A Short History of the Las Vegas Residency
In November 1944 a young pianist from Wisconsin took a booking at the Last Frontier hotel on a dusty highway outside Las Vegas. Liberace…
Slot Streamers and the Twitch Gambling Ban
For a stretch of 2021 and 2022, the most reliable spectacle on Twitch was not a video game at all. It was a spinning…
Betting Exchanges and Bookmakers: How They Differ
A bookmaker and a betting exchange both display odds on the same football match, yet they are running opposite businesses. The bookmaker is a…
Sweepstakes Casinos and Real-Money Casinos: The Difference
Sweepstakes casinos look almost identical to conventional online casinos: the same slot titles, similar lobbies, jackpot counters ticking upwards. Legally, the two operate in…
Inside Live Casino Studios
Behind every live blackjack table on a casino site is a physical room: studio lighting rigs, multiple broadcast cameras, a dealer working a scheduled…
The Sphere: How a Venue Became a Media Format
On September 29, 2023, U2 opened a 40-show run of “U2:UV Achtung Baby Live” inside a 366-foot-tall globe just east of the Las Vegas…
How Super Bowl Week Took Over Las Vegas
When the Kansas City Chiefs beat the San Francisco 49ers 25-22 in overtime at Allegiant Stadium on February 11, 2024, the game was in…
How Progressive Jackpots Work
On 21 March 2003 a 25-year-old software engineer from Los Angeles put about 100 dollars through a Megabucks machine at the Excalibur in Las…
How Betting Odds Are Set: Inside the Trading Room
The popular image of an odds compiler is a man with a cigarette and a form book, scribbling prices on a whiteboard. That world…
Atlantic City and Las Vegas: Two Recovery Stories
America’s two gambling capitals went dark within days of each other in March 2020, and the parallel largely ends there. Las Vegas reopened on…