finished the first draft of Roll the Bones: The History of Gambling.

What does this mean for you, the reader? A chance to do some more reading. Gotham will be bringing the book out next June, so if you’ve ever bemoaned the lack of a one-volume comprehensive history of gambling, you’ll have a few hundred pages of beach reading for ‘06. Or something to pass the time with while your friends are playing “just one more hand” at the tables. Unless you’re in Macau, where bringing books into the casino is strictly forbidden, as the word “book” has unlucky connotations. See, you haven’t even started reading, and you’ve already learned something (unless, of course, you’ve been to Macau).

For me, this is the culmination of a lot of work, and the prelude to even more. Right now the manuscript is 768 pages in MS Word, which translates to about 500 in actual book form. I’m guessing that the ideal book will be a bit shorter, so I’ve got some revising to do. This is more than twice as long as Cutting the Wire, which is less than 300 pages in book form.

I’ll be posting more info on the Roll the Bones page as I get it, but here are some little facts:

- manuscript structure: 12 chapters plus prologue and epilogue
- total manuscript pages: 768
- word count: appro. 190,000 (The next time I teach a class and get a student complaining about a 500-word essay…forget about it)
- first use of word “gambling:” page 4, preface

I tried to be comprehensive, so there are section on gambling from all around the world. The thing that should get the History Channel excited, though, is that I even have a paragraph or two on Hitler’s Casino. Seriously. We’ll see if that makes it through the revising.

What’s next? Selecting the photos and revising, then starting work on my next project, which I’d like to see come out in 2008. I don’t have anything in writing yet, but I’m leaning towards a biography for this one. After spending a year writing about everything to do with gambling, I’m looking forward to a more focused narrative.

Thanks to everyone who gave me support during this writing. Doing this website has been a lot of fun, but writing the book, particularly during the past few months, has cut into the time I can spend on it. I’m looking to start reading for pleasure again and getting a few reviews up: I owe Brian Rouff one for Dice Angel, and I’m finally going to start Money Shot. I’m just finishing Deke Castleman’s Whale Hunt in the Desert, which is an interesting inside take on the VIP casino host world. Again, you the reader benefit!

So just when I’m thinking that I’m having a good day Thursday, here comes news that someone else is having an even better day: an unidentified Rhode Island guest at Isle of Capri Biloxi hit the quarter Wheel of Fortune slots for $1,058,459.34. Based on my year of research into 7000 years of gambling history, my advice is to quit while you’re ahead.

Most people associate Macau with gambling, but according to the Rugged Elegance Inspiration Network, you can get some nice clothes made there, too.
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It used to be that “sleeping with the fishes” meant that you had permanently cashed in your chips. But a planned Macau casino will let people gamble in an underwater gambling hall.
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One of the things that struck me in Macau casinos was the prevalence of private VIP salons. Leased by junket operators, they give a share of profits to the casino but seem to be independently run. At last, there’s something in print that explains the phenomenon.
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I just couldn’t pass up this quote. Is xenophobia alive and well in Macau, or is A casino magnate just trying to articulate his vision for his company’s continued dominance?

“We are Chinese and we will not be disgraced. We will not lose to the intruders.”
–Stanley Ho

This was in an interesting story (with an opening historical misstatement) called Macau may trump Vegas (28-03-2005).

This week, I was talking to a reporter about the comparative nightlife of Macau and Singapore (I actually was taken to this place in Singapore). I struggled for words to tactfully explain what appeared to be the rampant prostitution in both cities. Singapore did a much better job of containing aggressively solicitous prostitutes to the nightclubs, while in Macau they seemed to rule the streets. At last, I have found a journalistic treatment of this phenomenon.
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You’ve got to love the subhead for this Guardian look at Macau: “With mobsters jailed and foreign investors pouring money into its gaming industry, Macau is enjoying a spectacular boom .”
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If it’s on the Internet, it’s got to be true, right? Maybe not. According to Dow Jones (so says Yahoo), Wynn Resorts is looking to build in Singapore. That seems reasonable. But one paragraph in, the article says that Wynn owns the Bellagio and Mirage.
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“Is it logical to believe in any form of luck? Before an event–no. After an event and the result is known–yes. In other words, there is no way to predict whether you will be lucky or unlucky before playing a game of chance, but after you have finished, the result will only then show whether you were lucky or unlucky.”

– Macau A-O-A Gambling Handbook

I just thought I would post the single least helpful bit of gambling advice I’ve ever read. Actually, I take that back. Most gambling advice (except to set loss, win, and time limits for yourself) is inherently bad.

Still, this seems like a rather expensive way to find out if you are lucky or not.