Author: David Mckee

Las Vegans continue to be taken to the cleaners, this time by the Oakland Athletics and their slippery owner, John Fisher. Seems that the A’s have quietly applied to spend as little time in Las Vegas as humanly possible. They’ve asked to hold eight “home” games out of town. This home-but-away fiction is humored, to a lesser extent, by Major League Baseball, to facilitate exhibition games overseas. Not that anybody is falling over themselves to invite the cellar-dwelling A’s to town but one can’t blame the feckless Fisher for dreaming.

Hardly the cruelest month, April made up for some recent and discouraging numbers for Las Vegas in particular and Nevada in general. Gambling receipts on the Las Vegas Strip tallied $666 million (the Mark of the Beast?), a 6.5% improvement over 2023 and 38% higher than May 2019. Locals casinos fared up even better, being up 16% overall, to $270 million. Table game hold was up on the Strip and baccarat was much tighter as well. Wagering at the tables (+20%) and slots (+43%) eclipsed 2019 figures. Baccarat winnings vaulted 80% from last year (when, to be fair, hold was very loose) and non-baccarat table games nosed up a percentage point. The one-armed bandits saw a 4% decline in coin-in.

Your favorite screwups, and ours, Bally’s Corp. just stepped in it again. Or rather, their legislative lackeys in Rhode Island did. Bally’s has never actually been caught kicking the ball onto the fairway … but it has a remarkable ability to convince lawmakers to do that wrong thing. This time, a bill was snuck into legislation. It would double the credit lines that Bally’s Twin Rivers-branded casinos could offer players, to $100,000 apiece. “Obviously we’re not interested in extending lines of credit to those individuals who would not be able to pay it back,” a Bally’s spokeswoman unconvincingly assured solons. Why not? Casinos do it all the time. Las Vegas is littered with the corpses of dishonored markers, often ones from players that casinos beg to return and inflict pain upon them again. It’s Big Gaming’s favorite codependent-abusive relationship.

While we don’t know how closely Bally’s Corp. is behind the political contretemps currently playing out in Virginia, it’s the second time in recent history that a high government official has taken non-kosher acts on the company’s behalf. The flashpoint is a letter from Petersburg City Manager John Altman to Bally’s, announcing that the company had been tapped to develop the city’s sole casino, “the result of an extensive vetting process.” Trouble is, the City Council met a week later, behind closed doors, and unanimously voted in favor of a $1.4 billion rival bid by Cordish Gaming. We had predicted Cordish would get the nod for the obvious reason that it put the most money on the table.

Casino revenues aren’t quite what they used to, at least not recently. It was inevitable. The casino business has been so supercharged for so long after Covid-19 that some customer pullback was bound to happen eventually. After all, the first law of economics is that what goes up must come down, sometime.