From Student to Visionary

Richard Schuetz praises Brett Abarbanel for transforming a beloved conference into a hub for fresh thinking and future leaders.

“Education is the passing of the torch from one generation to the next, not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.

William Butler Yeats

I entered the gaming business in 1971, dealing cards and dice at night to pay for my education. I really can’t begin to tell you how many gaming conferences I’ve attended since then. My guess is well over 100, and probably closer to 200.

Starting in the early 1980s, I attended basically every gaming conference in Las Vegas for the next 40 or so years, be it the Global Gaming Expo or its predecessors and/or pretenders. I have been to conferences in Singapore, Macau, Canada, and across Europe and the US. I also logged some serious trips to London for ICE, so much so that I just always assumed I would be in London in January. Yes, I’m sure it is closer to 200.

A conference that stood out from all of the rest was the International Conference on Gambling and Risk Taking. This conference was initiated in 1974 by Professor Bill Eadington of the University of Nevada, Reno, and was held at the Sahara Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas.

I met Bill in 1969 in a statistics class at the University of Nevada, Reno. It was the first class he taught at UNR, and I was a sophomore there. I really enjoyed his class and basically took everything he offered after that.

I had gotten into the habit of attending classes with teachers that I enjoyed, and my other favorite teacher was, like Bill, an economist. The reason I majored in economics was not that I necessarily thought economics was cool; it is just that I took so many classes from economists I liked, that economics was the path of least resistance to getting out of college in four years with a degree in something.

In 1973, I was working on my master’s at UNR and took a class Bill was offering on gambling. I was the only graduate student in the class, and one of my assignments was to write a paper. I wrote about why the US should legalize sports betting. Bill then came to me and said he would like me to present it at a conference in Las Vegas, and he would handle the logistics, finances, and other details. That was really a big deal to me. I was unaccustomed to college professors caring about me in such a way.

The following year, I was at the University of Utah in their Ph.D. program in economics, and I received a package from Bill. It was a terribly impressive-looking book containing a collection of articles. I opened the book, thumbed through it, and came across the paper I wrote and presented at the first Conference of Gambling and Risk-Taking in Las Vegas. Damn, I had been published and published in a book with some very smart and respected folks.

I could not believe it. I think I showed it to every living soul I passed on the University of Utah campus. What an incredibly big deal it was in my life. I have probably published over 200 articles since then, and yet I can tell you that nothing has provided the rush that this one experience did. 

This taught me the amazing power a professor can have when they embrace the true development of their students. See here, pp. 63-4. Arranging for me to speak at a conference and publishing a paper is so far beyond the normal relationship of listening to lectures and having test performance graded.

Fast forward to 2013, when I attended the 15^th Annual International Conference on Gambling and Risk Taking. It was held in May of 2013, at Caesars Palace.

Bill Eadington had passed away a few months earlier.

I attended the conference and sat with Bill’s family. I was asked to address the attendees at the closing banquet, and I have no earthly idea what I said.

I only remember crying.

As the banquet was ending, I was approached by a woman who introduced herself. It was Brett Abarbanel, and she said she was at UCLA doing gaming research and working on her Ph.D.

I told her that the last thing we needed on the planet was another Ph.D. in gaming who had little understanding of the industrial reality of where gambling was taking place.

I asked her if she gambled. She said she did. I asked her how she gambled, and she said she played poker. I asked what her game was, and she said, “Seven Stud.”

Damn, this was encouraging. Seven Stud was my game, and in poker, it requires a good short-term memory, vigilance in tracking cards, and the ability to do simple math calculations to adjust probabilities as cards are played. It is a calmer and more cerebral game than, say, Texas Hold’em. To play Texas Hold’em, it is apparently a requirement that a person be taught for several years how to be incredibly obnoxious.

At this time, I had stepped away from the casino industry, per se, and had become a gaming regulator in California. I had spent a lot of time in graduate school studying regulated industries and, more importantly, an enormous amount of time studying the development of Nevada’s gaming regulatory model from 1958 to 1966. At this point in my life, I had spent a lot of time in casino operations, so I thought I would go through the revolving door in the wrong direction and check out being a regulator.

When I say I became a gaming regulator in California, I should note that I was also the gaming consultant to the governor’s office, both legislative houses, and the California Department of Justice. I would love to suggest that this was because I was so incredibly brilliant, but it had a lot more to do with the fact that I was the only person in government in California who had any real casino experience, and I had a lot of it. This was a case where, in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man was king.

I told Brett I could introduce her to the folks in the legislative committees that oversaw gaming, the gaming folks in the Department of Justice, the gaming lobbyists, the gaming people in the governor’s office, the regulators, the tribal operators, the personalities who ran the card rooms, and so on.

I essentially anticipated being given a polite “no, thank you” from Brett. What was most amazing was that she said that she was in, and when I got back to Sacramento, she connected with me and started scheduling trips. As a note, I want to emphasize, and this will be understood by people who have spent some years in graduate school, the last thing you would want in graduate school is extra work, and that is because you are buried in work trying to secure your degree. I was amazed that she committed to it, and she was true to her word. I knew then that this was someone special.

I have followed Brett from a distance for the last ten years. I accepted an offshore job, and while in the US, I was far from Vegas, either in Pennsylvania or Florida. I noted she was making news from time to time, and it was always good. I was particularly thrilled to learn that she had been selected as the Executive Director of the International Gaming Institute, effective January 1, 2023. That made total sense to me, and I sensed it would be a step ahead for the program.

