Visits to the beleaguered Atlantic City land casinos dropped 6.2% last year, adding to the ongoing battle for survival of the gambling centre, but the positive aspect was that spending per visitor increased slightly.

The new numbers come from a Spectrum Gaming Group study which found that 26.6 million people visited Atlantic City casinos last year, a decrease of 6.2%, but that spending per visitor fell by only half that amount, indicating that the people who have stopped coming to the nation’s second-largest gambling market are the less-profitable customers.

Atlantic City is in the fifth-straight year of a revenue decline brought on by the explosion of casino gambling in neighbouring states and exacerbated made by the poor national economy.

The Spectrum findings are perhaps a vindication of the region’s marketing attempts to attract a bigger spending clientele – the casinos’ win-per-visitor was nearly $134 last year, down 3.6% from 2009 and nearly 8% from 2008.

Most visitors (22.9 million) travelled to the centre by private means – usually cars – whilst lower spending groups generally made their gambling pilgrimage by coach, with 3.8 million travelling by this method – a decline of 13%.

“Busing is on a long, slow goodbye,” one casino official opined.

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There was more disappointing news from New Jersey this week as local media reported that Senator Ray Lesniak’s lawsuit seeking to overturn a federal sports betting ban has been unsuccessful.

U.S. District Judge Garrett Brown ruled that New Jersey Senate President Stephen Sweeney and state Senator Raymond Lesniak, who filed the complaint, lack legal standing – in other words they are not the appropriate persons to legally challenge the federal sports betting ban.

The two politicians had based their case on a claim that the federal Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act violates the U.S.

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Only two weeks after launching its innovative Live Presenter Bingo on the Italian market, Intralot has launched a major television campaign in the country to boost audience participation above 1,000 players a day.

Intralot Italia enlarged its online gaming portfolio with the introduction of the first live online Bingo in Italy on 15 February this year, vigorously promoting the concept of live presenters interacting with players in real time.

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The International Olympic Committee’s summit on fighting corruption in sport this week heard the views of the online gambling trade group the Remote Gambling Association, presented by chief executive Clive Hawkswood.

“The licensed betting industry remains committed to taking all reasonable and practical steps to assist the sporting sector to protect the integrity of its events,” said Hawkswood. “It is, after all, betting businesses that corrupters seek to financially defraud when fixing sporting events and operators have a clear commercial interest in helping to deter such activity.”

The meeting focused on the impact of match-fixing, which has adverse effects on both the sporting and licensed betting sectors.

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