Rolling the Dice

Rolling the Dice

Coverage of casino licensing and the gambling referendum

Losing your shirt – and your home – at the casino

It’s a well-known truism in the casino world that the house always wins. Less well known is the fact that sometimes, apparently, what the house wins is your house. On Sunday, the Globe’s Mark Arsenault had a revealing look at the hardball tactics used by both Connecticut casinos to collect casino debts, measures that sometimes(...)

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Revere-only casino insults E. Boston

Community is once again being dealt bad hand

I’ve been supporting the community activists in East Boston who are working mightily to oppose the proposed Suffolk Downs casino. These activists are not simply saying “no” to the casino – they are also advancing a positive, forward-looking vision for the site and their community, one that focuses on attracting 21st century jobs to a(...)

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Up in smoke?

It’s kind of hard to say there’s a chasm between voters and politicians in deciding what’s best for the state, given that the voters put these folks into office and continue to pull the lever for them. But you have to wonder if anyone’s listening to the other side when you look at the disparity(...)

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Another casino setback

Small town Massachusetts has spoken and it seems that many of them don’t want casinos. Milford, a MetroWest town of 25,000, soundly defeated a host community agreement with Crossroads Massachusetts, a casino development group led by Foxwoods Connecticut and Colorado real estate developer David Nunes.   The much-anticipated Milford vote deflates the state’s fledging casino quest.(...)

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Casino confusion on Vineyard

The Massachusetts casino hunt has turned upside-down, and then flipped upside-down again. The wild turns of fortune now have wild turns of their own. The Aquinnah Wampanoag tribe threw the state for a loop last week, announcing plans to open a federally-permitted gambling facility on their Martha’s Vineyard reservation soon. And this week, tribal voters(...)

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Suffolk down but not out

Boston lost a protracted, petty-looking battle to bring a proposed Everett casino into its orbit earlier this year. Now, with Boston Mayor Tom Menino’s former casino dance partner Suffolk Downs rebuffed by East Boston voters and eyeing a massive gambling facility just across the city line in Revere, Boston faces the prospect of re-running the(...)

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Darwin rolls the dice

Now that the dust is settling, you have to wonder when it comes to casino permits: What the heck do we need a Gaming Commission for? There’s a sort of Darwinian process of natural selection going on in the decision to site casinos in Massachusetts, and it appears voters are the ones taking the bull(...)

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Against all odds, casino vote in doubt

In the gambling world, the house always wins. In the case of a bid to build a billion dollar casino in East Boston, the house is Suffolk Downs and its well-wired investors. Until recently, it was also Caesars Entertainment, and its bloviating CEO Gary Loveman. And it’s the mayor and the House speaker, a political(...)

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