Columnist Robert Walters: Half-open casinos get half

Robert Walters

Thursday, March 2, 2000 | 9:43 a.m.

Robert Walters, a writer who lives in Washington, D.C., was a syndicated columnist for United Media for 14 years.

You're in a casino playing blackjack. The dealer's first three cards are a six, a four and an ace. She reads her hand as an 11, mistakenly assigning the ace the value of one instead of 11. She deals herself two more cards, a five and an eight. She breaks, with a 24, then pays all the players.

At another blackjack table, the dealer's first two cards are an ace and a queen. She recognizes that as a winning blackjack, and promptly sweeps up all the player's initial cards. But she leaves their bets in place, instead of collecting them also.

Over at a roulette table, a player has placed a stack of chips on the line between two numbers. One of those numbers is a winner, and the dealer proceeds to assemble a 35-1 payout for the player. Because the bet covered only half of the winning number, however, the player deserves only a 17-1 payout.

Have you died and gone to heaven? Nope. Too many other bizarre events make it clear that you're very much alive and playing in casino hell. The casino is losing players' "markers" -- negotiable financial instruments with their signatures that can be cashed for hundreds or thousands of dollars apiece. VIPs invited to a gala party marking the casino's debut are being turned away at the door by security officers insisting that there's no room for them inside.

A computer that's supposed to control slot machine activity is too feeble to keep up with the action on the casino floor. As a result, slot players are frustrated by machines that move in slow motion.

Premium players -- the casino's very best customers -- who were flown in for its grand opening are being antagonized by the staff's ineptness. Indeed, supervisors candidly acknowledge that many staff members were inadequately trained.

Everything described above -- the good, the bad and the ugly -- was on display at Harrah's New Orleans casino in the days and weeks after it opened in late October last year.

In an early December interview, Jan Jones, the former Las Vegas mayor who now is Harrah's senior vice president for communications, offered an explanation that was short on substance and long on platitudes, in support of the company's claim that the initial problems have been resolved.

"You are always going to have glitches," especially in a city with a lack of "skilled, experienced employees," Jones explained. "Good business is about doing the best you can, recognizing your problems and fixing them. They identified their mistakes and fixed them."

By mid-December, however, the price of the stock in the company that owns the New Orleans casino, JCC Holding Company (Harrah's is a minority partner in a joint ownership venture as well as the operator of the facility), plunged to an all-time low after the company reported initial earnings well below what securities analysts expected. (The per-share price of the stock peaked at $10 just before the casino opened, but subsequently has lost about two-thirds of its value.)

Unfortunately, Harrah's New Orleans isn't the only recent example of a casino that encountered serious problems because of a premature opening. The saga of the Venetian hotel-casino in Las Vegas, which opened while construction of its guest rooms, shops, restaurants and other facilities was far from complete, has been widely publicized.

Similarly, the Resort at Summerlin opened in mid-July, but its restaurants, stores and health spa were not completed for months afterward. "The lack of dining and entertainment options until September hampered the company's ability to attract local residents to the resort casino," its owners acknowledged in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. It has undergone a name change and is now called the Regent Las Vegas.

Those developments present evidence of a disturbing pattern -- a rush to cash in on a gaming boom on the part of casino owners who aren't willing to wait until staff members have been properly trained and construction has been substantially completed.

Sophisticated players have come to understand that although they're likely to be separated from their money when they visit a casino, they're paying for a form of entertainment. But being forced to cope with a still-under-construction facility or an ill-trained staff in a not-ready-for-prime-time casino is hardly entertaining.