Last Wednesday the following story appeared in the Wall Street Journal: Online Gambling Suffers Setback – American Gaming Association Withdraws Support, Citing Differences of Opinion. During a WSJ interview (at G2E Asia) Geoff Freeman, president and CEO of the AGA, said that the group can no longer support online poker legalization due to disagreements among their membership and the entire industry.
I saw the story, but chose to ignore it when I put that day’s Flash together, though Ken Adams did include the story in the afternoon Adams Daily Report.
Why did I ignore it?
Wall Street Journal articles are primarily for Wall Street Journal online subscribers – and I am loathe to send 95% of the Flash readership to stare at a paywall.
More importantly, it was old news! The AGA iGaming turnaround was first reported in the Las Vegas Review Journal (and in the CDC Newsroom) in March, when Jim Murren told Howard Stutz that the AGA should tone down their Internet Gaming push. Also Freeman made similar comments when he spoke at the Southern Gaming Summit earlier this month.
That did not stop the national media from treating this (not new) story as if Obama had suddenly come out against Obamacare. AGA turnabout articles appear in several newspapers (many through the Associated Press), was the lead story on NPR’s business news, and became the hot gaming business story of the week.
Sadly much of the secondary reporting was wrong, at least in my opinion, with stories (and conclusions) based not only on non-news but with at least two questionable assumptions.
Questionable assumption #1: The gaming industry, except Sheldon Adelson, was solidly behind iGaming legalization. Thus the AGA was cowered by a single member.
Beginning in late October (in reaction to a commentary I did criticizing an online gaming poll commissioned by Adelson), I received several calls and emails from casino executives concerned about the spread of legalized online gaming, because it would take away from their brick and mortar casinos. Ken Adams also heard the same comments – and an ad hoc poll I did in February confirmed, at least to me, that there was considerable industry disagreement regarding iGaming legalization.
By March, more and more casino executives had publicly spoken out (most famously Steve Wynn; others included John Farahi of Reno). They did not support Adelson’s tactics, but they didn’t want legalized online gaming to spread any further than it already had. (The most effective thing that Adelson did was to get Wynn – using a little hook & crook – to publically agree with him. That put a much more respected industry figure on Adelson’s side – without costing him a dime!)
Questionable assumption #2: The AGA iGaming turnabout was Geoff Freeman’s decision – and done to protect his job or make his professional life easier.
Today I noticed a few people on iGaming poker websites questioning why Geoff Freeman made a decision “to back away from the fight because of one man.”). I have not discussed this specific situation with Freeman or any member of his team, but based on my understanding (and the input of Ken Adams who was quite active in the Nevada Resorts Association, the predecessor organization of the AGA) any serious change in policy would have been an AGA board decision (who met in Las Vegas last month). When I did a commentary in February on the AGA 2014 Strategic Plan I did sense from Freeman that the the iGaming fight was becoming too all-consuming, but he alone could not change course without board direction.
Of course on Monday morning one could criticize quarterback Freeman for massing his considerable talents and energies, plus the AGA’s resources, on an unfamiliar playing field (for both him and the AGA) – but it is that exuberant spirit that I like about him. To paraphrase FDR, “Better the occasional faults of an association that operates in a spirit of progress than the consistent indecisiveness of an organization frozen in the ice of its own protection.”
