Via Marginal Revolution, a quote from Machine Gambling in Las Vegas:
While in the past the typical gambling addict had been an older male who bet on sports or cards for ten years before seeking help, now it was a thirty-five-year-old female with two children who had played video for less than two years before seeking help.
Lonely old white men used to hog the gambling addiction, but that stereotype has, finally, been shattered: young mothers are no longer forced to ride in the back of the bus to bankruptcy.
You know, when we stop to think about all the progress America has made toward ensuring that the marginalized get equal access to financial ruin, we shouldn't forget that it's unsung individuals like Donald Trump, Steve Wynn, and Sheldon Adelson who are some of the real heroes.
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65 comments:
Superserve the core
You've come a long way baby!
Spain and rural US are full of depressing tiny casinos with nothing but video gambling machines and downscale looking gambling addicts of both sexes. The gambling industry is very lucky to have Las Vegas set the imagine of casinos in the American mind.
Online video poker addicts are mostly young men though who have been brainwashed. It turned out that many of the larger poker websites had management engaged in systematic cheating or were Ponzi schemes. I sympathize with gambling addicts, I found my three or so lifetime trips to casinos when I actually gambled was intoxicating almost precisely like amphetamines. What scared me off was my final trip, where I lost $400 but felt extremely good doing it.
Geez, wouldn't you know they'd go for cheap sucker games too. When I worked in Nevada 40 years ago, the smarter women went in for Blackjack. Old ladies played the machines.
OT, doesn't it seem like non-gambling card games are just not done anymore? To think of all the energy people used to put into Bridge, Canasta, whist, rummy etc.
But when you think about it, aren't the brave actresses of fetish porn movies the Real Heroes of society? And don't forget the drug mules smuggling the heroin Americans won't conceal
Speaking of casinos, one of the strange things about the USA is that in many states the market is monopolized under state law by "tribes" of fake Indians. It would be a simple matter for CA and CT and so on to just auction off a limited number of casino licenses, possibly with a rule they can't be in urban areas.
Guys, it could be worse. i.e. We're not yet at the Gibbonesque stage of fake sign language guys infiltrating or being openly contracted for state funerals.
@Anonymous 4:05 pm There's a casino in tiny Oxford, Maine across the road from a dairy farm. My girlfriend is telling me we got some very nice cheese at that farm once.
I'd burn that wretched casino to the ground if I could.
Hmm, I wonder to which degree the South African signer/rapist incident is the latest example of the Guy Goma personnel strategy in action. Some of you may recall no-fly-list veteran Tamerlan Tsarnaev flying to Chechnya & back anyway due to an FBI spell-check glitch -- that's the wave of the future, folks.
Without randomly grabbing the nearest expert or seeming expert on the spur of a moment -- henceforth, the Goma Principle -- we'd have to conduct lengthy evaluations to determine if our legislators, police chiefs, college professors, and FEMA administrators are qualified and not Being-There cyphers. That would be way too expensive.
Asians are notorious gamblers. How about US Asians? Are there any stats?
The whole point of HBD is to stress the general characteristics of populations rather than individuals, so my personal experience might not stand up to scrutiny. Still, for what it's worth, it indicates a tendency to gamble among Far Easterners.
In the small town in England where I grew up, Jonnie the Chinese restaurant owner bet his restaurant in a poker game and lost. In Japan, a colleague's father, got into debt to the yakuza after betting on the ponies. His wife tied a bicycle to herself and jumped off a pier. My colleague turned up at my host's house begging for money. She then disappeared with her younger brother and we never saw her again. None of that ended up in the local crime stats. I asked but no one would tell me what happened to the father.
This is an anecdote, not data, but live in Flushing Chinatown and can get a bus every day of the week to my choice of tri state area casinos. The buses are free, the casinos have tons of Chinese advertising and they regularly bring famous Chinese actors, singers and chefs to the casinos as a draw. Usually the neighborhood subway stop is plastered in casinos ads, and there are several casino billboards at the Main/Roosevelt intersection.
