You can do all manner of despicable things in a casino if you’re a high roller … but count one lousy card and you’re toast, mister. That’s the message being sent by Warner Gaming after it banned Ben Affleck from the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino “for life.” Leaving aside the ludicrous verbal overkill, aren’t celebrities winning big supposed to be valuable advertising? Besides, there’s nothing remotely in the neighborhood of cheating if you’re counting cards — just using mathematical skills to achieve an advantage. The execs at Warner had the choice of having sweating an advantage player or recapturing their lost “where the stars play” image … and decided to make the tightwad move. There’s no way the Hard Rock comes out of this ahead in the court of public opinion.
Las Vegas Sands has taken the “for sale” sign off Sands Bethlehem. It’s promising new investment in the property and has appointed a new president, former Marina Bay Sands senior veep Mark Juliano. The latter’s probably better known from his tenure as CEO of Trump Entertainment Resorts or prexy of Caesars Atlantic City. So, needless to say, he knows the competition. Sheldon Adelson‘s desire to be shot of Sands Bethlehem never made much sense, as it’s always the #1 or #2 casino in Pennsylvania. It doesn’t have the glamour of other, more recent Sands casinos, but it does well enough.
“Many of our people have been with us at Sands Bethlehem since the first day the doors opened and they have had to endure some trying events in recent months, including waves of media speculation about the future of the property,” said LVS COO Michael Leven piously — and never mind that he’d been the source of much of the speculation. Here’s hoping for an angst-free future at the property.
Chipless gambling. It’s coming to Macao, where Stanley Ho‘s Macau Jockey Club (left) has installed 
three e-baccarat tables (and 180 other machines). That means that two out of every three baccarat employees could be pink-slipped. Dealers need no longer apply. The machine does the math. As Paradise Entertainment Chairman Jay Chun points out, this does address an impending Macanese labor problem: The dearth of potential casino dealers to staff runaway casino growth. The current 85,600-person casino workforce may have to be supplemented with 40,000 more employees, beginning in 2015 — and guest workers are a sore point in the enclave.
I thought it was ridiculous for HRH to 86 Affleck, but I believe that most casual gamers would view “card counting” as something illegal. My point being, if your average Joe saw the headline, without knowing what we know in gaming, they might have thought that Ben Affleck may have been cheating.