When Did We Stop Caring?
I started as a dealer in 1992. Back then, the question I got asked more than any other, at parties, at family dinners, by people who’d just found out what I did for a living, was whether the casino cheated. Not whether gambling was risky. Whether the game itself was rigged. People genuinely believed it. […]
When Free is NOT Free
When Is Free Not? The central conceit around something being free is that it is automatically valued for its worth to you because it is not costing you any money. This is not, I would argue, the right way to frame the question. In fact, it is not even necessarily true. There is a belief […]
How Casino People Learn
Every industry has its legends. The people who have seen it all, or at least enough of it to stop being surprised too easily. They have opened properties, closed them, survived recessions, regulatory changes, political interference, impossible owners, impossible customers and a few ideas that looked brilliant in the boardroom and died on the floor […]
What Would I Build Today If I Could Start From Scratch?
A question was put to me a few years ago that I have found myself returning to from time to time. If somebody handed you the money, the licences and a suitable location tomorrow, what kind of casino would you build? At first glance it sounds like a simple question. Most people in this industry […]
The 7 Failures of State Owned Casinos
There is an old joke from late Soviet Moscow. The first state-run red light house has opened. The chandeliers are Bohemian crystal. The champagne is imported from France. The furniture is from Maples of London. The cologne is the finest Parisian perfume. And the girls, comrade, are all Heroes of the Great Patriotic War. The […]
5 Ownership Models that Change Everything
Over the course of a thirty-year career in this industry I have worked for a large listed corporation with properties across three continents, a smaller regional operator running a handful of properties in markets that most of the industry had not yet noticed, and a family-owned single property where the owner’s opinion of a particular […]