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Gaming Guru  The power of television5 March 2019
By I. Nelson Rose The more things change, the more . . . What? They remain the same? They change? One of the last book stores in Los Angeles recently closed. And record stores are just as rare. This doesn’t mean that people aren’t buying, or at least reading, books. And more individuals have copies of recorded music, mostly downloaded, than when it was only available on vinyl or tape. What does this portend for legal gaming? Content still seems to be more important than platform. You may have to call it, for legal reasons, a video lottery terminal, or electronic bingo, or a fixed odds betting terminal. But, the game has to play basically like a slot machine. For mass retailers, whether the box store is online or landbased, selling clothing or gambling, customers want products and services they recognize and trust. The experience has to be satisfying, regardless of how it has been delivered. For most forms of legal gaming, patrons want games they have played before. The success of Casino War, a slight variation on the card game played by children, shows that many gaming patrons want familiarity and comfort, along with their risk-taking. Brand-names can be instant nostalgia. Wheel of Fortune® was the major breakthrough. Customers instantly recognized the slogan, “Wheel of Fortune!” called out by the bank of slot machines. Its success led manufacturers to look for other well-known brand-names: I Love Lucy, Star Trek, Elvis. The whole point of branded slots is to tap in to our warm, fuzzy feelings of nostalgia. Such selling-by-association is certainly nothing new: movies like Star Wars may make more money from toys and other products than from the movie itself. But it is relatively new to legal gambling. How did those brand names get so deeply buried in our consciousness? Most seem to have become part of the collective culture and memory of Americans through television. Movies are a close second, with recorded music far behind. It is more difficult for other consumer items to become cultural icons: Harley Davidson is a rare example of a non-entertainment brand-name making the transition to gaming. The power of T.V. can be seen in the nearly complete dominance of Texas Hold‘em over all other forms of poker. In fact, the World Series of Poker is a stark reminder that Texas Hold‘em has become, in the minds of most people, synonymous with poker, due to television. Why don’t people look for other games when they walk into a casino poker room? If you are younger than 35, you may not remember a time when other forms of poker were dealt in both cardclubs and home games. If you’re under 25, you may not even know there are other forms of poker. This is only a slight exaggeration. When players of all ages are taught poker today, they start, and usually stick with, only one game. The WSOP does feature 7-Card Stud and even the exotic Omaha Hi-Low Split. But, does anyone today play Roll Your Own, Burt-Don’t-Look or Anaconda? Do new players know that Baseball and Dr. Pepper are not just a ball game and soda pop? It was not always this way. As recently as 1960, Texas Hold ‘em was considered so bizarre that an overhead shot of a table with 12 players got a two-page-wide photo spread in Look Magazine. Even the name of the game was still in dispute. The Look piece is entitled: “‘Hold Me’: a wild new poker game.” So, how did Texas Hold ‘em become so dominant? The answer tells us a lot about how gambling, especially legal gambling, spreads. It is a story of some of the greatest forces in modern America: television and war. War is the innovator. Whenever you bring together hundreds of thousands of young men for long periods of times with absolutely nothing to do, new forms of gambling develop. Craps has been a long-term problem for casinos, because the players who learned the dice game in World War II are all dying off. The great American game of poker, a truly home-grown invention, was created out of war. The Civil War allowed the recently developed game of draw poker to spread and evolve. Stud poker was invented by soldiers who had grown tired of draw. Draw and stud poker spread throughout the western frontier. But it took two more wars to create the modern game. World War I brought into play seven-card stud, while World War II led to the invention of Texas hold ‘em. Television is the propagator. Football only became a prime at-home spectator sport with the start of Monday Night Football in 1970. Spurred on by a reduction in the federal excise tax on legal sports wagers from 10% to 2%, casinos installed ever bigger and more technologically sophisticated sportsbooks. And it was T.V. that made Texas Hold ‘em a household name. In 1973, Jimmy “The Greek” Snyder and CBS were interested in filming an hour-long documentary on the WSOP. But they had two major drawbacks: First, poker players have poker faces. They figured the normal lack of emotions could be overcome through careful