The whole point of HBD is to stress the general characteristics of populations rather than individuals, so my personal experience might not stand up to scrutiny. Still, for what it's worth, it indicates a tendency to gamble among Far Easterners.
I think it's well known that East Asians like to gamble.
In his Germania, Tacitus noted that the Germans liked to gamble:
http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/basis/tacitus-germanygord.asp
"What is marvellous, playing at dice is one of their most serious employments; and even sober, they are gamesters: nay, so desperately do they venture upon the chance of winning or losing, that when their whole substance is played away, they stake their liberty and their persons upon one and the last throw."
What's interesting is that Las Vegas was originally created by Mediterranean (Italian and Jewish) gangsters for a largely Germanic clientele. It may be that Mediterraneans are able to be more moderate with gambling, just as they are with alcohol, relative to Germanics. Perhaps this is why their gambling was notable to Tacitus.
Casinos are officially sanctioned fleecing schemes.
I read the new slot machine invented in the late 90's is the greatest mind manipulator of all time because the machine is calibrated to allow people to think they are close to winning by getting 3 out 4 more often or paying out small sums more often.
Read The Power of Habit on it.
It's truly evil, but the people in power support it. The people in power years ago realized the dangers of gambling.
The argument seems to come down to freedom. Yes, the freedom of so called businesses to screw people over. These used to not be legit businesses, but we are more enlightened today I guess.
I would shutdown all casinos.
I know a Vietnamese guy who told me that Vietnam has a bunch of legal casinos that are foreigner-only. Vietnamese people are not allowed inside the casinos.
The point, I guess, is to make sure it is people from other Asian countries who wind up getting fleeced. A good case of a government actually protecting their citizens from one of their well-known vices. Vietnamese people supposedly are even bigger gamblers than other Asians.
Gambling is still huge in Vietnam, but it's mostly underground. Pachinko-addiction is a huge problem in Japan.
young mothers are no longer forced to ride in the back of the bus to bankruptcy.
That was probably your funniest crack ever.
>>>What's interesting is that Las Vegas was originally created by Mediterranean (Italian and Jewish) gangsters for a largely Germanic clientele. It may be that Mediterraneans are able to be more moderate with gambling, just as they are with alcohol, relative to Germanics. Perhaps this is why their gambling was notable to Tacitus.
Don't get your history from the movies, please.
Speaking of casinos, one of the strange things about the USA is that in many states the market is monopolized under state law by "tribes" of fake Indians.
My Justified habit has gotten so bad I started watching that stupid show Longmire. Last or 2nd to last episode of season 1 had a whole scene about the local Cheyenne res, the blood quantum, and the tribal leaders upping it so they can bounce the stragglers before their casino deal goes through. Shit you not, next scene a half-breed is giving YT shit about how the US gov't only quantifies dogs, horses, and Indians by blood %.
"This old town's filled with sin,
It will swallow you in
If you've got some money to burn."
'Sin City' - Words & Music by Gram Parsons & Chris Hillman
Ever professional women I knew in Louisiana was a sucker for video poker. I have always thought it was the lower stress level of a machine vs human.
Don't get your history from the movies, please.
The Las Vegas casinos were really founded by the mafia.
Speaking of East Asians, gambling, and progress toward ensuring equal access to financial ruin, most casinos in South Korea, and apparently in Vietnam and Nepal as well, are foreigner only. All but one casino in South Korea is open to Koreans, and it's deliberately in a remote location. Singapore has restrictions on who can enter casinos e.g. barring people who've filed for bankruptcy or received state aid, and Japan has a ban on casinos.
http://www.abs-cbnnews.com/business/01/28/13/why-south-koreas-casinos-are-open-everyone-except-koreans
"For conservative Asian countries, the financial pros and social cons of casino gambling pose something of a dilemma -- one that several have chosen to resolve by adopting a foreigner-only access policy.
The upsides are obvious in a region where rapid development has nurtured a taste and capacity for high-end leisure activities.
Casinos provide a consistent source of hard currency revenue, fuel tourism -- especially from sought-after high rollers from mainland China -- and boost the local economy.
