Inside Asian Gaming

8 INSIDE ASIAN GAMING | March 2014 In Focus Photo: Karl Baron/flickr Breathe This Prying the cigarette out of a gambler’s hand is never easy. Perhaps it’s a little easier now than it used to be as smoking rates generally have declined worldwide, substantially so in the more developed nations, and governments have moved aggressively to restrict the habit or ban it outright as part of the global war on public tobacco consumption they began waging in earnest around 30 years ago. Restrictions on smoking in casinos are hardly new—California’s, for example, date back to 1995, New South Wales’ to 2002—but introducing them invariably is difficult and expensive, particularly in terms of the blow to the top line that accompanies them, at least initially. In Asia, a region whose love affair with cigarettes has been long and deep, they are unheard of in the gambling space, which finds Macau as something of a pioneer in its attempt, now a year in, to strike a balance between public health and profits. In essence this has involved carving the city’s booming gaming floors into more or less even halves, smoking and non-smoking. It’s not working, to hear it from the representatives of the croupiers and pit staff it was designed to protect. This is not surprising, since the intent hasn’t been to curtail the amount of smoke in casinos but to corral it. It hasn’t been very effective at this either, judging by air quality tests, in part because the law doesn’t require physical barriers between the halves, which often exist side by side, especially on older and smaller floors, and because management has responded, as you might expect, by moving more games, along with the dealers who man them, into the halves where everyone’s smoking. On the plus side, at least they now provide non-smoking areas, which they hadn’t given much thought to before—and why would they, with gamblers pouring in from mainland China in increasing numbers every year, stoking a market whose revenues are the amazement of the world. The Chinese are as religious about their smoking as they are their baccarat.