editing. But who wants to see an hour of the back of players’ cards? No amount of creative camera work could make a game like five-card draw interesting to a home audience. The obvious answer was that some of the cards had to be face up. Five-card stud is usually boring, and seven-card stud would probably be too complicated for home viewers who had rarely, or never, played poker. But a game with community cards worked perfectly. As a nice bonus, Benny Binion and the top players he invited during those first few years knew and liked Texas hold ‘em. Over the years, CBS continued to broadcast footage from the WSOP; in the 1980s ESPN began airing hour-long shows. The cameras always focused on Texas Hold ‘em. Then, in 2003, the hole-card camera was introduced. And five card draw became extinct. There does not appear to be a new social media that has the universal appeal of television. It will probably be a while before Angry Birds and Farmville appear on the faces of slot machines. More importantly, the days when almost everyone in America knew the same things — from why Juliet was on her balcony to what is the Bat-Signal — are almost over. The mega-hits, like Harry Potter®, are few and far between. Instead, everyone with a computer, which means everyone, can create their own popular culture, and be in complete ignorance of what interests other members of society. For example, people who read this column are much more likely to follow the exploits of Chris (“Jesus”) Ferguson than Kim Kardashian. But, T.V. still has power. Even I know, a little, about Kim Kardashian, because she is enough of a celebrity to be the object of ridicule on shows like Saturday Night Live. It is impossible to predict the next fad big enough to become immortalized as a slot machine. But at least for a few years the odds are that, whatever it is, it will make its greatest impact through television. Preferential shuffling19 February 2019
It is time to look again at the controversy over the right of casinos to shuffle cards in blackjack whenever the remainder of the deck favors the players. Although the issue of casino dealers counting cards has been stewing for decades, the most recent flare-up is the result of technological breakthroughs. ... (read more)
What should daily fantasy sports do now?24 November 2015
The two big daily fantasy sports (DFS) operators, FanDuel and DraftKings, and their backers are, in the immortal words of former President George H.W. Bush, in "deep-doodoo." But lawyers with legal shovels can probably dig them out. As recently as last year, the DFS industry's problems were relatively insignificant. ... (read more)
Gambling and the Law: Court gets New Jersey sports betting wrong again19 August 2015
Last year, I wrote an article explaining why the federal Court of Appeal was incorrect in ruling New Jersey could not regulate sports betting. The same court has now got it wrong again, this time ruling that the Garden State cannot even deregulate sports betting. In other words, when it comes to sports betting, New Jersey may not regulate, and it may not not regulate. ... (read more)
Gambling and the Law: Are daily fantasy sports legal?Technology is speeding up changes in the world of gaming. It took almost two centuries for poker to evolve from Straight Poker – five paper cards dealt face down with no draw – to Internet Hold ‘Em linking players using computers in different states and even on different continents. Decades passed before ... (read more)Gambling and the Law: Culture clashIt is not easy to do business in Asia. Or in the U.S.This is especially true of heavily regulated businesses, like legal gaming. And the problems are compounded when an individual who is a product of one culture wants to expand into a foreign market.Sometimes, the barriers are structural. How, for example, ... (read more)Gambling and the Law: Be Afraid! Be Very Afraid!Opponents of legal gambling are notorious within the industry for making up numbers. Robert Goodman, for example, is a discredited "anti" and the founder of the grandly named, though now defunct, "United States Gambling Research Institute." He is infamous for proclaiming, "The American Insurance ... (read more)Gambling and the Law: 'Blackjack and the Law' wins case for casinoIn one of the very first cases heard by the federal court in Las Vegas in 2011, Harrah’s (now renamed Caesars) once again won the right to kick out card-counters. Roger L. Hunt, Chief U.S. District Judge for Nevada, based his decision, in part, on a book I co-authored in 1998, BLACKJACK AND THE ... (read more)Gambling and the Law: The Reid-Kyl letter on Internet gamblingLeaders of the Democratic and Republican Parties in the Senate have sent the U.S. Attorney General a letter demanding that the Justice Department do something about Internet gambling. What, exactly, is up to the reader. This Rorschach inkblot test of a letter allows proponents and opponents to project ... (read more)I. Nelson Rose |
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