The Bulletin Board
THE LEDE: Is Las Vegas’s rebound a mirage?
ROUNDUP: A look at the stories you may have missed.
VIEWS: How the perception of cheating killed online poker.
AROUND the WATERCOOLER: AGA, IGA, and unions urge Congress to limit prediction markets in crypto bill.
STRAY THOUGHTS: The Witness Protection Generation.
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The Lede: When it Comes to Las Vegas, Opinions Vary
I’ve written extensively about the current state of Las Vegas (here are six examples):
While some numbers are improving (as is optimism in some corners), the market is still hurting — CDC Gaming Report’s Buck Wargo recently noted that 2025 revenue was down just 4% but net income was down a staggering 81%.
I firmly believe there are still significant structural issues with the prevailing business model, and many operators are using super glue to close up significant wounds instead of biting the bullet and going to the ER for stitches.
And as Wargo noted, employment continues to decline (something I noted in a January column), with Strip properties decreasing their workforce by an average of 3.2%, with total employment of 92,130, down from 96,037 in 2019. Statewide, “The average number of employees decreased 1.6% from 148,967 in 2024 to 146,645 in 2025. There were 162,066 total employees in 2019.”
Earnings+More recently looked into the success (or lack thereof) “value packages” offered by MGM, which CEO Bill Hornbuckle said were an attempt to be “creative and launch an all-inclusive experience that bundles hotel, dining, entertainment and all parking and resort fees.” According to the team at Jefferies, “Current demand signals remain mixed, with insufficient evidence of a durable inflection.”
As I’ve been saying all along, the problem isn’t necessarily that prices are too high. The problem is visitors feel there is little value:
“It’s not simply the rising resort fee or paid parking; it’s the long check-in lines, sensor-monitored waters in the room, dwindling rewards, fewer free drinks (often based on play), smaller pours, acting like handing you a free water at check-in is some genius customer service idea, higher table minimums, and fewer face-to-face interactions with employees, as they are replaced by technology and automation.”
As I wrote in the past, it feels like the tipping point has been reached:
“I’ve always poo-pooed the idea of price sensitivity, but with the caveat that there is a tipping point. My belief has been (and remains) that a resort fee or 6/5 blackjack or 000 roulette won’t keep people away. But when quadruple-zero roulette is rolled out, or when resort fee passes a certain threshold, or is coupled with a dozen other added costs, it might, and the city is starting to realize that something might be wrong.”
Or as I said in one of the columns linked above, people aren’t looking for cheap; they’re looking for value:
“$10 earbuds are cheap. The problem is that they either don’t work right out of the box or shit the bed within a week or two. So there isn’t much value in purchasing them. But you don’t have to buy a $400 pair. You can get a lot of value out of a $50-$60 pair. Right now, Las Vegas is offering $400 and $10 earbuds; there aren’t any $60 options.”
Roundup: So Much News; So Little Newsletter Space
CFTC approves Novig as DCM [Press Release]: “Novig… received designation from the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) as a Designated Contract Market (DCM), positioning the company to operate as a federally regulated prediction market and expand nationwide under a single regulatory framework.” Per the press release, Novig plans to launch its prediction market offering this summer in all 50 states.
Massachusetts schools launch curriculum on gambling [WCVB]: “Medfield is one of 15 high schools across the state, along with seven middle schools, teaching kids about the problems that can come alongside the thrill of gambling.” The program is part of the Youth Sports Betting Safety Coalition, formed by Attorney General Andrea Campbell. “If we get to young people, particularly middle school, high school, we can help them if they choose to get involved with gambling, understand the risk, make sure they’re safe and that’s done responsibly,” Campbell said.
VLT fight heats up in Missouri [Missouri Independent]: “J&J Ventures donated $200,000 to three supporters of legalizing VLTs in the General Assembly. Per the Missouri Independent, “The company has contributed $3.5 million to Missouri campaigns since 2015, more than half since the start of 2025, according to records of the Missouri Ethics Commission.” STTP Note: In yesterday’s newsletter, I wrote about Pennsylvania Supreme Court finding skill games illegal.
