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Atlantic City's new attitude draws younger gamblers
Published: 2005-12-31
 By John CurranThe Associated Press
ATLANTIC CITY, N.J. -- LL Cool J was playing the House of Blues. A few blocks away, rapper Jay-Z's new nightclub was rocking. Fredericka Jones, 42, out on the town for a Friday night with her girlfriends, was determined to hit both, then try her luck at a casino.
She used to make the one-hour trip from her Philadelphia home once every couple of years. Now, she goes several times a year. And she has noticed some changes.
"The crowd is getting younger," she said. "You don't see the older crowd as much, the grandparents. Now you see the younger people."
Rejuvenated by a saucy new casino, trendy clubs and beach bars and a vibrant music scene, Atlantic City is evolving into a nightlife hot spot for people in their 20s, 30s and 40s who once saw it as one big neon-lit retirement home for senior citizens who arrive by the busload to play the slot machines.
Atlantic City began making the shift with the opening of the Borgata Hotel Casino & Spa in mid-2003. It stressed sexy fun more than gambling in its advertising, it showcased its racy "Borgata Babes" cocktail waitresses, it offered high-end restaurants, and it booked contemporary stars into its showrooms, instead of the aging crooners and nostalgia acts for which Atlantic City was known.
The moves paid off, turning the Borgata into Atlantic City's most profitable casino.
The Borgata also bet that blackjack, roulette and craps -- which many Atlantic City casinos were ditching in favor of more profitable slot machines -- could bring in more business.
Its rivals in Atlantic City's $4.8 billion-a-year casino business have followed suit, replacing slots with table games aimed at cashing in on both a poker boom and on younger gamblers' tendencies to favor games with human interaction.
"Tables are hot, there's no doubt about it," said casino industry consultant Joe Weinert. "A lot of that is fueled by poker's popularity and its popularity on TV, which is showing Americans that table games in general are fun.
"Increasingly, we're becoming a society that has grown up with solitary gaming experiences on their computers, TV sets or personal game consoles. And I think people are going to casinos and discovering the community atmosphere on the gaming tables. They're finding out that, hey, it's fun to be around real people."
In the 21/2 years since Borgata's opening, the Tropicana Casino and Resort has seen a 20 percent increase in table game play among under-50 gamblers.
Resorts Atlantic City -- which in the past year has booked rapper Snoop Dogg, opened a trendy Nikki Beach bar and switched its piped-in house music from Motown to contemporary -- has experienced a similar shift. Now, 60 percent of the gamblers in the casino's player database are under 50, compared with 39 percent 18 months ago.
Showboat Casino-Hotel, meanwhile, brought in the House of Blues, a chain of restaurant-nightclubs that built a $65 million addition consisting of a 2,200-seat theater, a restaurant, 50 hotel suites and its own mini-casino. Among the acts booked to appear at House of Blues this month: mewithoutyou, Puny Human and Avenged Sevenfold.
"I look at the list of headliners and I don't even recognize most of these names," said Jeffrey Vasser, the 45-year-old executive director of the Atlantic City Convention & Visitors Authority.
But he isn't complaining. Nor are the entrepreneurs opening nightclubs, name-brand restaurants and sexually oriented clubs aimed at the under-50 crowd.
The influx of younger gamblers has driven down the median age of the Atlantic City visitor from 55 in 1998 to 52 last year, according to a visitor profile commissioned by the Atlantic City Convention & Visitors Authority.
"There's more to do now," said Frank Whoy, 23, of Egg Harbor Township, N.J., who took in the LL Cool J show at the House of Blues. "More nightlife, more shows."
But the mix of old and young has also challenged casinos.
"It truly is a delicate balance," said Audrey Oswell, president of Resorts Atlantic City casino. "You don't want to do anything that's going to offend the older customer, which has been so loyal for so long. We've found that the young people and the old people can exist side by side, although we did have some people ask us who Snoop Dogg was."
Playing a slot machine at the Tropicana, Alexander Ott, 73, of Smithtown, N.Y., said Atlantic City is still "the AARP's playground."
"We've got the time. We're retired," he said. "These other people, they're only the Friday and Saturday night crowd. They're living paycheck to paycheck. We're living Social Security check to Social Security check."
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Poker promoter files lawsuit
Published: 2005-12-31
 By Eric Collins
Staff Writer
GREENSBORO -- When it comes to public poker tournaments in Guilford County, you might say the dealin's done.
A highly publicized bust of a poker tournament at a Greensboro restaurant last spring essentially put an end to promoting the events here, law enforcement officials say.
But the company that organized the tournament hasn't folded. Charlotte-based 5th Street Entertainment filed a lawsuit in Guilford County Superior Court in November asking a judge to clarify that its tournaments are legal.
The company claims that the events don't violate the law because players don't bet anything of personal value and it is free to play. Instead, participants compete for a chance to enter a championship game and earn a grand-prize trip to Las Vegas. North Carolina's gambling statute prohibits operating games of chance if anything of value is bet.
"These types of tournaments are going on nationally," 5th Street attorney William Bunting said Friday. "For the most part, there aren't a lot of questions about it."
But state officials maintain that the company is merely trying to skirt the law by avoiding having the players pay to play.
On March 2, agents from the state Division of Alcohol Law Enforcement raided a Texas Hold 'em tournament operated by 5th Street at the Ham's Restaurant on High Point Road. Guilford District Attorney Stuart Albright later dropped charges against both entities after learning that a lawyer for the Alcoholic Beverage Control Commission had given them permission to hold the tournament.
Also in March, officials with the Mecklenburg County ABC Board began informing venues that they could lose their liquor license if they hosted 5th Street's tournaments, according to the lawsuit.
The incidents caused 5th Street to lose business, dropping its tournaments from 50 to 29 per week in the state, the suit claims. To avoid prosecution, the company stopped the awarding of nightly prizes such as gift certificates, which caused a drop in attendance, the lawsuit said.
None of its tournaments have been held in Guilford County since the raid.
"People are playing for bragging rights now," Bunting said. "(5th Street) would eventually like to get back to awarding prizes."
The company originally filed suit in Mecklenburg County in June against state Attorney General Roy Cooper, Albright, the director of the ALE, the Mecklenburg County ABC Law Enforcement chief, and the state of North Carolina. But Superior Court Judge Robert P. Johnston dismissed the lawsuit Nov. 6. The court found that the company failed to state a claim that entitled it to a declaration that its business model is legal. The judge did not further specify his legal reasoning.
Bunting then filed a similar lawsuit Nov. 17 in Guilford County. He said the law changed in his client's favor when the N.C. Court of Appeals determined in September that a declaratory judgment was appropriate in a separate case involving gambling issues.
In a court filing responding to the suit, state Assistant Attorney General David Adinolfi argues that the lawsuit should be dismissed under the doctrine of res judicata. That means the issues have already been decided by another court between the same parties.
Reached by phone Friday, he declined to comment on the pending suit.
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