In this news article, Court rules casino lawsuits can be heard in state courts,  Choctaw counsel Bob Rabon is quoted:  “I’ve been representing Indian tribes for 40 years, and this is probably the single most difficult blow for tribal sovereignty that I have ever seen in my career.”  This is great to know.  Perhaps it is a step towards dismantling the “tribal sovereignty” system that has been such a failure.

Tribes operate big casinos that plunder their surrounding communities, generating most of their money from non-tribal members.  Patron disputes and allegations of wrongdoing are ignored by the casino-controlled “tribal gaming commissions.”  Victims of casino wrongdoing are expected to file complaints in the local tribal kangaroo court system.  Local non-tribal law enforcement agencies, though they often have jurisdiction over felonies committed on tribal land, are reluctant to arrest casino employees who commit violent crimes against patrons, often citing the stupidity of ”tribal sovereignty” as a reason for their refusal to do their duty.  “Tribal sovereignty” has been a dismal failure and should be ended.  This court case may be the beginning of the end of “tribal sovereignty.”  I hope so.

More information about the case:  Danny Dye and Pat Dye v. Choctaw Casino of Pocola, Oklahoma and The Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma

I had hope for the M Resort when it first opened. Decent blackjack, friendly employees, good service, lots of customers. I gladly doled out some Bear Praise for it. Little by little, in just a couple of months, all the above have deteriorated. Employees have been laid off, games gutted, attitudes worsened.

One poorly thought-out promotion was heavily pounded by intelligent patrons, and was abruptly canceled, to the disgust of those on their way and those waiting in line to do what exactly M invited them to do. Since then, the promos have been weak to downright insulting. It looks like perhaps M had a promotional budget for a certain period, blew it all on the one good promo gone awry, and is now reduced to doling out scraps in a feeble effort to attract customers.

For example, I recently received a nice looking, slick multi-color booklet in the mail. Thinking this might be a serious marketing effort to siphon off customers (deservedly so) from Southpoint and Green Valley, I hurriedly opened the booklet. I was disappointed to discover it was mostly worthless crap. The only things I kept were a free car wash coupon and eight $15 free play TITO coupons, each good for a two-day period. The rest of the booklet was quickly flung into the trash. I don’t know how many, if any, $15 free plays I’ll bother with, even though I drive past the M twice a day. A $15 coupon isn’t enough to entice me, or I don’t think many others, to make a point of visiting there. What marketing bozo thought of sending such puny coupons?

My “M Call” today again awarded me one dollar –333 points. Ah, yes: “Everyone wins.” One dollar? El Cheapo! They should be embarrassed and ashamed.

Too bad. I think M could have gained plenty of customers from Southpoint and Green Valley if sufficient promotional effort was made. But the offers have been cheap. The M has a nice facility. But without serious marketing efforts, it will wither away, particularly in the current economy.

UPDATE 6/26/09: Perhaps it was the bad publicity, perhaps it was the scorn from many patrons, perhaps it was just poor planning to send out the cheap offers prior to the good offers, but M Resort has made amends for its cheapness described above.  Some patrons are now receiving decent free play coupons. For example, $1,000 in free play — ten $100 coupons, each good for a separate period of about five days.  This is an offer more in line with what should be expected from a new casino trying to increase its market share.  Too bad the good offers weren’t sent out before the lousy offers. At least with the $100 free plays, it’ll be worth making the trip to also redeem the puny ones.

Resorts Atlantic City has launched a new online social community, called myresortscasino.com. Resorts says it is the first among its competitors to create a customized site that takes social networking to “the next level.” Think of it as a casino’s very own MySpace or Facebook-like page.

Casino ups the ante on social networking scene

This is disgusting. Gambling addicts and degenerates will be more easily be able to find others  like themselves, so the casino can exploit them together. Pathetic.  “Social networking” revolving around losing money in a casino? A new low in casino propaganda dissemination.

The slimeballs who thought up this one ought to be ashamed of themselves.

Peppermill Reno recently sent out “birthday month” promotions to patrons who list birthdays in July.  Some of the offers appeared to be for slightly more freeplay than some patrons normally receive as part of the Peppermill’s marketing efforts.  A nice touch, especially in view of the current economic climate.  It seemed like a good way to ensure that these “good customers” visit the Peppermill during July.

But wait: A few days later, another letter was sent out, retracting the offers and replacing the decent free play offer with a lousy “gift card” of face value  about 30% of the face value of the freeplay.  Peppermill freeplay is automatically  loaded  directly onto players cards with no time-wasting, annoying line-standing  (see  previous Growl about Circus Circus Reno’s stupidity).  However,  redemption of the inferior “gift card” offer will require standing in line at the players’ club.

