Gamblor’s World

Author: Walker, Adrian
Source: Boston Globe
Published: Dec 21, 06

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BOSTON – Bruce remembers vividly what it was like to be a compulsive gambler during the holiday season.
He felt lonely and isolated, he said yesterday. Not to mention that he often needed money, and gambling seemed like the logical way to pursue it.

“You want to be happy at the holidays, and that can only be achieved, in your addicted mind, through gambling,” he said. “In some psychological way, gamblers feel that money is the solution to your problems. For gamblers, that’s an irrational idea.”

Bruce eventually got help, partly through the intervention of the Massachusetts Council on Compulsive Gambling, which made him available for a phone interview. Its hot line gets about 2,000 calls a year.

Many people won’t get that help this year, because the agency’s budget was slashed by $345,000 in the state’s recent budget cutting. The state funds antigambling programs, partly to offset the addiction some people form through playing the Massachusetts Lottery.

State Treasurer Timothy P. Cahill said that no rationale was given for the cuts, but that the decision was short-sighted and should be reversed. “This is not a good time to be cutting money from an agency that’s trying to help people curb addictions,” he said by phone yesterday. “The holidays can be very stressful and financially very troubling for people. I personally believe, in working with them, that the Massachusetts Council on Compulsive Gambling does a fantastic job of trying to help people.”

Bruce said he started gambling when he was 13. His father gambled. By high school, Bruce was spending a lot of time at race tracks and in the company of bookmakers.

He won a hockey scholarship to a college in upstate New York. He didn’t last long, though. The popular race track at nearby Saratoga offered too much temptation. He flunked out.

By then, he said, his pattern was set. He attended other colleges, but gambling, in various forms, had taken over his life. “Through those early years, it was just a process that repeated itself.”

When his fiancée gave him an ultimatum, because he had begun stealing from her, nothing much changed. He went to a Gamblers Anonymous meeting, then decided he had things under control.

Despite not finishing his education, Bruce was able to forge a successful professional life. That was a mixed blessing; it gave him that much more money to gamble. By then, he was a husband and father. Gambling was his escape, he said.

“It gave me the ability to escape responsibility, the fear of not being an adequate husband and father,” he said. Life in the casinos was far more attractive than anything he had ever known.

“The lure was that I was treated well,” he said. “When you start stealing money and become a really high roller, it’s amazing the stuff you can get. I could never stop for any substantial period of time.” When his wife filed for divorce, he didn’t look for an apartment. It was easier to move into Foxwoods, he said.

Ultimately, Bruce’s stealing led to an arrest and a prison sentence. By then, he had decided to seek counseling and began volunteering to speak to groups about the dangers of gambling. He said he has not gambled in nearly three years and credits the council with turning his life around.

“As more people gamble, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see that there will be more people with problems,” he said. “They are one of the safe harbors out there. . . . I can’t say enough good things about them.”

I’ve always been ambivalent about the state lottery. No one has ever really explained the contradiction of a state that publicly frowns on gambling running an enormous gambling business. Obviously, most people who buy scratch tickets will never become compulsive gamblers. However, the notion that the state must make allowances to help those who do is a sound one. That is the compact that has been broken here.

It is a bad message to send and the worst possible time to send it.

Author:
Source: ABC News
Published Date: Dec 18, 2006

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AUSTRALIA – The Victorian Government has announced which gaming venues are to lose poker machines under its plan to cap machine numbers in 19 Victorian regions.
The Government promised to move 543 gaming machines during the election campaign and they will come from venues in Dandenong, Hume, Latrobe, Maribyrnong, Monash and Warrnambool.

Some clubs will lose only one or two machines and they can be moved to other regions not covered by the cap.

Gaming Minister Daniel Andrews says it is part of a $132 million plan to reduce problem gambling.

“A comprehensive plan to take action on problem gambling,” he said.

“This is the biggest package, the biggest policy and the biggest financial commitment in terms of addressing and taking action on problem gambling that Victoria has seen.”

Opposition gaming spokesman Michael O’Brien says the Government is simply moving pokies around instead of reducing the total number.

He says it shows the Government is not serious about tackling problem gambling.

“You can’t solve the drug problem by moving drug dealers across the street and you can’t solve gambling problems by moving pokie machines from suburb to suburb,” he said.

He says the caps will do nothing to help reduce problem gambling.

“This decision means that there will not be one less pokie machine operating in Victoria, operating on one less day, taking one less dollar of revenue,” he said.

Author: Curtis, Wayne
Source: Seattle Times
Published: Dec 19, 06

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UNITED STATES – Last year an executive for a major slot-machine manufacturer gave me a tour of his Las Vegas headquarters. Don’t be misled by the dozens of flashing, clanging slots in the showroom off the lobby, he told me. His wasn’t a gambling company. “We’re an entertainment company,” he said.
Unlikely as it may sound, slots, with their bright video screens and realistic sound systems, have become curiously sophisticated minimovies, complete with engaging characters (sly geishas, say, or crafty penguins) and plot twists (an unexpected game within a game), all built upon a deep understanding of the human-machine interface. Slot designers are forever searching for the precise combinations of sight, sound and potential payoff that will keep a player handing over cash, all the while ensuring the experience is not so intense that it induces seizures. Is that really so different from Hollywood?

