I'm sitting in the airport on the way to Vegas for a weekend of poker, steak and sports betting, no particular order (okay, exactly that order). It's my second trip there so far this year, and I haven't even gone there for a conference yet. Just coincidentally, I saw this tid-bit from the WSJ MarketBeat Blog about the latest report from Las Vegas Sands, the casino:
Eventually they get around to saying their win percentage for table games fell to 14.7% in the third quarter of 2007, compared to 23.4% in the third quarter of last year, compared with an expected range of 20% to 22%.
Interesting, the stock was slammed because the company had a bad run at the tables, or so it would seem. It's strange, because I always thought the law of large numbers was to be obeyed. Now my first thought, of course, was that obviously this was an aberration, right? Surely this would regress to the mean. After all, there's nothing uncertain about casino games. But maybe this isn't the right way to think about it.
In thinking about this some more, it's certainly possible that a decline in table game margins could represent something meaningful and not just a blip. Perhaps gamblers are getting better. Not all games and not all bets are created equal. If you only took the best bets on craps and stopped playing nickel slots, you'd improve your win rate and the house would be worse off. If you read up on proper blackjack strategy, you'd do better. Heck, if you played poker, most of your losses would be to other players and not to the house. Even in video poker, you can learn to play near breakeven. If slots were your sole game, you could go online and probably find a directory of the machines with the highest payouts within each casino. And then there's the overall explosion of gambling, which may have forced the Las Vegas Sands company to improve its payouts as a means of competing. This is all just conjecture, of course. Perhaps Davis has looked more into this.
Perhaps what needs to be done is for someone to collect several quarter of table game win-rates and see what kind of trend there is. I'd do it myself this weekend, but as the saying goes, "What happens in Vegas... is not related to reading casino financial data."
More: Stalwart favorite Carl Bialik, AKA The Numbers Guy, has more.
Congress may admit new states "on an equal footing" with existing ones; however, it has not done so since 1959. The Constitution is silent on the question of whether states have the power to unilaterally leave, or secede from,
Posted by: generic cialis | April 20, 2010 at 12:30 PM
The radio song says the it is a joy to have fun, and the world will sing along with you! Fun is in short supply these days, but I feel you can have it all if you try!
Posted by: psychic reading | October 31, 2011 at 04:34 AM