From ABC News
Online gambling isn’t just bad, it’s dangerous and immoral: So argues Sheldon Adelson, CEO of the biggest gaming company in the world.
“Click your mouse and lose your house,” warns Adelson, Chairman and CEO of the Las Vegas Sands Corp.
His views, expressed in an op-ed for Forbes, have not endeared him to fans of online poker, thousands of who now are trying to organize a boycott of the sumptuous poker room (59 tables, 14,000-sq. ft.) of Adelson’s The Venetian casino and resort.
“As an industry leader, and more importantly as a father, grandfather, citizen and patriot of this great country,” writes Adelson in his op-ed, “I am adamantly opposed to the legalization and proliferation of online gaming.”
He wags a warning finger at legislation now pending in California and Pennsylvania that would make online gambling legal in those populous states. Gambling online is already legal in Nevada, New Jersey and Delaware.
“You would think,” he writes, “[that] the chairman of the world’s largest gaming company would pursue any aspect of gaming which could increase profits, right? Ordinarily that is true—but online gambling is ‘fool’s gold.'”
It’s fool’s gold, he claims, because its profits have come only at the expense of brick-and-mortar casinos, with a corresponding loss of jobs. Alluding to “recent research from a number of European countries,” without identifying that research further, he says that countries in Europe that have legalized online gambling have seen a 20 percent decrease in visitation to land-based casinos.
In the U.S., he predicts, the spread of online gaming will cost “400,000 lost jobs in casino-hosting cities across America”—200,000 jobs directly related to the gaming industry plus another 200,000 indirectly related.
His own business, he says, would not suffer, since the Sands gets “almost all” its casino profits from Asia. Rather, the blow would fall on domestic casinos, including those run by Native Americans.
Online gaming’s potential pernicious effects on children, teenagers and adults with gambling problems constitute, in his view, “a societal train wreck waiting to happen.”
For example, “The possibility of underage children finding ways to place online wagers and the possibility of people betting under the influence of drugs or being coerced are all scenarios that can happen when the person is only monitored by their own computer screen. On the other hand, when a person makes an effort to get dressed, join some friends and head to the local casino for a night of entertainment, they must show themselves as adults, and their behavior can be observed and ultimately managed by security and other staff if needed.”