This collusion of advanced mathematical modeling, Pavlovian conditioning and multiplex smarts is intriguing. But what’s even more fascinating is how this whole enterprise can be traced back to ancient Mesopotamians rolling sheep hucklebones to see which of the four sides would come up.

That’s the tale told in “Roll the Bones” by David G. Schwartz, director of the Center for Gaming Studies at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas. Schwartz starts in the foggy borderlands between augury and chance, when prognosticators looking for clues about the future would roll the bones and interpret the results. It wasn’t a huge step to start wagering on the outcome of these rolls.

And it may be that humans are genetically hard-wired for such behavior: Dice arose independently in various civilizations. The first dice in India were fashioned of brown nuts; Native American dice often were made from shells or beaver teeth. Among the many telling facts Schwartz touches upon: Dice carved with symbols actually predate the use of numerals.

From dice, it’s onward to playing cards and wagering on the outcome of everything from insect fights to basketball games, from lottery drawings to wheels of fortune.

This tour takes the reader from ancient ages of superstition through to the Enlightenment, which gave rise to the science of probability; from seedy Western saloons to the gilded gambling halls of Monaco; and inexorably onward, as you might have guessed, to a patch of scrappy desert in southern Nevada.

It’s an epic story with an engaging cast. You’ll learn a bit about Denmark Vesey, a Charleston, S.C., slave who won a lottery and used his earnings to purchase his freedom (successfully) and fund an insurrection of some 9,000 slaves and freemen (unsuccessfully). And there’s John Morrissey, the bare-knuckle fighter turned gambling baron turned nearly respectable congressman, who was a major figure behind the rise of Saratoga Springs as a mid-19th-century gambling resort.

Chronicling a tale with such sweep has its challenges, not all of which Schwartz has overcome. The evolution of gambling refuses to follow a linear path; you can’t trace a neat line from dice to the OTB parlor. Schwartz leaps around to give each form of gambling its due, as if in a frenzied game of Whac-a-Mole. (Speaking of which, his detour through the world of crooked carnival games is among the book’s more engaging sections.)

All that hurrying around can be a bit aggravating, giving the book a jumpy feel. Leonie Leblanc, “the most famous Baden-Baden female gambler,” is given only two sentences. And will anyone not feel shortchanged by this brief note: “One man even proclaimed his ‘killer duck’ an interspecies champion and pitted it against all canine challengers.”

The narrative finds a more satisfying pace about halfway through, when the spotlight swings to the origins of modern gambling in the United States. We begin in New Orleans (where craps and poker took root), then travel with cardsharps up the Mississippi on steamboats, then push on to San Francisco during the gold rush and then Las Vegas.

Schwartz makes little effort to draw any grand conclusions about what this 5-millennium-old habit can tell us about ourselves. He seems content to simply note the obvious: that gambling is an ingrained part of our everyday life. “Roll the Bones” could have used more analysis and less inventory.

Still, Schwartz, the author of two previous books on gambling culture, does manage to accomplish something remarkable: He’s made Las Vegas seem like a vast repository of history, not a crash site of implosion, rebuilding and reinvention.

The book’s last chapter describes a stroll through the splashy new Wynn Las Vegas, a $2.7 billion casino that is “the most expensive … yet built.” Schwartz sees a ghostly reminder of the past at every turn — from the rise of fancy casinos in Italy, which is reflected in an Italian restaurant, to the specter of the early-19th-century German spa resorts, as seen in a lavish indoor garden.

And in casino impresario Steve Wynn, if you look hard enough, you can see a caveman rolling some animal bones.

Enoch band rejects contract for Parkland ambulances

Joel Kom, The Edmonton Journal, Friday, December 22, 2006

EDMONTON - The Enoch Cree Nation will lose its ambulance service next month after negotiations for a service agreement were scuttled by the reserve’s band council.

The Parkland Ambulance Authority, which has provided ambulance service without charging the reserve for the past 20 years, served notice Thursday it would stop sending its ambulances for the reserve’s approximately 900 residents beginning Jan. 20.

The move comes after about six months of serious negotiations for a service contract between Parkland and the reserve were dealt a heavy blow by the reserve’s band council last week.

Legal counsel for Parkland, the reserve and Paragon Gaming, which runs the two-month-old River Cree Resort and Casino, had settled on a deal that would see the reserve and casino pay for ambulance service.

But the deal was rejected at a band council meeting last week. That was followed by the notice Parkland delivered Thursday, though it is now in separate negotiations with River Cree management for a new agreement and will keep providing service there.

David Warhaft, Parkland’s chief administrative officer, said demand at the reserve had spiked in recent years because of the economic boom. That led to the need for a flat fee, he said.

He wouldn’t disclose the amount the reserve would have been charged, though he said it was in line with what Parkland charges to other rural areas.

Warhaft said he didn’t know why the deal was rejected, but Parkland would be willing to re-open negotiations. Enoch Cree Nation officials could not be reached for comment.

jkom@thejournal.canwest.com

© The Edmonton Journal 2006

© 2006 CanWest Interactive, a division of CanWest MediaWorks Publications Inc.