Let’s get back to the point – is the legislation the result of a conspiracy?
Earlier I said that Vegas casinos had all to gain from online gambling, particular with regards to the rejuvenated poker industry.
I haven’t been able to find a table of statistics showing the WSOP results for the past 10 years, but this excerpt from wsop2006.com should suffice for the time being.
The growth of the WSOP has been astounding, especially over the last few years. In 1972 when Thomas “Amarillo Slim” Preston won the title and $80,000, the tournament had only 8 participants. In 2000 Chris Ferguson beat 518 opponents to become World Champion. The win gave him $1,500,000 in prize money. In 2004 the number of participants had grown to 2,576 and the first prize was $5,000,000 (Greg Raymer won the tournament). The reining champion Joseph Hachem defeated 5,618 opponents to win $7,500,000.
Chris Moneymakers fantastic victory in 2003 is without any doubt one of the main factors behind this amazing development. His entire entry fee to the championship through online poker had been $39 and the win gave him $2,500,000. This gave online poker players around the world hope and lots of people discovered the game.
At WSOP 2006, Jamie Gold beat 8,772 players to win the top prize of $12 million and claim the title of world champion.
As you can see, the “astounding” claim above was nothing compared to what happened this year.
Could this have happened without online poker? Absolutely, positively, no way Jose. Needless to say, Harrahs has directly benefited from the popularity of online poker, even if they do not have an online play-for-real site themselves. And by extrapolation, Vegas casinos have also benefitted from the surge in popularity of poker in general.
How about casino revenue?
Best I can do was the stats from lvcva – Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority – what follows are the revenue numbers from Clark County from 2002-2006:
2005 $9,709,408,000 (up 11.4%)
2004 $8,710,976,000 (up 11.2%)
2003 $7,831,378,000 (up 2.6%)
2002 $7,630,528,000
In 2006, based on current numbers through July, the estimated annual revenue for Clark County in 2006 is $10.56 billion. This does not take into account seasonal fluctuations – it’s pretty likely that the actual number in 2006 will be higher.
Now look at the percentage increases in 2004 and 2005 – after Chris Moneymaker won the WSOP in 2003. Again, the word “astounding” is appropriate.
Whether or not the increases were due to the surging popularity in poker, or just a fluke, remains to be seen – but one can easily be tempted to draw the correlation here.
Online poker rejuvenated the poker industry in Las Vegas – and in doing so, sharply increased the annual income growth of the Las Vegas gambling industry – not likely through increased rake alone, but a probable surge in casino activity brought about by a large increase in visitors.
This is not necessarily conclusive evidence – but it is not just circumstantial, either. The land-based casino industry in Las Vegas has almost certainly benefitted greatly from the popularity of online gambling.
Now – any exec in Vegas – and most of them are damn sharp – would clearly have seen this data and reached a similar conclusion. Thus, it makes little sense that they would want to support a prohibition of online gambling.
Add this to the likelihood that a US-based online gambler, suddenly given a choice of playing at mgmonlinecasino or goldenpalace.com, is almost surely going to choose mgmonlinecasino ANYHOW… why in the world would Vegas land-based operators need to worry about the presence of the online operators, who are surely helping them to increase their land-based revenues?