Macau, now the world's largest gaming hub, saw its gaming revenue jump 13.5 percent to a record $38 billion in 2012.
But the social impact of gambling is equally well documented, in terms of addiction and broken families, as well as criminal activities like loan-sharking.
So a number of Asian countries have tried to have their cake and eat it, by building glitzy casinos but barring -- or strictly limiting -- entry to their own citizens.
Kim Jin-Gon, director of tourism in South Korea's Culture Ministry, cited a widely-held belief that Koreans are particularly susceptible to gambling addiction.
"Our feeling is that Korea does not have a mature culture that could enjoy gambling simply as a leisure activity," Kim said. "We block Koreans from casinos because the fallout would be too big."
South Korea's ban is not total. Of the country's 17 licensed casinos, one -- Kangwon Land Resort -- is open to locals.
Its remote location in a mountainous area, several hundred kilometres and a three-hour express bus ride from Seoul, was supposed to deter salarymen from nightly excursions during the working week.
But special "bullet taxis" offer a high-speed, white-knuckle service that promises to get punters there in half the time, and attendance and revenue figures seem to support the theories about Koreans' proclivity for gambling.
Kangwon Land pulls in an average 10,000 visitors a day -- around five times the actual seating capacity -- and boasted revenue of nearly 1.2 trillion won (1.1 billion dollars) in 2011, more than all the 16 foreigner-only casinos combined.
This despite rules that restrict any individual from gambling more than 15 days a month -- ID cards must be shown -- and impose a maximum house wager of 300,000 won ($280).
The overcrowding led to calls for other casinos to be opened to Koreans but the government has resisted, insisting that Kangwon Land was a one-off project with the sole aim of revitalising an economically depressed area.
Director Kim warned that other casinos, especially in major cities, would be swamped if access was extended to all.
"If we let Koreans in, there would be no room left for foreigners, which would defy the whole purpose of the casinos in the first place," he said.""
You must hate the public schools, and Indians.
"Mega Millions jackpot 2d biggest in 2 years, thanks to lousier odds"
http://www.philly.com/philly/news/Mega_Millions_jackpot_soars_makes_case_for_lousy_odds.html
"
Mega Millions is teaching a paradoxical lesson about lotteries:
The worse the odds, the more people play.
It defies sense at first blush, but the explanation is that longer odds mean bigger jackpots, and it’s “show me the money” that motivates people most.
Mega Millions, which worsened its odds 50 percent in late October, is now enjoying its strongest jackpot run in more than a year and a half."
"
So, on Oct. 22, Mega Millions underwent an overhaul, raising the minimum jackpot from $12 million to $15 million, establishing a minimum increase of $5 million, boosting the second-place money to a minimum $1 million (up from $250,000) and a maximum $5 million (up from $1 million), and giving players a lot more numbers to choose from – 1 to 75 for the first four numbers, instead of 1 to 56 – while making the range of numbers for the Mega Ball just 1 to 15.
One thing that didn’t change: The $1 price per ticket.
The changes in the numbers radically altered the chances of hitting the jackpot – from 1 in 175 million to 1 in 259 million."
The UK must rank as the world's gambling paradise. I have little doubt that the wagers staked per capita in the UK far and above exceed anything elsewhere in the world. What's more nearly every form of gambling you can think of is entirely legal, open and above board. The big gambling firms are major constituents of the FTSE 100 stock market index. Boomakers are totally legal and unregulated and very UK High Street has at least a half a dozen bookmaker's shops, which are really min casions these days, with a plethor of electronic roulette machines - but no real roulette wheel, note.
Most of the nation's former ubiquitos 1930s 'picture palace' cinemas have been turned into bingo halls. Online gambling - on all sports and all casion games is compltely unregulated.
Anyhow, my point is that although the 'betting shops' are male dominated - usually battered looking elderly or middle aged, down at heel grimly miserable looking men - and with a preponderence of blacks and subcons, they really do like to gamble, the bingo halls are 95% + full of women. Middle aged or older women mostly, working class in the main, but almost entirely women. The only male on the permises is the 'bingo caller' - the man who calls out the numbers. Usually a dodgy cockney chancer type and an unlikely sex-symbol for the endentate grannies.