Could Peppermill be trying to equal Circus Circus in stupidity?  Where do casinos find these clowns?  It is petty and stupid for the Peppermill to retract the better offers. It likely will annoy many patrons. I laughed it off, realizing the stupidity of many casino marketing people, but others may not be so forgiving and will take their future business elsewhere. After the original mailers were sent out, Peppermill should have sucked it up and moved on, leaving patrons with a nice birthday surprise.  Instead, Peppermill’s managers chose to deliberately antagonize patrons.  Mind-boggling.

With the exception of its excellent sportsbook, Circus Circus Reno has long been one of the worst-managed casinos in the Reno area, seemingly actually being run by clowns. Old and dirty, with paranoid, unfriendly pit personnel, most dealers suffering from shuffling disease, and featuring house-ordered preferential shuffling even against tiny-stakes players, the dump is a burn joint.

But it has hit a new level of stupidity. Circus Circus Reno sends emails with weekly free play offers that formerly were able to be loaded directly onto customers’ cards by use of the PIN, ready for immediate use on the machine(s) of the customer’s choice. But now, the system has been changed to instead create a new “line-standing opportunity” for patrons. To “validate” the free play, patrons now must now stand in the long, typically slow-moving lines at the players club.

When a patron asked the players club manager the reason for this newly-concocted stupidity, the manager replied that most patrons “prefer standing in line” to directly loading the free play into a machine, because “now we can offer more free play.” Further questioning revealed the manager had no clear idea as to what she was talking about, as she provided nonsensical answers to simple questions. Among other things, she claimed the “new computer system” is unable to correctly set the dates on which the free play should be automatically activated, so it must be done manually at the players club. Because many other casinos with supposedly older computer systems can handle this mundane task, it is hard to know if the players club manager was lying or really is as ignorant as she seemed. The claim that most patrons prefer wasting their time standing in line instead of directly loading their free play is mind-boggling.

I hope top management at Circus Circus looks at this absurd situation and takes corrective action before more customers are lost forever because of this stupidity.

June 3, 2009 - A rare victory for common sense over casino stupidity

There is at least one brain-using manager at Circus Circus Reno.  Friends have reported that as of June 1, the system has been changed back to the previous method of freeplay being loaded directly onto the card, immediately playable without the ridiculous line-standing.  Thank you to the intelligent person there, whoever you are.

From this article: U.S. SENATE TESTIMONY: Sheriff sees hotels, casinos helping

Clark County Sheriff Doug Gillespie said law enforcers are stepping up their outreach to Strip and downtown hotels, and also to private guards who live and work in Las Vegas.

This will further solidify the already too-friendly relationship between police and the many pinhead thugs who work in casino security. We have still not seen a single arrest of a security guard for any of the numerous violent crimes committed against patrons, many of which subsequently result in large civil jury verdicts. This will make it even less likely to happen.

“In our community there are over 6,700 private security professionals, and thousands more valet attendants, housekeepers and bell captains, each poised and capable of detecting suspicious behaviors indicating criminal activity,” Gillespie told a Senate homeland security subcommittee on preparedness.

“Professionals” — that’s absurd. The sheriff should look at the lack of professionalism in his own department. The mere thought of Metro stooping so low as to depend on the veracity of the lowlifes that populate casino security departments is frightening.

NFL Hires Full-Time Lobbyist to Attack Online Gambling

The NFL owes much of its popularity to gambling, online and otherwise. How many millions of people wouldn’t bother to watch a bunch of overstuffed, single-digit IQ thugs running around charging into each other like wild animals, if they didn’t have a financial stake in the games, whatever size any individual’s stake may be? TV ratings and attendance would take a severe hit. Advertising revenue would decline. Stadium workers and other employees would suffer layoffs. But the NFL puts its corporate head in the sand and bites the hand that feeds it. Ridiculous.

The NFL should learn from the bloated, self-important fat cats at Harrah’s, MGM Mirage, Station Casinos, and other casino companies that are now in or are contemplating bankruptcy. They can only gouge and sucker people for so long before many people stop coming. The economic downturn has quickly crippled the greedy, parasitic casino industry. By continuing to try to remove many people’s main reason to be interested in the childish games presented by the NFL, the league may find itself alongside the casinos in bankruptcy court. Wake up, NFL.

