Wednesday, September 20, 2006

The Las Vegas Sun looks at a former gambler who is coming after the
industry. The morality of gambling is not really an open topic in Las Vegas.
If you are really uncomfortable being around it and are opposed to it, don't
live here. You will hear the sound of slot machines in every grocery store
and corner store. Going to the movies often means going to a casino. And the
same is true for concerts or weddings and probably even your friend's kid's
bar mitzvah. If nowhere else, casinos are totally respectable here: to work,
to play, to celebrate and to hang out. But the morally and legally sketchy
history of the old gambling hall still has a tremendous psychological impact
on the corporate world that invests billions in building and marketing and
operating the Strip resorts. They fear change. One result of the hall's
shadowy legacy is that the resorts can be gaudy in their charity and
ruthless in their politics. As Joni Mitchell is once said to have asked
David Geffen: "Why is it so easy for you to be generous and so hard for you
to be fair?" You would have to live here to understand fully just how
comfortable and hardcore casinos are when it comes to getting involved in
county commission races, lobbying congress and tracking every tidbit of
legislation anywhere that might impact them. And, this frequently means
coming down hard on opponents. One casino company a few years ago got
connected to creating an anonymous flyer attacking a politician who didn't
do its bidding. No one gets in office here who has real and significant
plans to raise taxes on resorts.

Back in the day, of course, enemy No. 1 of the gaming industry were the
moralists who objected to gambling as a sin. But those were different times.
More recently, old-school finger waggers no longer have "Guys and
Dolls"-type worries over gambling and temperance and spend their time
focused on stem cells or gay marriage or other things instead. And,
particularly in Las Vegas, no grass roots movement against gambling is ever
going to happen.

Living in Las Vegas requires you to be more than OK with gambling; you also
must live surrounded by the sort of people engaged in putting money at risk
in games: the tourists, hobbyists, the professionals, and the people with
deep, life-destroying problems. This last category is the biggest headache
for today's industry. It would be hard to live here for any length of time
and not know someone who has destroyed themselves by gambling and often
ruined the lives of family members along the way.

Certainly, by generously funding many of the programs for compulsive
gamblers it seems likely the casinos have had some impact on the approaches
taken to the problem by professionals. Each casino has some sort of program
to help the addicts to varying degrees: sign up to not be mailed flyers, to
get yourself banned from the casino or to be contacted by a support group.

Of course, none of the casinos offer you a plan that gives you the money
back. The industry has plenty of fears about the nature of addiction and
gambling and marketing and the impact all that put together might cause for
the bottom line. On the surface, fears range from bad press to legislation
to lawsuits. The more cynical might wonder what percentage of gaming revenue
comes from people with problems. How much help can casinos really afford to
give them?

My own insufficiently informed and examined opinion is that knowledge is
power.

Enter Bill Kearney, a Philadelphia mortgage broker who claims to have once
lost everything to Atlantic City casinos. Knowledge is exactly what Kearney
is proposing.

Kearney has been pushing a bill through the Pennsylvania General Assembly,
one that Vegas casino corporations are keeping close tabs on. The bill would
require casinos to send customers a statement that would resemble a credit
card bill or 401K statement. You would know down to the last cent how much
you played, lost and won. Obviously, the gambling industry thinks this is a
terrible idea.

One complaint the casinos offer is that doing this would be prohibitively
expensive. The problem is that for regular customers almost every casino
tracks this information already and they regularly send other mailers like
coupons, incentives and deals to those same people. This is done thanks to
the casinos' rewards/loyalty programs.

Even for non-gamblers, unless you want to pay for the privilege, casinos
work hard to get you to sign up in a way that requires you to list things
like your address and phone number. They then give you a special card that
tracks what you do at every resort the company owns. So, when I was on
Atkins diet, Stations Casinos got me to sign up for a card when they started
to charge more for its buffets at Green Valley Ranch and Sunset Station to
pay anonymously (or, as they put it, they were offering a discount if you
have a card). Imagine how much more effort is put into keeping tabs on the
specifics for gamblers. Anyway, throwing one more mailing, with info on how
much you lost and won, probably isn't going to overwhelm any major resort in
town with more paperwork.

So, instead we get the foolish slippery slope argument. The Sun interviews
one gaming consultant: "What's to stop regulators from requiring McDonald's
to send out statements to customers who they think are getting obese?"

My first thought: lots of things are going to make that not happen to
McDonald's. Gambling has always been an industry with a unique level of
regulation.

The idea of actually letting people see how much their gambling is impacting
them in such a clear way seems overwhelmingly useful and empowering to
individuals. In fact, according to the Sun, MGM already allows this option
for players in their loyalty program.

As for how helpful this will be for problem gamblers, the experts
interviewed seemed mixed. Of course, many of the experts are funded by
casinos. But there is a certain common sense about the value in this idea.

What is also clear is that Kearney represents a new type of foe to the
gaming industry. Comparing himself to a traditional gambling opponent, he
tells the Sun: "They're throwing snowballs at casinos and I'm throwing
nukes. They'd never come up with something like this because they never bit
the apple. They never tried the product like I did."

Anyway, this right now is an idea in Pennsylvania that not only hasn't
happened there yet, but one that no legislator here has even breathed a word
to suggest should happen in Nevada. And it seems likely that will be the
case for as long into the future as anyone can see. Still, the notion is
powerful one. What do you think? Would this impact your gambling to know the
exact numbers that result from your play?