Women and bingo - an odd thrill, the temptation for me is to something subliminated and sexual in it, not the lonely obsession of the hardened horse-punter, but more of a collective feel-safe climactic.
Seriously, Steve, a post on women and gambling and nothing about the sexually harassing and hostile work environment professional women poker players face? Not only that but much more worrying: they earn on average only half of what professional men poker players earn!
Something must be done about this. I suggest we correct it by making losers of hands to women pay 25% on top of the pot and when women lose hands to men, the men should lose only 50% of what they bet. It's only fair!
Also, women are underrepresented at tournament final tables on the major poker tours and the WSOP, not only in absolute numbers but proportionally to their preponderance in the tournaments. If no woman makes it to the final table of any tournament, online or live, we should take the last woman who busted out and seat her when the first final table player busts, taking a proportion of each player's chips to give her the average chip stack of the remaining players.
In the case of the UK it is noteworthy that new labour deregulated the gambling industry to the fullest extent possible. Basically new labour was a sub Economist Friedmanite party at core. In the UK betting shops are the first shops to open and the last to shut. They are open 7 days a week. Non stop horse and dog races from around the world are broadcast on tv screens this combined with roulette machines and soccer and cricket betting.
Betting shops are found at literally every street corner. New labour even planned mega casinos for Britain as if internet gambling and the betting shops were not enough.
Ironically the labour party was founded as part of a general 19th century moral,salvationist crusade.
http://nationalinterest.org/commentary/gays-are-the-new-jews-9554
WWG
I wonder: is there some connection between being a math guy and just not seeing the attraction of gambling? It's not absolute--Asians are good at math and, as many other people have cited, they love to gamble.
I'm really risk-averse in the rest of life, so...
Australia is littered with tiny depressing casinos. Lots of slots. Betting on the horses via TV remote. Very depressing gambling culture.
It's erckoned that around £50 billion is staked annually in the UK at electronic roulette machines
alone. These are almost exclusively found at licenced betting shops. The clientele at betting shops as a rule is around 99% male. There must be around 25 million adult males in the UK, so therefore,roughly, £2000 per man is gambled annually at these machines. It can be pretty much taken for granted that only around a third, (in reality much fewer), of UK men are betting shp habitues, so you're talking around £6000 per annum per punter. or well over a £100 per week. Of course a fairly big proportion of that third - equating to millions of British men, must be doing a damn sight more. This is only one segment of the UK gambling market, mind you, but a big and rapidly growing one. Take it for granted that all the rest, the horses, the bingo, online gambling of all kinds, the national lottery, football betting etc total up to be at least as much.
Such is the state of the UK's gambling fixation.
Gambling is big business in the UK. It is run, in the main, big stock market quoted comapnies, (from which pension funds and the like are big investors) with CEOs and all the rest who are seen as 'respectable professionals'. In the USA, I believe, a bookie is a not so petty criminal.
Big gambling, in the UK, employs whole teams of savvy lobbyists who have been very succesful of late in persuading dumb politicians, especially of the new Labour variety, that gambling is a 'finacial services type leisure industry' and that all deregulation is good. Hence, the tight controls on betting shops that formerly regualted opening hours and even the choice of decor, seating and TV screens - previously they were not allowed ever TVs, chairs, or carpets - were sweeped away.
It was the depraved New Labour government of Blair/Brown that allowed electronic roulette.
The explosion of casinos across the U.S. from Indian reservations just outside big cities in the West, to the decrepit Northern industrial centers desperately seeking revenue has been a terrible development and a major folly of public policy.
So, is machine gambling correlated with IQ somehow?
"Pachinko-addiction is a huge problem in Japan."
Shouldn't Japanese be playing panippo? Pachinko sounds Chinese.
Re Anonymous: "It would be a simple matter for CA and CT and so on to just auction off a limited number of casino licenses, possibly with a rule they can't be in urban areas. "
I suspect that in New York State, recognition of fake Indian tribes, and thus the rights to casino operation, is already being awarded to groups which have contributed to the politicians in control. The money is contributed behind the scenes, or laundered, of course.
