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As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing Legalized Gambling in Thailand. I started thinking about making this video after reading a recent article in the Thai Enquirer, that is thaienquirer.com, the article is titled: The latest push for legalization of casinos reaches the next step this week. Quoting directly: "The latest Parliament Committee to study the potential legalization of casinos has picked its chairman on Thursday. "The Prime Minister and the Government did not provide any policy or any special instruction on the issue since this is a matter for the legislative branch," said Deputy Transport Minister, Atirat Ratanasate, who was selected to lead the casino committee." Quoting further: "The matter must be studied in all aspects including the pros and cons, impacts from abroad and impacts from neighboring countries," Atirat said. "And the aim is for the study to be done within 90 days as assigned." he said. Atirat will be working with 16 other Deputy Chairmen of the committee which includes members of the opposition and the coalition. The 60 member committee was set up after parliamentarians voted," and this is key; I think this is important, "voted 310 to 9 to look into a proposal that would allow legalized casinos to be set up in the country. The idea is to attract more tourists to the country after the COVID pandemic wreaked havoc on the tourism industry." Well as I have said in anything about this internationally, this is US, Europe wherever, I would say the COVID pandemic didn't wreak havoc, it was the lockdown that really, really knocked out a lot of the economic activity, let's be clear on that. 

However I think overall it is good they are talking about this; I am glad that they are. If I can betray a little bit of my own hubris, I would kind of chime in although a big piece of me highly doubts anybody cares or is watching this that is on this committee; although 60 members, you never know. This might pop up in their YouTube feed, you never know. One thing I would hope that maybe is thought about a little bit especially if the thinking behind this is to sort of goose tourism or to kind of boost some revenue for the tourism sector especially the broad tourism sector, maybe, I worked in the gambling industry, gaming industry for a number years. I worked through law school for one of the major Casino corporations in the United States, there are two kinds of gaming. They say that there is “convenience gaming” and “destination gaming” so like Las Vegas it is a destination. You go to Vegas to gamble. Macao is kind of like this. That is what you go there for. It has different aspects than so called convenience gaming. Convenience gaming especially came about kind of in the later 80s into the 90s when you started seeing especially in the United States, things like the Indian reservation casinos, Native American casinos started to pop up on their sovereign territory. Then a lot of the states at a state level started to say "well hey, we need to maybe get into this". Convenience gaming has its ups and downs as does destination gaming, those two models. But one thing, I think people kind of fail to look at when they analyze this is they kind of take an either or approach. We are either going to have one casino and no other gambling or we are going to have like kind of everybody can sort of have small gambling operations or there is a licensing process. For example in Vegas I mean it is possible to have gaming licenses in gas stations and things.

What I am kind of hoping this committee looks at is not only the notion of a casino but also possibly the notion of like kind of smaller licensees for smaller level kind of gaming activity. What I am talking about is for example let's say a bar and guest house might run a poker game. Like they have a license; they can have one table; it has got to maintain, conform to certain regulatory standards; you have got tax authorities that come in and monitor that and make sure that the taxes are getting paid on it; there are obviously licensing fees associated with that but you can have like one small little game in a small operation or maybe one slot machine for example in a bar or something like this. 

The reason I say this is if you are going to do it there is sometimes a real downside to just having one Casino because it acts like a Hoover vacuum. It just sucks up capital but it is all sitting just in one place whereas if you have a little bit more of a lax approach where you could have a little bit of gaming activity mingled in with other entertainment activities, I could definitely see especially with certain types of table games for example where that, poker in particular, could have a tremendous positive impact in my opinion on just small SME kind of Tourism related businesses, even small bar and grills, guest houses, just littler operations. Now I know that is sometimes not exactly what everybody is looking at because they kind of like having a single repository of that money where they can take their tax; it is a tax issue where they can identify where that money is at and take their cut but I am kind of hoping maybe they look at a more broad-based approach and be able to provide licensing at a little bit lower level. There are downsides to all of this. I am not saying there are not pros and cons as noted in this article. There are pros and cons across the board. It really has to be studied carefully but there is something to be said for allowing a broad part of the economy to directly benefit from an easing of gaming regulations.