Recently in site news Category

We're pleased to announce that the first Gaming Research Colloquium Series speaker of the 2009/10 school year has been scheduled.

On September 3, surveillance expert Derk Boss, owner of DJ Boss and Associates, will give a talk called "Behind the Camera: Current Trends in Casino Surveillance and Loss Prevention."

The talk will take place at 2 PM in the Extended Study Area, on the first floor of Lied Library.

You can see a flyer here.

One of our earlier exhibits, Paradise Misplaced: The Xanadu Hotel and Casino has been updated to bring it into conformity with the current design. 

This is the last of the exhibits to be updated, and the latest part of our ongoing revamp.

We're in the middle of a site overhaul, so please forgive any broken links or other strangeness.  When the renovations are complete, we should have a more intuitive, easier to navigate site with better access to more statistics and other resources.

I've posted the CGR-digested, single-page breakdown of the 2008 Nevada gaming revenue numbers.  It's a pdf file: http://gaming.unlv.edu/media/2008_NV_gaming.pdf.


There are some interesting trends.  All tables games won less money in 2008 than they had in 2007.  Penny slots actually won almost 10% more than they had in the previous year, but all other slots were down.  Five-dollar machines had the biggest drop-off, Megabucks the smallest.

Basically, both visitation (37.5 million) and total gaming revenue ($11.6 billion) have returned to 2004/2005 levels. 

I've been quite busy here at gaming.unlv.edu.  While revamping the main page, I decided to add more content to the site.  Sitting on one of the world's greatest collections of gambling material, I've added a featured resource and featured book section. 

The featured resource is a primary source found within the Gaming Collection, online, or both.  It's something that will be helpful to people doing research into gambling.  For example, the Nevada Gaming Abstract, the first featured resource, is one of the essential tools for tracking the financial performance of the state's casino industry.  Each featured resource entry will explain the resource in question's context, what it does, and where to find it.

The featured book is a publication about gambling that, because of its age, influence, or both, I consider important enough to spotlight.  This is not a book review section: rather, I just talk a little about the book and its place in the gaming research pantheon. 

I'm going to keep the inaugural editions up for a little while.  Once I spread word of mouth about the site's new capabilities, I'll start changing them once a week or so.

There's a new feature available on http://gaming.unlv.edu: "From the Virtual Stacks."  This is basically a random collection of facts, figures, and whatnot found elsewhere on the site.  If I'm lucky, it will pique some users and lead them to some good reading.