Looks like i'm in the minority in that i'd love to have a British mentality to gambling in the US.
I enjoyed being able to bet on virtually any football match, sporting event, etc. at anytime of the day/night and have tons of bookmakers compete for my business.
At the very least online sports books should be opened up and become widespread in the US a la UK.
I also enjoy going to the Montreal Casino during F1 weekend. Usually only play blackjack, mini-baccarat, or roulette.
Somewhere I have read that the slot machines are what the locals are most addicted to. People just sitting there all day dropping quarters / debit cards.
In Japan, casinos are illegal but they have legal gambling for horse racing, keirin (the short track bike racing that's recently become an Olympic sport), motorcycle racing, and powerboat racing.
Did you hear about the latest school shooting? It was over a student targeting his debate coach because he got ejected from the debate team. That's got to be a first.
"Colorado shooter was said to be targeting his school debate coach"
http://www.latimes.com/nation/nationnow/la-na-nn-colorado-school-shooter-identified-20131213,0,7601970.story
i spent October in Macau playing poker at the Wynn. the lowest stakes no-limit games being spread most days were 50-100HKD, the equivalent of ~$6-$12 in the USD, and the highest game running, which ran practically 24/7, was 500-1000HKD, with several million HKD in play at all times.
most of the players at 50-100 and 100-200 were locals or bankers from Beijing and Hong Kong, with a few Australians and Scandinavians in the mix, but the big game was 60% Jewish, 20% Scandinavian, and only 20% Asian. you can guess which group was donating.
it is common knowledge among poker pros that the majority of Chinese players are extremely risk averse and unimaginative, with a visible minority that gambles for the sake of gambling. it is not a curve: they are one extreme or the other. the Japanese are extremely conservative (and way more likely to turn their stacks of chips into works of art), no exceptions, and Koreans are aggressive and smart, with few exceptions.
what they all have in common is mind-blindness: they seem incapable of thinking about what their opponent is thinking or feeling, nevermind ascending to higher levels, e.g., 'i think he thinks i think..' they don't think strategically and they don't seem reflective. then again, it is possible that reflective asians are even less likely than reflective north americans to end up playing poker for a living.
"Anonymous said...
In Japan, casinos are illegal but they have legal gambling for horse racing, keirin (the short track bike racing that's recently become an Olympic sport), motorcycle racing, and powerboat racing."
They also have a lot of illegal, though mostly accepted, gambling. Supposedly, one of the biggest subjects for gambling in Japan is high-school baseball, sort of like the NCAA basketball championships here.
The thing about American casinos is that you can go into a recently built, garish and expensive hotel/casino and everyone in the casino will be shabbily dressed. The casinos try to garishly replicate a glamorous, Old World casino environment, and everyone inside except for the dealers, servers, and staff is in sloppy jeans, sneakers, flip flops, etc. It's incongruous. When I first went into an expensive casino, I expected people to be dressed decently or at least in a tacky, garish but expensive fashion just because the hotel/casino was expensive and fancily made up. But the people in there looked like they had just stepped out of a Wal-Mart. No matter how much they spent on the hotel and glamming it up, you still had a bunch of crummily dressed people inside. I guess they don't care about the overall aesthetic and want to make the most money, and the people who spend the most at casinos are lower-middle and lower class people who dress shabby.
Are there any classy casinos anymore with strict dress codes in the US? The casinos in the US, even the expensive ones, only seem to forbid extreme things like no-shirts, tank-tops, etc. Otherwise you can wear crummy jeans and sneakers. Are they only in Europe in places like Monte Carlo or something? I guess casinos haven't really been classy places since 50 or so years ago, when most ordinary people couldn't afford to go to casinos and could only gamble with their local neighborhood bookie.
Here is some iSteve bait that touches on the current post of gambling with the twist of Asians and illegal immigration for good measure. From a story about CT hospitals facing a fiscal crunch over caring for illegals is this little nugget:
Other undocumented immigrants require care while "passing through Connecticut," such as the patient who experienced a brain aneurysm while visiting a local casino. He spent a year at Yale-New Haven Hospital at a cost of about $5 million before being medically transferred to Beijing, also at the hospital's expense.
