Question of the Day - 21 May 2017

In Las Vegas last week, I found out the shuttle from Bally's to the Rio was not running. Is this temporary or permanent?

It's permanent. The shuttle goes only from Harrah's to the Rio. The Bally's shuttle was discontinued May 1.

What is restaurant week? What does it mean? Sponsored by Three Square Food Bank and now in its 10th year, Las Vegas Restaurant Week is “a celebration of dining out for a cause,” a fundraiser for local food banks, homeless shelters, and feed-the-needy organizations. Since 2007, more than 2.5 million meals have fed nearly 300,000 food-insecure southern Nevadans.

This year it takes place this year June 19-30. Participating restaurants will be announced on June 6. 

Total Rewards invited their Seven Stars players to one of their quarterly events taking place in Las Vegas in 2016, in part to celebrating Caesar's Palace 50th anniversary. They gave us all a gold metal colored coin inside a black felt drawstring bag. One side had Caesar's head, and the back displayed an etching of a picture of the (I think) original Caesar's palace building. My question is, do you think this coin has any value (either in general or to a collector)? I only ask because in the grand scheme of things, I have to think it’s semi rare, in that it was only offered to however many people registered for the event (a few thousand?).

It’s tough to predict what collectors will consider valuable in the future; if we could, we’d invest and make a fortune when the time came (or our children or grandchildren would).

That said, we know exactly the place to find lots and lots of collectors of casino memorabilia, especially tokens like yours. The Casino Collectibles Association’s annual convention (this year is their 25th) meets June 22-24 at South Point. That would be the best place to go and show your Caesars coin to gauge interest, current and future.

Isn’t it about time that the $1,200 threshold on which withholding tax on foreign nationals is applied was raised? I’m a Canadian who’s been coming to Las Vegas for nearly forty years and the purchasing power of $1,200 today is a heck of a lot less than it was back in the early eighties. Though I get the withholding back because I have a TIN and can apply losses to winnings, it’s still a lot of fuss and bother to have to file every year.

Based on relatively recent developments, the IRS seems more inclined to lower the threshold than raise it. To the tax man, it has a lot less to do with purchasing power than it does with revenue collecting and tracking transactions (or so they tell us). In 2015, as we wrote in QoD 4/6/17, “the IRS launched a small trial balloon, suggesting that because so much had changed over the past 38 years, especially relating to potential money laundering and ‘terrorist financing,’ it was considering lowering the thresholds to $600.

“Actually, the $600 figure didn’t come out of thin air. The IRS proposed it in 1977, but it precipitated so much opposition that they doubled it. Even more resistance emerged in 2015, including an American Gaming Association petition signed by people in all 50 states, plus 14,000 letters and emails against lowering the thresholds. So the balloon kind of floated away.”

But it’s sure to show up again in the foreseeable future, so you’re probably in for plenty more fuss and bother.

This concerns your answer on W-2Gs for machine play, bingo, and keno. What are the thresholds for sports betting and dog and horse racing?

There are no thresholds for race or sports betting like there are for slots, bingo, and keno, same as there aren’t any for table games. The exception is if you win more than $600 (there’s that figure again) at odds of 300-1 or more, though those odds are pretty rare in a sports book, though not, as an astute reader pointed out to us in a comment below, in a race book. Other thresholds are involved, including Currency Transaction Reports ($10,000) and Multiple Transactions (starting at $3,000 in some casinos), but for the most part, race and sports bets don’t generate a W-2G.

What sportsbooks put up the entire season's worth of NFL lines? In other words, if I'm going to be in Vegas in week 7 and want to bet a week 14 game, where do I go?

Based on last year’s offers, the Westgate posted the entire NFL schedule at once, as did CG Technology, which runs the sports books at the Venetian/Palazzo, Cosmopolitan, Tropicana, Hard Rock, M, and Silverton.