Casino news source: Boston Herald - http://business.bostonherald.com
By any other name: Slots, bingo ... what’s the difference?
By Scott Van Voorhis
Boston Herald Business Reporter
Sunday, April 8, 2007
As the Mashpee Wampanoags push Beacon Hill for a green light to open a Las Vegas-style casino, the tribe may hold the trump card: bingo slots.
If the tribe is denied the right to open a traditional gambling casino, tribal leaders contend they will move forward with a wagering resort that features bingo slot machines.
A few years ago, the threat of opening a bingo hall might have been dismissed as empty talk. How much draw could it have, compared with the offerings of Foxwoods and Mohegan Sun or other casinos?
But an evolution in gambling technology and an explosion in bingo machine popularity has given the threat real teeth.
If the slot machine can’t come to the gaming facility, then bingo will come to the slot machine.
Tribes like the Mashpee Wampanoags now say they have the option of rolling out a casino with high-tech bingo slots that look and play so much like slot machines that even hard-boiled gambling aficionados would have trouble telling the difference.
They say those machines remain out of the reach of state gambling laws, like one in Massachusetts that bans slots.
“Until the Supreme Court of the United States wrestles with this, there is nothing they (state authorities) can do about it,” said William Thompson, a professor at the University of Nevada Las Vegas and an expert on the gambling industry.
Bingo has evolved from a game called beano, first played in this country at country fairs nearly a century ago, to the version played on bingo cards. Then came the Indian high-stakes bingo halls, and now, wired together electronic machines that are proliferating around the country in so-called “bingosinos.”
For players, there are few noticeable differences between playing a bingo slot machine and a video slot machine. A bingo screen comes up for a few seconds, then is suddenly replaced by traditional slot machine imagery.
What makes it legal in states that ban slot machines is what the players don’t see - the wiring.
With a traditional slot machine, players are betting against the house. But in bingo slots, the machines are wired to a central server.
The players, in effect, are betting against each other rather than against the house. As in bingo, a jackpot might be awarded at various intervals.
Overall, the random pattern on which winners are selected is set up differently in a bingo slot machine than in traditional casino slots.
Those are complexities, however, that even the pros would be hard-pressed to notice. The aim of bingo slot machines is to look, feel and sound like slot machines, not a game of bingo.
“Once a week they might have a super jackpot,” Thompson said. “The players get the same action.”
So far, the new machines have also held up in court as well, said Bob Choisser, publisher of Bingo & Gaming News.
As they talk about the possibility of building a casino with bingo slots, the Mashpee Wampanoags point to the Seminole Tribe in Florida.
That tribe erected a gambling empire based on bingo slots, even mustering cash for a nearly $1 billion deal to buy the Hard Rock chain - and all in a state that until the last year or two had outlawed slot machines.
In 1998, the Mashpee’s sister tribe, the Aquinnah Wampanoags of Martha’s Vineyard, fell a vote short of convincing the Fall River city council to let it open a traditional, high-stakes bingo hall.
In subsequent years, gaming companies, assisted by a legion of engineers and lawyers versed in local gambling laws, went to work.
“What happened in the interim is that the lawyers and engineers got involved,” said Gary Piontkowski, head of Plainridge Racecourse, a harness track near the Rhode Island border.
Today the Mashpee Wampanoags say that if push comes to shove, they could build a gambling resort around bingo slots.
And if that happens, will gamblers find machines that look, play and sound like the slots found at casinos in Connecticut, Atlantic City or Vegas?
Bingo. |
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