"One of our major sources of undocumented residents are the casinos," Gedge said. "These individuals have no family. No money. No identification. The only thing they have is a Wampum Card."
I tried to get interested in gambling but I seem to be immune. I also seem to be immune to opiate addiction. It's certainly not my virtue or strength of character - I'm just not interested.
When I hurt my back I had a prescription for morphine. I took a lot, but when my back got better, I just quit. I still have some in my medicine cabinet. I don't really understand in any kind of personal way why anyone would want to take dope.
The same is true for gambling.
I had a database development contract at UC San Francisco. A beautiful young office assistant there told me how her husband (an MD) and her brother had made thousands by casually playing online poker. To hear her tell it any smart person could clean up through online gambling.
I did watch some of the then popular TV poker shows, so I decided to immerse myself in poker.
I tried for a couple weeks but it was always so boring. Real poker when you play it is not like watching it on TV. The TV shows have editing. In a real game most of the time you just immediately fold. What fun is that?
The only thing I got from my flirtation with poker was that I actually understood the whole 'Texas Hold'em' scene in 'Casino Real'.
Albertosaurus
Slightly off topic, but since we're talking gambling, has anybody else grown to despise state lotteries?
You go into a gas station to pay for your gas or maybe something you bought to drink and you're stuck behind somebody who's at the register for 5 minutes picking out what scratch-off cards they want, filling out their lottery slip because they like to pick "their numbers" or doing the old "cash this in and give me back this ticket, this ticket, this ticket etc."
"Corn said...
You go into a gas station to pay for your gas or maybe something you bought to drink and you're stuck behind somebody....."
If at all possible, I never set foot in an urban gas station. I never buy food or drink there, and I pay for my gas at the pump with a credit card. It's an especially bad idea to go inside an urban gas-station after dark - your odds of getting caught in the middle of a hold-up increase a great deal.
And I agree with you about state-lotteries. State governments should not be in the business of corrupting thier citizens. As Dave Barry pointed out, when private individuals used to run lotteries, they were called "numbers rackets" and the law used to come down hard on them (when they weren't being paid off by them, that is).
Yes, if it weren't for the development of pay-at-the-pump and debit cards, I might have strangled some lottery player by now.
It is pretty easy to grind out a living playing live poker in Vegas. You need a few month's living expenses to ride out the inevitable swings.
You are not going to make much money off the local pros who are grinding it out like you are. You make money from tourists who consider their $500 - $2000 loss for the night as part of their Vegas entertainment costs. Even so, because of ubiquity of online and TV poker, there aren't that many totally clueless players at the table.
And yeah, it is a completely boring grind for little money.
Anonydroid at 7:33 AM said: So-called 'gay agenda' around the world is Jewish globalist supremacist agenda through the backdoor.
Hunsdon said: I see what you did there. Rimshot!
When I hurt my back I had a prescription for morphine. I took a lot, but when my back got better, I just quit. I still have some in my medicine cabinet. I don't really understand in any kind of personal way why anyone would want to take dope.
Most people who try heroin and/or morphine in a big enough dose come away with some understanding of its addictive potential. When I took that stuff (I don't know if it was just morphine or heroin) I got the transcendental/euphoric high that so many others get. That's when I *got* drug addiction even though I never became a drug addict.
In Louisiana if you own a truck stop that has pumped 50,000 gallons of diesel fuel the last three months you can put in video poker machines.
This makes for some interesting diesel prices in some locales.
Did you hear about the latest school shooting? It was over a student targeting his debate coach because he got ejected from the debate team. That's got to be a first.
Ultima ratio.
Slightly off topic, but since we're talking gambling, has anybody else grown to despise state lotteries?
I was at the Kwiky Mart today waiting behind a guy who was purchasing his lottery tickets: “I’ll take three Lucky for Lifes, two MegaMillions with a dollar back-up, and four—no, make that five—Play 4s, I’ll give you the numbers. . .” The guy had a strategy, diversifying his investments, hedging high payout/low probability games with low payout/higher probability games. A futile attempt to try to beat the con.
