Every city has its cross to bear. In the case of Las Vegas, it’s former steroid user, baseball player and serial dumbass Jose Canseco. He obviously skipped firearm-safety class the day they told you to make sure your gun is empty before cleaning in it. Luckily for Canseco, no vital organs were injured, just a finger in his left hand. (Had he shot himself in the head, would the bullet have found anything to hit?)
* On a distantly related note, Caesars Entertainment continues to burn through cash. It offered Toby Keith $325,000 to perform one show at Planet Hollywood and make an in-person appearance at Toby Keith’s I Love This Bar & Grill. Still, that pales next to the $4.5 million put before Kanye West to perform nine shows at The Axis, at Planet Hollywood. If I were Celine Dion, I’d be a bit miffed, since the Kanye payday exceeds the $476,000/concert she pulls down at Caesars Palace. And who does more for Vegas tourism?
* Card-counting may be legal in Maryland but nobody told the casinos. The heavy-handed, dragoon tactics are in object lesson in what happens if you have the temerity to display skill in your casino play. Maryland Live is the offender in question, as you can see from the verbal beatdown (and half-nelson) put on blackjack player Justin Mills. Director of the Maryland State Lottery & Gaming Control Agency Stephen Martino said that “using intellectual capacity to keep track of cards is not prohibited by state law or regulation.” Cordish Gaming obviously didn’t get the memo but Anne Arundel County‘s attorney’s office saw nothing worth prosecuting on either side.
And Big Brother’s reach is extending. The Washington Post reports “license plate recognition systems, tracking software to follow certain people through the casino and 360-degree, high-definition cameras that record with so much clarity that surveillance operators can zoom in after the fact.” Well, that makes you feel nice and welcome, doesn’t it?
Ironically, in light of its Cro-Magnon tactics, Maryland Live had actually recruited Mills as a player and had sent a limousine to bring him to the casino. It ended the evening 
banning him for life. (In a further irony, Mills was actually $2,800 in the hole when casino staff detained him.) What Mills did was “extremely prevalent because it is not illegal,” says professional alarmist Beverly Griffin, whose Griffin Investigations helps casinos around the country persecute advantage players. Griffin helps enforce the implicit pact between gamblers and casinos: We’ll let you play if you accede to the likelihood of losing your money.
“We do not have a comment, except to say that as a private facility, we reserve the right to refuse service or limit play of any casino customer,” sniffed Maryland Live spokeswoman Carmen Gonzales. Sensing a PR opportunity, Horseshoe Baltimore General Manager Chad Barnhill said Horseshoe was “not opposed to highly skilled players visiting our casino, provided they don’t attempt to unfairly disadvantage other guests or collude to impact the integrity of our games.”
* Those of you who miss Asteroids and Centipede, don’t worry. Atari is developing social-gaming versions of them, which will “will go live on Facebook and as a stand-alone Web site and will be available in both desktop and iOS-Android mobile versions with a mix of casino games and updated versions of the company’s iconic catalogue.” Seattle-based FlowPlay, developer of VegasWorld, is going in as Atari’s joint-venture partner. This is the first step towards Atari taking a dip in the waters of Internet gambling. Atari is also rolling out slots, blackjack, video poker, solitaire, and bingo. Real-money Atari Casino is expected to debut “later this year,” which doesn’t leave them much time to get it ready.