For a position more intelligent and honest than that of the NFL, see:

N.J. lawmaker challenges federal ban on sports betting

From this news article:

Herbst Gaming, which has spent the past year seeking a financial restructuring plan for its $847 million in debt, announced an agreement Tuesday with its bondholders in which the company will lose ownership of its 15 casinos in Nevada, Iowa and Missouri, but retain control of its Nevada slot routes.

As I have previously growled, the Herbst brothers were particularly rapacious in the manner in which they operated their dumpy little casinos. Their shameless preying on addicted, compulsive gamblers with the miserable table games in Primm was the worst of their worst. Though they had a monopoly on a location at which few would even bother to stop, except for addicts who couldn’t stand to wait another 45 minutes to get to Las Vegas to give away their money, the Herbsts permitted atrocities such as double deck blackjack paying only 6 to 5 to infest their casinos.

In Las Vegas, Terrible’s is a casino that truly lives down to its name. Management has repeatedly lied to patrons about various promotions, and the atmosphere in the casino is one of constant hostility towards patrons from the slugs employed there. Even after the sportsbook, long among the unfriendliest in town, was taken over by Lucky’s, some of the same inept, rude staff remained. The entire sportsbook staff should have been fired long ago, before the failing sportsbook was handed over to Lucky’s.

In Reno, the Herbsts continued a
bizarre and player-unfriendly blackjack rule they should have done away with when purchasing the dump Sands Regency. And they continued a culture there of hostility towards patrons. Even worse, in a casino surrounded by fleabag motels and populated largely by street people and gang-member types, they did little or nothing to clean up the place and make it safe for patrons.

In contrast, Herbst Gaming did make substantial improvements to the other low-end Reno-area property it purchased, the seedy Rail City. However, the typical patrons of Rail City are not much better than Sands Regency’s. Somehow, the Herbsts weren’t able to figure out that the money wasted on improvements to Rail City would never be recovered by continuing to cater to the coin-playing fleas that make up Rail City’s patron base.

In retrospect, it looks like the Herbsts did just about everything wrong. Judging by the terrible mismanagement, it appears that they actually wanted their little casinos to fail, for whatever reasons. Well, fail they did. Good riddance to the Herbst-operated casinos. Let’s hope that decent, competent operators take over after the bankruptcy proceedings.

The Herbsts can go back to their gas stations and car washes, with which they do a good job. And they can continue to plunder and prey upon the addicted gamblers who play the slot machines in those places and others on their “slot routes.”

On its first full day of operation, the M Resort in Henderson had a single-line 25-cent video poker machine with a progressive starting at $10,000 instead of the undoubtedly intended $1,000. A patron hit the jackpot. Rather than hassle the winner or try to outright cheat him, as many casinos have done in similar situations, after a thirty-minute delay, the M Resort paid the patron the $10,009, closed the bank of machines and politely asked the other players to cash out and play other machines. No harassment of the other patrons, no threats, no security guards, etc. In view of all the casino misbehavior we routinely see, it as refreshing to see a casino behave properly in this situation.

It is too early to form an overall opinion of the M, but from this incident, it appears to be on the right track. Many other casino managers could learn from this incident.

Despite many well-publicized settlements and large jury verdicts for casino abuse of patrons, casino security still doesn’t seem to understand the basics. Of all the casino security stupidity I’ve personally encountered over the years, and of all I’m aware that has happened to others, the one at the Cannery ranks among the stupidest.

They (Cannery guards) finally announced clearly that I was being detained and I was not free to go. Two of them were openly armed. I asked the grounds for my detention. They said it was because I was taking pictures. I asked whether they had reason to think that I had committed a felony, which is the only suspicion that triggers their authority to detain. Yes, I was told–taking pictures. I asked, incredulously, “You think that’s a felony?” The guy said, “Yes, it’s a violation of our policy”–as if that’s the same thing.

The writers at www.PokerGrump.com and www.vegasrex.com have done such a good job of chronicling the moronic behavior of both the guards and the police officers, there is not much to add except I hope the Cannery victim sues and receives a large amount of money from these jerks.

As for the idiotic guards at Stratosphere, we can only hope that someone with a functioning brain at the Stratosphere reads about the actions of the nitwit guard depicted below and fires him before he hurts someone.

It seems to me that the economic situation has many casino employees on edge and on their worst behavior ever. The situation is ripe for someone getting seriously injured by these pinheads.

Vegas Rex: In my opinion, this guy is very dangerous. He is just looking for a reason, any reason, to go off on someone … and mark my words … at some point he will do exactly that.