One time I heard a lottery customer bemoan his poor chances to the storeowner. The storeowner said, "The way I figure it, making your dreams come true by winning the lottery is like a million-to-one shut, but making your dreams come true by working for a living is like a BILLION-to-one shot."
I guess that's the way it feels to those that play.
bankster heaven is debt saturation
debt saturation leads to permanent stagnation
My biggest win in poker was 10 years or so ago.
I staked a few hundred to some dude on the Internet (first and only time I did it). He won the World Series of Poker, and I collected $75K.
It wasn't just the money; it was the thrill of getting notified by email. This was before Facebook, Twitter, or even live poker broadcasts.
It was the best gambling experience of my life.
"The explosion of casinos across the U.S. ...has been a terrible development and a major folly of public policy."
All part of the Wall St. -owned ruling elite's economic war on the poor. They are gradually creating a hell.
Are there any classy casinos anymore with strict dress codes in the US? The casinos in the US, even the expensive ones, only seem to forbid extreme things like no-shirts, tank-tops, etc. Otherwise you can wear crummy jeans and sneakers.
Steve Wynn initially tried this when he opened the Bellagio in the early 90s: he attempted requiring men to wear jackets and ties, etc., or at least in the evening. It didn't work. By the end of the decade things were relaxed to allow the casino to get the kind of numbers they were counting on, and it's been People of Wal-Mart standards ever since. When Wynn later opened up his eponymous place in the new century, even more upscale-looking than the Bellagio, he never even bothered starting with something like a dress code.
Oh, and the Chinese gamblers who flock to Vegas? They never equated table play with anything like James Bond class or style--they're always wearing sweats and baseball caps pulled over their eyes.
Ben Mezrich's Bringing Down the House, while mostly fictional, was at least honest in admitting that nearly all of the original MIT Blackjack Team were Asian-American. (The Hollywood film version, 21, of course, could not play with fire like that. The MIT coaches picked Asian-Americans because the casinos know middle- and upper-class white parents don't allow their kids to spend their dough on the Strip, so if white college kids show up betting big at 21 tables, their surveillance machine gets turned up to 11.
But they wouldn't suspect big-spending Asian kids, since their HBD departments know that typically, Asian parents, plotting a dull life of plodding conformity for their kids, allow them a bit of wild oat-sowing excess to get it out of their system first. Sort of like they way Amish boys are allowed to get crazy as late teens before they settle down back on the farm.
The reason Chinese have to fly to Vegas by the chartered 747-load is because a lot of them are gambling with money that isn't theirs. And even the Macau casinos, let alone the domestic PRC ones, are riddled with State Intelligence operatives who keep track of who's winning, and more importantly, who's losing.
A substantial number of the people who are executed for corruption in the PRC are mid-level bureaucrats or middle-management types who ran off with the local Party treasury, or the factory payroll, to let it ride on Pai Gow, and lost.
They think they're safer from prying eyes in Vegas. But that's been changing, and China's Ministry of State Security's efforts in the US have been focused on getting operatives into the corporations running the Strip as well as defense and IT industries.
what they all have in common is mind-blindness: they seem incapable of thinking about what their opponent is thinking or feeling, nevermind ascending to higher levels, e.g., 'i think he thinks i think..' they don't think strategically and they don't seem reflective.
I used to play tennis with Japanese guys (in Japan). They almost always could out-think me.
I was at a Publix with my brother a few weeks ago; we were high 'n happy and we decided to buy some scratch-offs out of the vending machine. (Using only my money, of course.) I picked mostly fives and tens at first, and I was winning, over and over. I'd just close my eyes, meditate on which ticket to buy next, and I'd at least win my $ back almost every time. I was up fifty bucks or so.
Then my brother convinced me to buy some of those twenty-dollar tickets - his friend Taz won $500 on one once, he said. Strike one, strike two, etc. I wound up thirty-five bucks poorer when all was said and done.
The moral of the story? I don't know.
