David Schwartz is arguably the preeminent expert on gaming revenue data. As director of UNLV’s Center for Gaming Research, Schwartz compiles the information released by the various U.S. gaming jurisdiction and releases them, free of charge, to the public at the department’s website, gaming.unlv.edu.
The center thrives on the most complete and up-to-date data is can compile (sometimes difficult in its home state, since Nevada is generally a month behind all other jurisdictions. The one state that provides the most complete and detailed information for more than 30 years has been New Jersey. Eager to show that it has nothing to hide, the state regulators (the Casino Control Commission for the first 30 years, and since a regulatory reorganization four years ago, the Division of Gaming Enforcement), New Jersey has provided detailed information about each of its Atlantic City casinos, including gross gaming revenue, breakouts of table game win by game, slot machine win by denomination, comps giveaways and much more. Early on, casino execs complained that it gave competitors an unfair advantage, but since all casinos were required to report the same information, that argument held little water.
But last month’s announcement that the division will cease to report important information on all games in its monthly results. Instead, it will only disclose how much was won by casinos at “table and other games,” “poker” and “slot machines.”
This disturbs Schwartz not only because he’ll have less data to report and analyze but also because New Jersey had been the “gold standard” for gaming reporting.
In a column in a Las Vegas weekly publication Seven, Schwartz explains why this is a problem.
“For years, New Jersey has published casino statistics that were nearly unrivaled in their detail,” he wrote. “Unlike Nevada, which aggregates results by reporting areas, the Garden State broke them out by property. With more than 300 locations, doing that in Nevada would be unwieldy to say the least, but in New Jersey, which never had more than a dozen casinos, it made sense.
“The monthly revenue reports in Atlantic City included the results for all table games and slot machine denominations. So if you wanted to find out how roulette performed at Borgata vs. the Trump Taj Mahal, for example, you could. The public had an unprecedented window into how the business operated. And those who study and explain the industry to the public had a magnificent set of data to work with.”
Schwartz says this decision is a blow to the celebrated New Jersey transparency.
“That makes it much more difficult to gauge the performance of individual games, not only at certain casinos but across the market,” he says. “They are not aggregating the individual game data, as Nevada does; they are, for now, eliminating it entirely.”
While this will negatively impact Schwartz’s compilation and analysis, he says it is a cause for concern for all players and investors.
“It’s more than academic,” he states. “While most of the public has an inkling that gambling odds favor the house over the long haul, it’s not so easy to tell which bets are better than others by looking at the games. It’s possible, of course, to go online and look up information about the theoretical house advantage of different games. But New Jersey’s game breakdowns let players actually see how much money the casino kept at individual games. If access to these state-verified figures helped one gambler bet more wisely, the disclosures are worth it.”
