Rowdy night in Boston; Stitt’s standoff

All hell broke loose at Encore Boston Harbor in the wee hours of Monday morning. The first brawl broke out as nightclub patrons were leaving Mémoire. It was so bad that police had to call in backup. According to the Boston Globe, one man “was arrested and charged with assault, disorderly conduct, and resisting arrest after he allegedly became uncooperative and combative with a club security officer and police.” Fifteen minutes later a mini-riot erupted in the main lobby. “Troopers from the [Gaming Enforcement Unit] and State Police-Medford located a Lynn man, who allegedly became involved in a verbal altercation with two women, then pushed one of them and grabbed her cell phone from her hand and threw it across the lobby. Further investigation revealed that the suspect allegedly inappropriately touched one of the women.”

Another arrest was made, this for indecent assault and battery, assault and battery, lewd and lascivious behavior, and disorderly conduct. And the fracas has drawn the attention of the Massachusetts Gaming Commission, which apparently will have some questions to put to Wynn Resorts. As for the latter, it needs to either beef up its Encore security force or retrain it to better cope with unruly customers.

* Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt (R) and the state’s gaming tribes remain at a Mexican standoff, with the guv maintaining that the casino compacts don’t automatically renew and the tribes arguing otherwise. Legislators are hesitant to get in the middle of this face-off. Rep. Collin Walke (D), a Cherokee, thinks Stitt dissed the tribes by announcing his demand for higher tribal taxes via a newspaper op-ed, rather than dealing with the tribes directly. Stitt denies this, saying he called the Five Civilized Tribes beforehand and followed up with a letter to all 35.

Stitt didn’t get into the substance of the calls, although he has already dibbed the extra money he wants, as funding for public education. Walke is not mollified. “He’s acting as though these are not sovereign nations and are rather simply employees of his company. I think that’s the wrong way to go about doing this,” he said. Whatever the case, Stitt’s call for exponentially higher gaming taxes sounds like a dog that won’t hunt.

* Despite a 2% increase in net revenue and 35% higher table games sales, Wall Street was so underwhelmed by the latest numbers from AGS that the stock price plummeted 52%. Stock analysts expected a $0.14/share profit, only to be handed a seven-cent/share loss. Observed The Motley Fool, “the company blamed the reduction on lower expectations for gaming operations revenue within the [electronic gaming machine] and Interactive segments, driven by a combination of product underperformance in Oklahoma, softness from certain corporate customers, and delayed entries into New Jersey and select markets in Europe and Latin America.”

* China‘s opposition to Internet gambling in the Philippines has reached such a level that it will be on the docket when President Xi Jinping meets with Rodrigo Duterte. The industry is a juicy source of income tax for the Philippine government, so don’t expect Duterte to give it up.

* Customers aren’t happy with the British casino industry. In 2013 there were only 169 official complaints. Last year there were 8,266. “Most of them were about firms refusing to pay out on winning bets or failing to operate in a socially responsible way,” reports the BBC. Part of it is due to a sheer increase in gambling. Gambling Commission CEO Neil McArthur tried to spin the numbers as a positive. “We are pushing the industry to know its customers, and part of this is actually, possibly, a good sign because it’s suggesting that consumers are demanding more of the gambling operators. And I would encourage them to continue to do that,” he told The Beeb. The commission has no plans to cap the size of online bets, because “operators already have enough information to keep players safe and to ensure they are playing with money they can afford to lose.” Do you buy that?

While on the subject of disordered thinking, Donald Trump and the NRA facilely equate mass shootings with mental illness. (Full disclosure: I suffer from agitated depression.) Why then is the government trying to make it harder to get treatment?

* Our apologies to the Cleveland Browns, whom we may have been too quick to write off this season, at least if a Washington Post profile (paywall blocked) is telling it like it is. If you want to have a flutter on the Browns, your bet will probably be influenced by data from Sportradar, the official source of betting data for the NFL. The deal is expected to be lucrative for the league, at little as $250 million, probably more. The proprietary data will be disseminated through such online bookies as DraftKings and William Hill. In addition to acting as the clearinghouse of NFL data, Sportradar will be entrusted with standing guard against fixes and fraud.

* Did Jim Murren put all chips on Joe Biden too soon? It’s looking that way for the gaming boss.