The biggest local issue in Boston these days is the placement of the new casino that voters approved. Three licenses were approved: one for the metro area and two for faraway places to be determined. Steve Wynn has already gotten approval from the locals for his casino plan in the city of Everett, a nasty little industrial, rapidly Brazilifying shithole across the Mystic River from Charlestown. The land the casino will be built on is a former hazardous waste site (Monsanto)! This being the crooked People's Commonwealth, the land is currently owned by 5 mobsters, and the head of the new commission appointed to oversee gambling, had to recuse himself from the vote because he's done business with one of the aforementioned crooks. Of course, the Wynn organization knew nothing about it (wink, wink).
The competition for the metro casino is a group led by the owners of Suffolk Downs in East Boston, a fading racetrack peopled by the stereotypical horseplayers you see in any gritty movie. Their original partner was the Caesar's Entertainment Group, but they pulled out amid the commission's background check process, calling it "arbitrary, unreasonable and inconsistent with those that exist in every other gambling jurisdiction". The Scots-Irish owners of Suffolk Downs then persuaded the Mohegan Sun, the Connecticut Indians' gambling concern, to join the partnership. The locals in East Boston spoiled the party by voting against the plan, effectively killing any casino in the city proper. The Suffolk owners, along with the Scots-Irish CEO of Mohegan (hey, they're Indians, but not stupid) are working to get approval for a site in the neighboring city of Revere, a place pretty similar to Everett.
What's interesting is the fact that the wealthiest casino owner in the world, Sheldon Adelson, has no interest in acquiring a casino in his hometown. He refuses to subject himself to the self-serving political crooks' scrutiny, preferring to deal with the straightforward crooks in Vegas and Macau.
Every pathology in American politics is on display here. The commission members are all old political hacks collecting six-figure salaries. The casinos have been sold to the voters as instant cash cows, but nothing resembling real research has been shown to the public, just wild-ass estimates of potential revenue. And the mob gathers 'round like vultures over a carcass.
I'm not a big casino guy, my only real experience in Vegas was the old Comdex shows (founded by Adelson's old company, The Interface Group), so it's skewed by the fact that 275K computer nerds were running around the town. I've been to Mohegan and Foxwoods in CT, where gamblers are captives in the middle of nowhere. But I've also been to the riverfront casino in New Orleans, where there were about 75 people in the place on a lazy Saturday afternoon. If a place like the Big Easy, a "destination" by anyone's sense of the word, has a struggling casino, how can a casino in an industrial shithole like Everett or Revere be successful? Yet it's going to get done, with all the attendant vice and corruption.
1) Most casinos outside of Vegas are ugly, depressing as hell, and the air quality is shit.
2) Vegas casinos are substantially nicer, since many gamblers are also there for conventions or entertainment (about 157 Cirque du Soleil shows the last time I checked) and aren't there just for the gambling. A much higher percentage are out-of-towners, rather than local proles.
3) Asians are heavy gamblers, and tend to stick to the tables. I've gambled maybe a dozen times in my life, and rare is the time there wasn't an Asian at the table.
4) Slots have the absolute worst odds, are boring as hell, and attract the worst people. If you really want to play slots, bring hand sanitizer.
5) Never, never, ever let them sign you up for a player's card.
http://nypost.com/2001/02/15/how-marc-helped-plunder-russia/
US helped oligarchs rape and loot Russia in the 90s. Russia is far from perfect but have good reasons to resist American influence. It's too bad US doesn't have someone with spine like Putin to deal with our financial oligarchs in Wall Street. Instead, all politicians and media outlets are whores to the Wall Street oligarch class who've ignited a new cold war over the fact that Russia doesn't allow gay day parades.
But why just pick on Russia over this issue when 90% of the world--including most US allies--don't allow gay day parades either? Russia's real sin in the eyes of Western oligarchs is that it dealt with the oligarchs who looted the nation in the 90s. Anti-Russian crusade is about tribal and professional courtesy and solidarity among global oligarchs ruling the West. This 'gay issue' is just a red herring. After all, US and France have very cozy ties with Saudi Arabia that executes homosexuals.
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