Celebs=heat

That's the good kind of heat, too. A timely article from ABCnews about the Palms:

Maloof has built a smallish off-Strip hotel and taken it to the top of hip heights with a heavy dose of slot machines and a relentless marketing campaign featuring the likes of Britney Spears and Leonardo DiCaprio.

Maloof's business model for the 430-room Palms covets jawdroppers like Playboy models and Jessica Simpson, instead of expensive showstoppers like Celine Dion.

"If you have the girls, you are going to get the guys," Maloof said about attracting customers to his $265 million resort.....

Maloof knew what he didn't want: families and foreign tourists visiting Las Vegas for the first time. How to accomplish the opposite? Let MTV take over a suite and fill it with seven attractive people who weren't sheepish in front of the camera. Give them the hottest bar in town, a rooftop lounge called Ghostbar. Install strippers' poles in some rooms for bachelor and bachelorette parties. Build 24, 8-foot-long beds for some very tall and rich athletes (the Palms sponsors the Kings). Then throw in concerts by Nelly, Jay-Z, Pink and let them perform in a club that only holds 1,800 people — not an inexpensive proposition.

End result: lots of buzz, plenty of hype and an endless stream of 20-something and 30-something customers willing to leave their money in Las Vegas.

Maloof says that it's easier to throw around money when you don't have to answer to Wall Street corporate analysts. "I guarantee I overspend," Maloof said. "I don't have to watch every dollar. I'm a private company. If I want to go out and spend whatever I want to spend to work … a great event, I'm going to do it."

FULL STORY

Part adoring portrait of Maloof, part gape-jawed description of the celebrities that fill the Palms, it's a good look into the casino that has only a few historical inaccuracies--such as giving kudos to Bugsy Siegel for filling the Flamingo with Hollywood celebs when he drew a meager line-up of B-listers for the casino's actual premeire. The Bugsy Myth will simply not die.

But it's funny, I only rarely see celebrities there; usually it looks like its filled with kids from Irvine waiting to get into Rain. I guess I've got to start spending more time there.
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Roy update: Show will go on

Siegried spoke to Diane Sawyer, and I ripped this from ABCnews; I was there for the Palms story and got this bonus:

Asked how he would feel being on stage with a big cat again, Siegfried Fischenbacher, the other half of the pair known as Siegfried and Roy, said, "I will be. I will be because this is my family, and Roy will be."

Fischenbacher, a German native, continued in broken English: "This is our life. If I wouldn't do this, life would be — meant nothing. But the life what we lived would meant nothing."

Roy remains in critical condition, but is stable. Fischenbacher said he is confident his partner will pull through.

"I know Roy all of these years. He always surprises us. Roy always comes through because I think Roy, he is the strongest man ever lived anyway. He has the strength like a tiger, you know."

Fischenbacher said he communicates with Horn by holding hands and squeezing. "One time is yes and two times is no. I can see his eyes, and he is following me, and he smiles and he's positive."

FULL STORY

To be light-hearted for a moment, I hope he isn't fighting "like a Bengal tiger." We know how that went for Gray Davis.

And what about the tiger? Bernie Yuman, the duo's manager, had this to say to the LVRJ: "His future is bright," Yuman said. "A tiger is a tiger. We understand."

He mauls someone into critical condition, and gets that kind of vote of confidence? That tiger must have a real personality. Whether the show will go on or not is contingent on Roy's recovery, and if the thoughts and prayers of his well-wishers mean anything, it will be a speedy one.
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Russian regulation?

I came across a very interesting article in the English website for Pravda about gaming and regulation. I want to repost much of it here. I get the feeling that the AGA does not have a branch office in Moscow, and that the industry does not have many effective third-party advocates. From Pravda:

People learnt about gambling long ago, in the early days of mankind. At first people threw the dice, then they learnt to play cards, roulette and lotteries; the number of other games of chance is increasing every day. All people, men and women of any ages and social positions, are prone to the sin of gambling. People like to feel their adrenalin increase and watch a ball jumping on the red and black sectors of the roulette. People lose entire fortunes, commit murders, and violate the human and divine laws while gambling. Others, on the contrary, sometimes win.

