The Boston Globe last week carried a piece about the difficulty that self-exclusion programs have in larger casinos, such as Foxwoods Resort Casino.
It cited the case of David Schreiber, who several years ago voluntarily signed up for the “voluntary self-exclusion” program at Foxwoods. The program gives the casino cause to deny him access and allows it to eject him if he violates the agreement.
Nevertheless, Schreiber has been allowed into the casino multiple times, where he makes almost 50 bets a minute. The self-described gambling addict says he has returned to the casino a hundred times since he got on the list, and hasn’t been ejected. He was discovered once, when he won a $1,250 jackpot—which he wasn’t allowed to keep.
Foxwoods would only comment in general, issuing this statement: “We’ve supported responsible gaming at Foxwoods from day one,” and adding “To further help out those who opt for exclusion, we take additional cautionary measures such as freezing their rewards accounts, which eliminates the ability for them to accumulate points or access complimentary offerings, and removing them from our marketing list so they no longer receive gaming offers and announcements. We also flag them in our systems so that we can intervene if they attempt to collect jackpot winnings.”
The casino says more than 2,000 people have signed such agreements over the course of the casino’s history. However, social workers who know gambling addicts well say that such agreements don’t work well in large casinos.
After all, casinos don’t require that customers show ID’s to play. Security personnel may have the pictures of those who have signed up for the program on file, but how do they find them in a crowd? Certainly, casinos have among the most sophisticated facial recognition software going, but most don’t apply them on the entire gaming floor.
The programs do help gambling addicts face their addiction, say psychologists such as Jeff Marotta. Such people “are admitting out loud that they can’t control their gambling, which may lead them to taking other steps to curb their gambling,” he told the Globe.
Massachusetts has employed a self-exclusion policy with teeth, according to Mark Vander Linden, who is in charge of the program for the Massachusetts Gaming Commission. The casino employs people who are tried to look for gambling addicts and to gently lead them towards counseling, rather than to punish them.
At Plainridge Park, the first casino to open in the Bay State, an estimated 40 persons who signed self-exclusion agreements were ejected during the first 18 months of operation.
Critics, like Les Bernal, of Stop Predatory Gambling, calls such efforts “a sham.” Adding, “It’s a sham. It’s public relations, at best. The casinos say they are taking steps to protect consumers, but they get their profits from problem gamblers every day.”