Brendan Sorsby to enter NFL supplemental draft [CBS Sports]: “After legal battles, injunctions and uncertainty surrounding his college future, Brendan Sorsby has made his decision: He's headed to the NFL supplemental draft.” Sorsby admitted to gambling on pro and college sports, including 40 bets on Indiana football while he was a freshman with the Hoosiers in 2022. As I noted in a recent Stray Thoughts, “A Texas judge granted Texas Tech quarterback Brendan Sorsby a temporary injunction against the NCAA, allowing him to play this season.”
NGCB makes arrest in Fresno State match fixing scheme [Press Release]: “The Nevada Gaming Control Board (NGCB) has concluded a comprehensive investigation into suspicious sports wagering activity involving Fresno State men’s basketball games during the 2024-2025 season… Evidence obtained through subpoenas, financial records, cellphone data, licensed sportsbook operators, and coordination with the National Collegiate Athletic Association established probable cause that multiple individuals conspired to fraudulently place wagers tied to the intentional underperformance of a Fresno State athlete during a Jan. 7, 2025, basketball game.” Per the release, one suspect has been arrested and criminal charges are being pursued against others.
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Views: Online Poker’s Perception Problem
This is Part 3 of a four-part series by Phillip Atkinson, the CEO of Unrational Games. The articles were originally published on X and are reprinted here with permission from the author.
Part 1: Not Neutral
Part 2: Not For Me
The articles focus on cheating in poker, but more importantly, how customer perception of cheating can kill a business. Once again, there are many parallels to prediction markets.
Does the person sitting next to you at the poker table think they are playing a fair game?
There are probably only a couple of hundred people on the planet who have caught more people cheating at poker than me.
People soft playing pocket aces against a friend.
An organised ring of players from East Asia colluding at low stakes.
Players using multiple accounts at the same table.
Players who magically managed to click on the exact same pixel location on a button twenty times in a row.
Players who magically clicked on pixels on a button in a perfectly uniform pattern.
Teams of players using squeeze plays and chip dumping in tournaments.
Players repeatedly disconnecting when all-in.
I’ve come to the view that examples like the above are mostly irrelevant. Actual cheating at online poker is not what killed the game. What became toxic is a widespread perception of cheating.
Most of it gets caught
The first thing to understand is that most cheating is unsophisticated and, as a result, is fairly easy to catch - by the reputable companies at least - through internal tools and analysis, not by the players who think they’ve spotted it. The poker rooms have access to vastly more data and context than any individual at the table, so they catch vastly more. That was certainly the case at PokerStars, which invested a lot in good people, systems and tools in this area. What you also got was a fair number of false reports:
Players who legitimately disconnected.
Players who got lucky on bad plays.
Players who mis-clicked on the wrong option and looked suspicious doing it.
And that is the key. Players are correct to conclude that cheating exists. They are mostly wrong about whether it happened to them (unless they were a victim of the UltimateBet/Absolute Poker scandal, probably the most egregious example from poker history). There are only a small minority of long-term winners in online poker, so even the average player, someone who is genuinely competent, is a net loser over time. People are terrible at recognising their true position in the poker/gambling hierarchy, even when the data is clear. Put those two things together and you get the now-common perspective. They didn’t lose because they were worse, they lost because others are cheating. And the thing about perspectives is that they are very hard to change.
The tipping point
Despite scandals and less sophisticated detection tools, back in the boom years the damage was fairly localised. There were enough easy games to go round that the genuine incidents of small scale collusion, and the imagined ones, never made a real dent in how the product felt. Now you’ve had over a decade of players churning, the games are far harder, and the odds of crossing paths with someone who has soured on the whole thing are much higher. The number of people carrying a negative view reached critical mass years ago. When you were the only one among your friends who held it, it stayed moderated, or internal. Once it’s a chunk of your social group, and almost ubiquitous at your Thursday night home game, it becomes the default mood music, and it reaches the ears of new players quickly.
