Inside Asian Gaming

November 2011 | INSIDE ASIAN GAMING 33 Feature you’re likely to side with Hobbes. Here in the first of a two-part series, the respected gaming journalist James Rutherford gives a personal perspective on how Macau and Singapore are viewed from the US—the country that started modern resort-based casino gaming. I. The Name of the Game The popularity of gambling in all cultures derives from its origins in religion. It was a means, among others, for prophesying the future. The money came into it because a person wishing to divine their standing with the unseen powers should expect to pony up for the information— oracles having to eat, too, after all. The money element lingered no doubt for the frisson of danger it lent to the enterprise. It imbued the act of prophesy with a palpable significance. The roots of this blending of the mystical and material still run deep in Eastern cultures. Chance is something of a Western construct. The Chinese tend to viewthings through theprismof inexorable karmic laws. Gambling, refracted in this way as a tussle with luck, or destiny, as they see it, is a natural product of the cosmic ebb and flow. As portents go—of the many available for the seeking on life’s journey—it enjoys a considerable measure of respect. By that reading, the growth of Asian casino gaming is a function not only of regional economic growth, but a desire by many newly-affluent Asian consumers to test their luck for the future. Baccarat is a particularly rarefied form of the quest; a game of very low house advantages and often very high betting limits in which everything comes down to luck—as pure a test as the casino floor provides. That’s about the best way to understand its popularity as the gambling game of choice among the ethnic Chinese across the region. It became popular in Macau in the 1960s, but its place in the lore of the Middle Kingdom may harken back to much earlier times. The ‘natural’ hands, 8 and 9, represent auspicious quantities in Chinese numerology, as does 6, another important number in the game. In Europe, baccarat was originally played with Tarot cards, and one theory holds that along with its close cousin chemin de fer, it actually descended frompai gow, the popular Chinese gambling game played with tiles and similar rules. II. China’s Individual Visit Scheme— The History The Individual Visit Scheme (IVS) is part of a gradual opening up of mainland China that has been going on since the country’s economic reforms of the 1980s. Initially, that opening up was inward—allowing investment fromHong Kong and Taiwan and later from outside the zone often referred to locally as Greater China. Later, the opening up involved movement the other way, enabling Chinese citizens to travel abroad— firstly in escorted groups, but then also as individuals. That’s not an unusual concept for Westerners, steeped as they are in the cultural traditions of individualism. But it was initially a radical concept for Chinese after centuries of collective living and thinking. That opening included allowing China’s avid gamblers to visit Macau. What specifically triggered the launch of the IVS in 2003 was the need to boost tourism to Macau and Hong Kong after the trauma of the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) outbreak. (This shouldn’t be confused with ‘SAR,’ short for Special Administrative Region—the title appended to the semi-autonomous Macau and Hong Kong territories since their return to Chinese administration.) The IVS—or something like it—would have eventually happened with or without SARS. But the policy—coming as it did the year after the first post-monopoly casino concessions were awarded—couldn’t have been more propitious. To give an idea of its impact, in 1999, the year Chinese sovereignty was restored in Macau, the Macau Statistics and Census Bureau counted 1.6 million mainland visitors. In 2010, those visits from mainlanders totalled more than 13 million (53% of all arrivals). A total of 5.4 million of those trips (41%) were made using individual visas. This year, mainland Chinese are tracking at about 57% of visitor arrivals. Through August, their numbers had topped 10.5 million and were surging 17% year-on- year. Travel on individual visas in August accounted for about 42% of those visits. Internationally, the IVS generates 70% of China’s outbound tourism. Currently, about 270 million residents in 49 cities are eligible to apply, including all 21 major cities in Guangdong—theprovinceborderingMacau and Hong Kong and the most populous in the country. IVS travellers pay dividends outside the casinos too. Because the scheme restricts the frequency and duration of their visits, visitors from the mainland tend to stay longer and spend more—on average MOP2,039 per capita in Macau last year, versus MOP1,158 for other visitors—and they constitute more than half of all hotel guests. III. Individual Visit Scheme—The Geography What so impressed the European traders and colonisers of centuries past Sands Macao—an early beneficiary of China’s Individual Visit Scheme