I consider myself a professional and generally I take pride in my work. Even still, I find it difficult to impossible to get on task and write my articles knowing that I only have three weeks left to this job. To make matters even worse, it's a dead news time. July was a fantastic news time. The online gambling industry had the arrest of an executive of a prominent internet gambling establishment, the passing of the anti-internet gambling bill in the House of Representatives, and the countdown to see what, if anything, would happen with the Senate before Congress went out on break. My job was easy in July. August was much harder with Congress out and nothing really happening in the industry. I was thankful for the week I had to take off due to my son being out of day care for three weeks. I could avoid having to spend hours upon hours banging my head against the wall thinking about something to write about. However, I was motivated to bang my head against the wall in those days. I knew I had a job to do, one that I would be doing for awhile. I don't have that motivation now. This is exactly why companies don't make people work after being given notice. No matter how dedicated the employee it's impossible to give the same effort to the job once you know you won't be there for much longer.

But effort I must give so I read and I read and I read.

Before the proverbial poo-poo hit the fan I would mention my lack of Chinese and how this would affect my job eventually. It only makes sense that internet gambling would move to the Asian frontier once the US market shut down. Most companies had started putting feelers out in the Asian arena well before the writing was even on the wall. Asians created gambling, after all. It's only natural that online gambling would appeal to them.

"The [internet gambling] companies, particularly the large ones with large resources, that have ceased operations in the US have all said that they would refocus their efforts on other markets, and particularly the Asian markets," said Eugene Christiansen, chairman of Christiansen Capital Advisors LLC, a US-based consultancy firm that provides gambling and entertainment-industry analysis and management services.

The Asian Times studied the trend and reported from Kolkata this week that: "The exodus in fact has already started. On the day Bush signed the new [Safe Port Bill with the anti-internet gambling amendment] law, Sportingbet that derived about 56 percent of its business from the United States, sold its US operations to an Antiguan company for US$1 and revealed that it is focusing on Europe and the rest of the world including Asia. While closing their operations to all US customers, others such as PartyGaming and 888Holdings too said they would be targeting other regions like Asia."

The article states, "The impact of the ban, then: online gaming is all set to bloom in Asia." The one thing that bothers me about this article in particular and most of the articles I have been reading about the entrance into Asian markets, is the assumption that all of these companies are going into Asia because the US has shut down. This couldn't be further from the truth. The US market was close to saturated with what online gambling firms assumed they could get and Asia was simply a natural progression to find new markets.
"New laws and a high level of enthusiasm from Asian customers makes Asia the next emerging growth market," said William Eadington, a professor at the Institute for the Study of Gambling and Commercial Gaming at the University of Nevada, Reno, adding that of all the centres being developed in the region, Macau promises the maximum opportunity. Macau is already becoming the "Las Vegas of Asia", after a new gambling law in 2002 broke up the gaming monopoly, allowing Las Vegas entrepreneurs to open major new casinos such as the Wynn Resorts, The Venetian, MGM, Melcor, and Galaxy.

"Singapore, too, has decided to legalise gambling, enhancing the attractiveness of a prosperous city, while [South] Korea, Japan, Thailand, Taiwan, India and China are watching others and trying to decide what to do," Eadington said. All these Asian countries, as well as European countries, he said, are trying to regulate Internet gambling rather than ban it as gamblers are increasingly turning to the Web.

Asia promises to be a huge market. India hasn't even begun to be tapped and China will certainly be a big hit as well, assuming that the Chinese government won't block the websites. Otherwise there's the rest of Asia and the East. Internet gambling isn't dead for everyone. For many it's just beginning.

Posted on: November 5, 2006

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