Experts: Stop squeezing table game players
By Thomas Moore, Las Vegas Sun
In the early 1980s, a battle was fought and lost in the casinos of Las Vegas and Atlantic City. The result, said two experts at the Cutting Edge Table games conference at the Flamingo Las Vegas this week, was that slot machines won the high ground on the casino floor.
“1984. What does that year mean to us?” Michael A. Meczka, president of Meczka Marketing Research Consulting, said during a session titled “We Have Met the Enemy: It is Us!” “In 1984, across Nevada and Atlantic City, it was the year when slot revenue began to exceed table revenue.”
Corporate ownership may be more to blame for the decline of table games — and also diminishing gambling revenue — than any generational shift if the arguments of Meczka and other speakers on Tuesday, the second day of the conference, hold any weight.