Reopening the Horseshoe

Harrah's and MTR are moving closer to reopening the Horseshoe. This week, hundreds of employees participated in an orientation session and parade. From the LVRJ:

Harrah's management plans to reopen the downtown landmark Thursday. In preparation for that new beginning, company officials and other local leaders met with approximately 850 workers who will soon be drawing paychecks again at the Horseshoe.

Following a morning training session at the hotel-casino, workers were grouped in a made-for-media throng and marched past curious onlookers to a luncheon at the former Race Rock restaurant site near Neonopolis. Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman and city Councilman Lawrence Weekly headed the procession from failed downtown business to failed downtown business, while many following behind said they were thrilled to know they'd soon be back at work.

reviewjournal.com -- Business: Staff steps lively toward return to Horseshoe

Way to see the RJ put a negative spin on this: "from failed downtown business to failed downtown business." The description of the parade sounds like something out of a Steinbeck novel.
The good news, of course, is that the Horseshoe will be open again this time next week, with hundreds of people back to work.
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posted by Dave at 11:18 AM

ATC on WTO

Last night, All Things Considered, the National Public Radio talk show, ran a brief piece on the Antigua WTO case. If you listen very carefully, you'll hear two seconds of commentary by an "assistant professor of gaming studies." I love how mutable my title is. The UNLV student newspaper once ran a photo of me with a caption identifying me as the "director of gambling." That would be a great job--telling people how to gamble and whatnot. Anyway, the ATC clip is here: http://www.npr.org/rundowns/segment.php?wfId=1791956.
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posted by Dave at 8:48 AM

How to win at roulette

A trio of scammers at London's Ritz casino may have used lasers and cell phones to beat the odds at roulette. From the Guardian:

It is understood that the three suspects, two Serbian men aged 38 and 33, and a 32-year-old Hungarian woman, made two visits to the casino earlier this month. On the first night they walked out with £100,000. They returned on a subsequent evening and appeared to disprove Albert Einstein's conclusion - that the only way to win on roulette was to pocket the money when the dealer was not looking - by walking out with £1.2m.

The casino is believed to have paid them £300,000 in cash and written out a cheque for the balance. But, as is routine when such big wins occur, the casino reviewed its security tapes and called in the police.

Scotland Yard confirmed that when police arrested the three at a hotel they seized a "significant quantity of cash". Officers are also thought to have confiscated a number of mobile phones. The three were bailed until the end of the month.

It is thought the gang's success may have been based on a theory known as "sector targeting". The theory is relatively simple. A player determines the point at which the ball is released and the point it passes after one or two spins. He or she can use these figures to calculate the ball's "decaying orbit" and so anticipate the area of the wheel - or sector - the ball is likely to come to rest in.

The system cannot reliably predict the slot the ball is likely to fall in but by determining the sector greatly sways the odds in the favour of the punter. The problem is that it is almost impossible to do such a calculation using mental arithmetic.

In the early eighties a gambling expert, Scott Lang, published a book detailing how to use a digital stopwatch to calculate the sector the ball would finish in but casinos simply banned stopwatches.

For years there have been rumours that con artists have made sector targeting a practical method by using computers. The data relating to the two points is fed into a computer which has been programmed to calculate the "decaying orbit".

In laboratory conditions it has been done but managing it in a casino with hundreds of thousands of pounds - and the threat of being caught - makes it much more difficult.

It is thought that the gang which allegedly struck at the Ritz may have taken the theory a step further by using the laser scanner to calculate the speed of the ball with more precision.

They would still have had to have got the information back and laid their bets within seconds - an impressive feat which, if proved, will send shock waves around the gambling houses of the world. But whether the three would be brought before a court is a moot point.

Guardian Unlimited | Life | The sting: did gang really use a laser, phone and a computer to take the Ritz for 1.3m?

For those of you playing along at home, this is how the scam works:
1 A laser scanner hidden in a mobile phone which measures velocity is aimed at a roulette wheel as it is spun by the croupier.


2 The laser measures the speed of the ball as it is released and as it passes a second point. The ball's "decaying orbit" can be calculated.


3 The two figures are relayed to a computer, which works out where the ball is likely to come to rest. It would almost certainly not be able to predict the slot but may have been able to work out the sector, improving the odds for the gambler.


4 The computer's prediction is relayed back to the mobile phone. The bet or bets are placed before the cut-off point of three turns of the roulette wheel. The whole operation takes two or three seconds.

How you can inconspicuously point a laser at the roulette wheel, receive a transmission, and then place a bet is beyond me. Do the pit bosses in England keep any kind of eye on their games? In my experience, roulette pit bosses have been some of the most demanding, because the stakes are high--35 to one on a number bet--and the potential for cheating is great. Granted, this is usually low tech stuff like bet pinching or capping, but I think that someone using a cell phone in the seconds before placing bets should set off some alarms.
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posted by Dave at 8:54 AM

Victory for Antigua

I wonder what Jay Cohen's horoscope was this week. A day after he left Nellis Federal Prison Camp, the World Trade Organization ruled in favor of Antigua in a case inspired by the 1998 crackdown on Internet gaming that sent Cohen to prison. From the LV SUN:

Antigua, which has a population of 68,000, filed a complaint with the WTO about a year ago concerning the United States' position effectively banning Internet gambling.