This is not a problem unique to poker, and it is worth watching where prediction markets are heading. Retail participants lose to better-informed, better-resourced counterparties for entirely structural reasons, and they will reach for entirely structural villains to explain it such as insider trading or front-running. PMs are their own worst enemy in this regard, running markets on events which have already happened, or that are quite clearly open to manipulation or privileged insider information access. Shayne Coplan often mentions that insider knowledge is a feature, not a bug, but this is a luxury opinion of an operator. Players, poker or otherwise, have a certain baseline expectation of fairness (reasonably or not). Once enough people are convinced the game is unfair, their perspective on the product will not be changed by appeals to theory. And unhappy players are vocal.
No fingers left
In the previous posts in this series, the main issues were driven by operator choices. In this case they aren’t, and they have no real answer to it. They can talk up modern ML and AI detection, tighten their monitoring of the environment their clients run in, and catch more. None of it touches the weight of opinion. Players seeking an unfair edge have always made it an arms race, and every time they surface a more sophisticated method of cheating, they also confirm the suspicion that there was something to find. Detection and reassurance have always pulled in opposite directions.
Do modern AI tools make things even worse? Almost certainly. There are research papers suggesting LLMs can beat solvers in certain spots, and it is genuinely unclear how a site would respond to a player using one for decision support, or whether they could reliably detect it at all. But I think the more likely outcome is simpler: the perception that players ‘teaming’ with an LLM are winning will take hold, and at that point there will not be enough fingers to plug the holes in the hull.
And, as with every other part of this series, the ‘pros’ have done a spectacular job of making it worse. Ghosting. Stables. Selling equity in ways that quietly distort the incentives in major tournaments. Quietly colluding against high-profile whales. The very base of the poker pyramid probably isn’t aware of most of this, but the more time you spend in the ecosystem, the more apparent it becomes. When even the figureheads are overtly flawed, the whole system suffers.
So is there anything the sites can do about it? I don’t think so. It is the same clash that runs under everything else - the nature of the (existing) business against the nature of the product. The mass of players who churned out and hardened into a cynical wall of voices are growing in size every hand, every day. The sites have nothing to say to them, other than a reactivation email and a deposit bonus. The biggest shame is that so many of them still love the game. They just hate the product.
Around the Watercooler
Social media conversations, rumors, and gossip.
As Semafor reports, the American Gaming Association (AGA), Indian Gaming Association (IGA), and high-profile unions (AFL-CIO’s Hotel and Gaming Trades Council and UNITE HERE, among others) sent a letter asking lawmakers to restrict sports betting at prediction markets through the CLARITY Act:
“Congress should not wait while this nationwide expansion of gambling continues. It should use crypto legislation to reaffirm a simple principle: sports betting falls outside the CFTC’s remit and cannot be offered through prediction market platforms.”
This is not the first time the industry has tried to rein in prediction markets through the CLARITY Act. As I reported in May:
“As Congress continues to work on the CLARITY Act, the American Gaming Association (AGA) and Indian Gaming Association (IGA) are once again calling on Congress to also consider prohibiting sports betting and casino-style gaming on prediction markets.”
As it did in January, the two groups argue that “CFTC-registered prediction markets are indistinguishable from sports betting… without the licensing, consumer protections, integrity safeguards, tax contributions, or local accountability required under state and tribal gaming frameworks.”
Stray Thoughts
There is a new generation of adults (people in their late-twenties and early-thirties), who not only avoid face-to-face conversations but are also nearly impossible to communicate with, as they also avoid email/text conversations at all costs. It’s the Witness Protection Generation.
I’ve really started to notice this at the martial arts school, where the parents of a typical ten-year-old (so 35-45 years old) will quickly respond to emails. The parents of our youngest students are nearly impossible to contact via email and even text. It’s not even that they don’t respond, they don’t even see it.
