And you thought the Las Vegas Raiders had a bad season. Compared to all the trouble on the Strip this past year, the worst team in football practically blended into the scenery.
In 2025, Las Vegas was vilified for being too pricy. Needless chaos billowing from the Trump administration KO’d much of the international market. That made it doubly difficult for corporate giants to meet their quarterly projections in a tumultuous economy with consumers – and not just Democrats – focused on affordability issues.
Although it’s always sunny at the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, the facts are that overall traffic was down and the tarnish on Vegas’s something-for-everyone image took a big hit.
Will it change in 2026 with the industry facing a low blow in the form of a new law tucked into the One Big Beautiful Bill Act that limits the tax deduction for gambling losses to 90 percent of winnings?
The FAIR BET Act (Fair Accounting for Income Realized from Betting Earnings Taxation Act) introduced by Nevada Rep. Dina Titus (D-NV) provided a swift sensible fix that could have been inserted as an amendment into the 2026 National Defense Authorization Act. But after the House Rules Committee declined to act, FAIR BET was sidelined. More recently, President Trump has intimated he’s amenable to make a similar change to the law that went into effect on the first of the year.
Which makes the decision not to insert it into the larger bill appear more like political theater than sound policy. This is one to watch closely in the months ahead.
The past year was tumultuous and then some for the Nevada gaming industry. Its historically admired regulatory system was stress-tested multiple times. Some of its major players paid multimillion-dollar fines and settlements to extract themselves from criminal investigations that generated negative press around the world.
MGM Grand, Resorts World Las Vegas, and Wynn Resorts settled a range of issues, most of which were related to allowing unsavory customers to gamble, despite suspecting a high likelihood that their funds were derived from illegal activity in violation of well-known federal anti-money laundering rules.
That begs obvious questions: Will this year prove any different or is this merely the state of play?
Perhaps Gaming Control Board Member George Assad, for my money the most intriguing state regulator in Nevada, will give us his opinion on this issue in 2026. He certainly has no shortage of them.
Assad has been outspoken on a number of topics in his brief tenure, taking time to criticize MGM, announce the results of a Gaming Control investigation of former Las Vegas casino executive Scott Sibella, and torch one-time Strip casino titan Steve Wynn.
Assad hadn’t been on the board long when he took a few shots at MGM’s business strategies and even its stock. The slights were duly noted in The Nevada Independent and elsewhere and generated a response from longtime gaming legal authority Tony Cabot.
“Short of an extraordinary event, it really isn’t a regulatory concern or shouldn’t be a regulatory concern as to the honest business decisions made by a company. Regulators shouldn’t be second-guessing the business decisions of a company under their control ,unless it impacts their ability to effectively go forward by going broke.”
As CDC Gaming’s busy Buck Wargo reported, Assad blasted Wynn and then some during the recent Gaming Law Conference sponsored by the State Bar of Nevada.
“I’m proud to say the Nevada Gaming Control Board was able to eliminate this piece of garbage from Nevada,” Assad said of Wynn. “He is living in Florida now, thank God. The rest is history.”
That’s some tough talk.
Sibella, a casino executive with more three decades of experience, pleaded guilty in 2024 to a single count of failing to file Suspicious Transaction Reports in a federal investigation involving illegal bookmaker Wayne Nix. Sibella was sentenced to a year of probation and was fined $9,500.
As part of his settlement with state gaming regulators, Sibella agreed to pay a $10,000 fine, lose his gaming license, and accept a five-year suspension. Five years is a long time in the casino business. Would the state be moved to shorten his suspension, say, with a “temporary” license status?
I would love to know what members of the Commission and the Control Board think or at least what they’re willing to say. Maybe Assad will shed light on other topics, such as whether he thinks Sibella could have avoided trouble with investigators if he’d only exercised his right to remain silent.
It would certainly make the action inside Nevada gaming worth watching in 2026.