The U.S. position has slashed revenue in Antigua, which developed online gambling to boost an economy whose main income, tourism, suffered after a series of hurricanes.

Some gaming observers say the ruling may have limited affect on the longstanding position of the U.S. government that Internet gambling is illegal.

In an interview with the Las Vegas Sun earlier this week, American Gaming Association Chief Executive Frank Fahrenkopf said such a ruling probably wouldn't have much power to affect change in the United States.

The U.S. Justice Department has long interpreted a telephone betting law from the early 1960s as making it a crime for offshore casinos to accept bets from U.S. residents, he said.

"I doubt the ruling will have any impact at all on land-based casinos in the United States," he said.

Antigua-based Internet companies handle a quarter of online bets in a global industry worth $6.1 billion. The country has lost more than $90 million in income from the U.S. ban. About a sixth of the government's $200 million annual revenue comes from the Internet gambling industry, Sir Ronald Sanders, Antigua's ambassador to the WTO, said in a telephone interview from London.

"We lost many jobs as a result of the U.S. laws. This is justice done and a victory for the WTO dispute system," Sanders said. "This proves that a small country like ours can take on a big nation and win."

Up until 1999, Antigua and Barbuda was among the largest Internet gambling jurisdictions in the world, he said. Sanders has argued that the loss of jobs, reduction in government revenue and money lost to the rest of the economy are "very significant" relative to the size of the nation's economy and population.

The complaint marks the first time a Caribbean country and any country with a population of less than 100,000 has taken a dispute to the WTO, he said. It's also one of few disputes to test the relatively new General Agreement on Trade in Services, one of three multilateral agreements that underpin the WTO, he said. Under the agreement, member countries have to make certain commitments to free trade.


Las Vegas SUN: U.S. loses WTO ruling covering online gambling

While the impact this ruling will have on Internet gaming's legality in the US is unclear, it may prompt some sort of international discussion of Internet gaming, which would probably be a good thing. As the Internet crosses national borders, it seems that any binding decisions can only be reached at the global level.
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posted by Dave at 2:53 PM

Jay Cohen free

Internet gaming entrepreneur Jay Cohen is out of jail and ready to resume his career as an options trader, though he still insists he did nothing wrong. From the LV Sun:

"I still maintain I ran a legal business in another country," Cohen said. "I regret that I did not get a fair trial or a fair appeals process. What if I were Chinese and ran a website in the U.S. that was critical of China, then returned to China and was jailed? Would the U.S. support China on that?

"People need to speak up for their rights when they feel they are right."

Cohen did not have much time to chat, as his civil attorney, Bob Blumenfeld of Texas, was on a tight schedule, set by the government, to get Cohen to Oakland, Calif., where he will spend 30 days in a halfway house. Cohen intends to return to stock options trading next month. He also will spend two years on probation.

Cohen was charged in March 1998 with violating the U.S. Wire Act and was convicted in a New York federal court trial in February 2000. In a twist of irony, he was sent to Las Vegas to serve a 21-month prison sentence.

For now, the native of Woodmere, N.Y., who holds a bachelor's degree in nuclear engineering from the University of California at Berkeley, is through with the Internet sports gaming business that in 1997 he helped pioneer.

Las Vegas SUN: 'Net gaming operator Cohen freed from prison

The article also has an excellent summary of the entire Cohen case. My forthcoming book, Uneasy Convictions, will discuss this case in some depth. I got to interview Cohen, which was one of the more interesting elements of writing the book. I would have like to have interviewed Frank Erickson or some of the other "betting commissioners" who testified before Congress in the early 1950s--these were other pioneers in sports betting who found themselves on the wrong side of the law. In any event, the Cohen case serves as an interesting test case for applications of the Wire Act to the Internet, and it is a case that, surprisingly, technology and individual rights lobbies paid little attention to.
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posted by Dave at 5:03 PM

Singapore casino?

Singaporeans, eager to preserve their city's reputation as an international destination, want a casino. But they don't want locals to play there. Even though many Singaporeans already gamble at Genting Highlands or Macau, Trade and Industry Minister George Yeo maintains that a Singapore casino, if it offered unlimited access to locals, would be bad. From the Straits Times:

'For a long time, the Singapore Government has said that it will not have casinos in Singapore. The reasons are very clear to us: Gambling can be addictive.

'If husbands go there after work, housewives go there and gamble with their family money - the money that is intended for the kitchen and to look after the house and their children - then there will be problems,' he said.

But globalisation and the desire to ensure Singapore remains a draw for wealthy visitors prompted the Government's rethink.

'While we want to attract international gamblers, wealthy people to come here, I don't think we want to encourage Singaporeans to go and patronise the casino when they cannot afford it,' he said.

Why no 'free for all' casino - MARCH 22, 2004

The casino has been proposed for Sentosa Island, which is already a small resort island off of Singapore. I charied the first day of the 2002 Gaming and Casinos World Asia Pacific Conference there. It's a great island, and there seemed to be tourists from all over the world there.
Just to give you an idea of how different the news in other nations can be, there is an article about a "sex central" village. As an American, I'm not used to stories into local business that quote the "village chief," but I guess that things are quite different in other parts of the world.
posted by Dave at 11:40 AM