From today WSJ.
<<Gambling for Fun Proliferates
On Web With Online Casinos
ONLINE GAMBLING is on a roll. The Nevada Legislature passed a measure last week that paves the way for state gaming regulators to license Web casinos. Though plenty of logistical and legal hurdles remain, the move brings the U.S. a step closer to legalized Internet gambling.
Yet the games are already here, all over the Internet. Offshore casinos, like the bevy of Web sites based in Antigua, get most of the attention. But crowds are also swamping blackjack tables at Yahoo! and MSN, where the action isn't for money but simply for fun.
Or is it? The prevalence of pseudo-gambling on the Web shows just how narrow the distance is to the real thing, particularly since big-name Las Vegas casinos are among those fielding the play-for-fun sites. The Internet games offer valuable practice for the time when money bets online become legal. Regulatory obstacles aside, turning pretend games into cash games will require little more than a software upgrade.
Visit the Internet home of the Bellagio, the glitzy faux Italian palace on the Vegas Strip, and you can make a room reservation or read about the hotel's Le Cirque satellite restaurant while string music wafts from your PC's speakers. You can also click on a link titled "Play Games & Win Prizes" to play Krazy Keno or Phantom Belle poker.
THE BELLAGIO GAMES are the creation of WagerWorks, a spinoff of a slot-machine maker. The company, based in San Francisco, wants to be the Microsoft of online casino games. "We're excited about real gambling online," says Andrew Pascal, Wagerworks' CEO. "We want to enable traditional casino operators to move their business onto the Web."
To craft its just-for-fun site, WagerWorks took actual games developed for video poker and slot machines and translated them for play on the Web. When I asked Mr. Pascal if it would be difficult to set up the games to take cash bets, he assured me that would be no trouble. "Our Ten Play Poker game is in nearly every single licensed casino," Mr. Pascal said. "These have all been proven in a traditional casino environment."
The WagerWorks games are slick. The Arabian Riches slot machine, for instance, offers intricate graphics and casino-style sound effects. Alan Feldman, vice president for public affairs at Bellagio's parent, MGM Mirage, says hotel and casino customers love the Web games, which allow them to play at home for loyalty rewards like free buffets. "We rolled them out with very little fanfare, and we're thrilled with the response," Mr. Feldman says.
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To play at the Bellagio's site, you need to fill out a registration form with your name and your home and e-mail address. You also need to supply your birth date, attesting that you're over age 21. "We don't promote to kids," Mr. Feldman says. Such behavior, he argues, is exactly what separates mainstream licensed casinos from Internet upstarts. "We must show the responsibility to our customers that is expected by our regulators and ourselves."
A few clicks away, a popular Web site called iwin.com also has video poker and slot machines. But here all ages are free to play the games. There's no registration necessary unless you want to try to win prizes. As visitors play, they're bombarded by ads for offshore Web casinos, such as Antigua's Casino-On-Net.com. Iwin.com (iwin.com) is operated by a unit of entertainment giant Vivendi Universal. Andrea Sarkisian, the spokeswoman for Vivendi's interactive publishing unit, didn't respond to my repeated inquiries about iwin's policies.
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ADS FOR OFFSHORE CASINOS abound at Yahoo's Games channel, too, placed above the site's own play-for-free games. In addition to online blackjack, Yahoo's Games home page dishes up reviews of Nintendo and Playstation games. Yahoo says online-casino ads are "targeted" to registered users 21 and older. Apparently I get to see them because I use the personalized My Yahoo page as my home page. A Yahoo cookie thoughtfully told the Games page that I'm of legal age.
But given the ambiguous legality of offshore casinos in the U.S., what are the ads doing there in the first place? Yahoo -- recently forced to reverse itself and drop ads for X-rated fare -- had no comment on that question. Other sites that run offshore Web-casino ads include Lycos and Weather.com., according to Evaliant Media Resources. America Online, in contrast, says it doesn't accept ads from online gambling sites.
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For the traditional casinos, the next step will be assuring gaming regulators that they can verify a customer's age and identity. That's necessary to definitively screen out minors and to block bettors in jurisdictions that bar wagers. To accomplish that, industry officials are mulling everything from thumbprint scanners and global-positioning systems to low-tech alternatives like faxing a copy of a driver's license.
Maybe Web experts will be able to devise ways to keep kids outside the casinos' virtual doors. But in the meantime, those innocuous-sounding, all-in-fun games flooding the Web could well turn out to be the candy cigarettes of Internet gambling.>> |