Gambling has become a precious enticement for swindlers of all kinds, a legal one by the way. The number of people addicted to gambling in Moscow makes thousands; more and more casinos and gambling houses is increasing in the city. Experts from the Russian Association of Gambling Business Development say that about half a million people regularly indulge in gambling in Moscow. Psychiatrists at the same time provide quite different information. The head of the extra-hospital aid in the National Narcological Scientific Center Taras Dudko says that the number of people regularly going to Moscow casinos, bookmaking offices and gambling houses is over 1.5 million people.

Gambling business is some kind of an intellectual drug that yields incredible profits. The necessity to establish government control over gambling has been spoken about for a long period already. Otherwise huge sums of money will be involved in gambling and handled without any assignment to the state budget. Besides, the government will not be able to control money inflow into gambling business. This will allow to legally launder money by Russians as well as foreigners. Chairman of the Duma Budgetary Committee Mikhail Zadornov says that lotteries are that sphere of activity where the government has not had control within the past 12 years. Every year, the government receives fewer revenues because of gambling which is $5-15 million; about $300-340 million fall out of the government control.

Until recently, no effective legal basis has been introduced into the gambling business. The law in force "On the gambling tax" was adopted in July 1998; but this is rather a project of the law as it regulates relationship between entrepreneurs in gambling.

Early this week, the Duma Budgetary Committee have once again touched upon the issue and recommended the chamber to approve the second reading of the bill "On lotteries". This will be the first serious legislative act to regulate activity of the operators on the gambling market.

This bill is expected to fix the rules of play on the lottery market once and for all; the document will also determine the responsibility for any violations in lottery organization. Mikhail Zadornov says that the document provides for administrative responsibility of lottery organizers. "Besides, some amendments to the Criminal Code are to be done to provide for criminal responsibility during organization of lotteries." The bill also stipulates the prize bounties amount which is to make up not less than 50 per cent of the total sum of the lottery and assignment for special social programs, not less than 10 per cent. Companies or individual persons wishing to organize lotteries must first obtain certificates. According to the new bill, target assignments are to be used now to finance important social infrastructure and events, including those meant for sport and culture development. A member of the Duma Budgetary Committee told RBC daily that "lotteries all over the world are the means to distribute earnings between different layers of the population and to finance different social programs."

We should wait and see to what extent this redistribution will prove to be effective in this country. The government will be extremely lucky if it manages to establish control over all big players on the gambling market. Petty swindlers must be the responsibility of law enforcement authorities; the government must prevent creation of more financial pyramids in this country.

This is also very important to protect the younger population from the obtrusive advertising of gambling houses. The problem is that the number of game-playing machines and gambling houses is speedily increasing all over the country. Teenagers miss school or immediately after lessons run to gambling houses to crowd around game-playing machines with the hope of winning some money. And when they lose their money they still find ways to accumulate another sum and feed it to the machines.

Addiction to gambling is the same as drug or alcohol addiction: it cannot be cured; the only way for people to get rid of it is to give it absolutely up and never start it again. There are special clinics for drug and alcohol addicts; unfortunately we have no medical institutions of this kind meant for people addicted to gambling. The state must somehow control the addiction of people to gambling. If the state cannot cultivate some different moral in the people and youth first of all, this state will easily turn into a country of people crazy about easy money.

"Violate the human and divine laws while gambling?" Maybe, maybe not--church bingo directors would have a different take on that.

"Petty swindlers" is also a pretty big catch-all for casino operators. I know that the English makes it a funny read, but this is like seeing a parallel universe where US casinos never got state regulation and continued to run as semi-outlaw operations without any PR machine. It makes you realize how far the industry has come in the US.
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posted by Dave at 4:11 PM