I also heard she was speaking a lot and traveling about the world, both dispensing and acquiring knowledge. Good for her, because that is exactly what she should be doing.

Then, as a result of some life changes and the desire to develop a book on casino compliance, I recently moved back to Las Vegas. One of the first things I realized was that I could attend the 19^th International Conference on Gambling and Risk Taking. This would be the old Eadington Conference, and I could not wait to see how Brett handled it.

It was absolutely fantastic. Brett has a high comfort level with a microphone and communicating with both large and small audiences. The show design was excellent, with serious kudos for the presentations in the big room following the lunches.

One of the most interesting and innovative aspects of the show was the post-lunch keynotes. This started with Anette (Peko) Hosoi, the noted MIT Professor of mechanical engineering, whose expertise extends to both math and systems, and whose interests include fluid dynamics, bio-inspired design, and sports data and tech.

This was clearly an indication that Brett was not offering the rather tired menu of gaming conference topics, but she was opening new boundaries and dimensions in gaming conference discourse. Moreover, she was not constrained in her program design to gambling topics alone, but paid homage to the risk-taking aspect of the conference’s title. Having Ms. Hosoi at the event was brilliant and indicated that Brett is clearly defining new boundaries in the study of whatever it is that we all do.

The message I took from Ms. Hosoi is that we see what we see because of where we stand and the language we use, and maybe we should move around a bit and look through different lenses to better understand what is going on in our world(s).

The second day’s keynote featured Pamela Maldonado, a sports betting analyst for ESPN and a media personality, and Chad Millman, an author and Action Network media personality. My first response to this was that if they wanted some knowledgeable people to talk betting, they should look to some of the personalities that hang around BetBash, but then Brett reminded me that I was missing the point. A huge part of what is going on in betting right now is all about the media, and so the design of this presentation was brilliant. One cannot really understand what is going on in the betting world without understanding what is going on in the media, and the betting analyst/media personality is a huge part of it.

The last presentation featured Jeanne Elfant Festa, co-president of White Horse Pictures, and Myron Martin, president and CEO of The Smith Center. Here, the movement from gambling to risk-taking was complete. If a person walked into this presentation from a traditional gaming conference, they would think they were lost. Yet again, yet again, this was a brilliant design. These two talked about risk… and reward, and it was emotional and insightful.

The end result of these three sessions was a tour de force that demonstrated the role of gambling, risk, and uncertainty in our lives, as well as the multitude of ways to view them.

The most important aspect of the conference, and something that was totally consistent with Bill Eadington, was found in the breakout sessions. Brett had completely broken away from the modus operandi of the traditional conferences. Please allow me to explain.

For the 1976 Bicentennial Celebration in the United States, I was in the Ph.D. program in economics at the University of Utah. There were many grant dollars available to fund events celebrating the Bicentennial. The University of Utah scored some of these dollars for a visiting speaker program. One of the first speakers to participate was Wassily Leontief, the 1973 winner of the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences.

When Mr. Leontief arrived, and before the event, the economics faculty was in the office area dressed in their finery and ready to impress. Mr. Leontief politely visited for a few minutes and then asked where we kept the graduate students. The faculty was somewhat taken aback, and I walked him down to the basement where we were kept. He sat and visited with a small group of us for about 45 minutes. Later in the day, he gave his presentation to a large audience in an auditorium.

What is important to understand is that Wassily Leontief was awarded the Nobel Prize for developing input-output analysis, and his work in this area was incredibly brilliant. He is also known and respected for his Nobel lineage, as documented by Nobel genealogy. This means that more of his students have received Nobel Prizes in Economics than those of any other person. That is not something that happens by accident, but rather is the sign of an individual who focuses not on the present or the past, but on the future. And as impressive as his analytic work was, I am most impressed by the fact that he clearly saw creating an environment for his students to grow and excel was of critical importance. I believe it to be his life’s greatest professional accomplishment.

Bill Eadington did not just teach to teach. He worked with many other young students to develop them as thinkers. He didn’t just lecture them and give them tests; he had them, as students, present papers and helped them get published. In short, Bill was a teacher, but more importantly, he was a mentor to me and many other students.

Wassily Leontief was a brilliant economist, but he is equally famous for being an incredible mentor to many talented young economists.

And Brett? Well, one could not help but notice that many young academics and graduate students were presenting at her event. That, my friends, does not happen by accident. More importantly, they were some of the most interesting thinkers in the crowd. Brett is not living in the past or the present, but is working to find and encourage those people who will shape the future. She certainly has that Eadington-and-Leontief thing in her. To me, that was the most impressive aspect of the conference. She welcomed and embraced the young people.

I have largely lost interest in gaming conferences anymore because they seem to be the same old people selling the same old pablum. It is the ancien régime who stop in, place the needle on the record, and think they are important. One of the real beauties of my recent attendance at the UNLV event was that I heard the term “gold standard” only once, and that was said by someone who should know better. That statement is clearly an antiquated refuge of a bygone era.

No, this conference at UNLV was not your parents’ conference. This was about the future, with new ways of thinking and new approaches to thought

The good news is I now have a conference to look forward to, led by someone whose focus is the future, not on continuing to repackage and sell the prattle of the past.

The Bill Eadington Conference used to be my all-time favorite. That is no longer true, for as John Kennedy suggested in his 1961 inaugural address, the torch has been passed to a new generation.

My favorite conference now is the Dr. Brett Abarbanel Conference. It is young and professional, exploring new approaches to thought, and where you will find the day’s new thinkers. And that is a very big deal.

Damn,…it almost made me cry again.