Members of the House of Lords in the U.K. are requesting information from the government of Prime Minister Gordon Brown, seeking to know how a possible expansion of gambling, both online, and at casinos, will be managed in the U.K.
  
According to Lord James of Blackheath, he has, in the past, run casinos, "although not in this country," on behalf of a British bookmaker. Secondly, he was, until recently, executive chairman of the Jockey Club racecourses and was therefore "responsible for the running of the races at Aintree, at Epsom for the Derby and at Cheltenham," said Lord James.
 

Mini-Casinos

"I welcome this initiative," said Lord James. "A number of concerns have arisen as a result of the Gambling Act and they deserve close consideration. I have three principal concerns to raise with your Lordships. The first is, like the others, an unintended consequence of the Gambling Act. There is a rapid and tangible drift to the conversion by the bookmakers of the 10,000 or so betting shops into mini-casinos."
 
 That trend was somewhat worrisome to Lord James. He prefers that casinos be created which will spur tourism, i.e., "destination casinos." 

"Every casino is allowed to have four FOBTs—that is, fixed-odds betting terminals," said Lord James. "Until eight days ago, they were confined principally to roulette, blackjack and stud poker, but they have now been expanded to include direct access to virtual reality racing, to which I shall return shortly."

Lord James said the FOBTs are the subject of a series of control orders recently issued by the government  This has resulted in some changes for the gamers. "You have to put real, folding money into the machine. It will then register you as having a number of stakes available according to the number of pounds that you have put in—you can diminish it to a fraction of a pound," said Lord James. "However, according to the control orders, which do not foresee that risk, you can press each number 10 times. So you could have £200 on a single spin and press one number to repeat that bet as many times as you had stakes left in the machine. There is no separation of your original stake from the winnings, and therefore no opportunity to remove your stake and bet just with the winnings."
 

Virtual Reality Racing

Virtual reality racing is also emerging as an issue in the U.K. "For those who are unfamiliar with it, I say that it is a technique which has been developed by the bookmakers whereby they are able to represent with a computerized software program an imaginary race run by images of horses, with jockeys on top. It is known in the business as cartoon racing," said Lord James. "In theory, each of the 12 horses in a race has an identical chance, with odds of 11-1. However, the bookmakers want to encourage people to bet on them, so they put up on a separate screen the imaginary odds for three or four of the horses to imply that they are favored."
 
Lord James said that the bookmakers were "at arm's length from the software systems" and that the software system was sacrosanct and never interfered with.

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