Lawyers for Terrance Watanabe how say that the high roller’s losses in 2007 were nearly 69 percent higher than they claimed in their original lawsuit. From the LVRJ:
Lawyers for Nebraska philanthropist Terrance Watanabe say in a new lawsuit that his losses at Harrah’s Entertainment casinos were much larger than they previously reported, making him what some experts call the biggest high roller of all time in Nevada.
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"No one has ever lost this much money in a casino before," said Bill Thompson, a UNLV public administration professor who specializes in the gaming industry. "It’s just a fantastic amount. He’s the biggest whale of all time."
via Losses may make bettor state’s biggest whale – Business – ReviewJournal.com.
I’m not understanding how the amount of his losses could go up by nearly 69 percent six months after the original complaint was filed. Did he really have no idea of how much money he lost during the year? Because that’s a pretty significant margin of error.
That aside, I take issue with Professor Thompson’s claim that Watanabe is “the biggest whale of all time.” The reporter talked to me for this story, and asked me if the $189 million loss made him the biggest gambler of all time (or words to that effect). My response? Since I don’t have a stack of win/loss statements for every player, I can’t say that he is or isn’t, even though that is a lot of money, and I would guess that he would be one of the biggest players of all time. There’s a difference between “the biggest loss that anyone’s written about in the newspaper” and “the biggest loss of all time,” because there has always been a certain discretion around high-end play, and individual wins and losses are not part of the public record, unless they go to court, as in cases like this. As I told him, the only people who could tell you that definitively are working for the casinos, and I can imagine that they aren’t feeling particularly talkative on this subject.
So I’d like to know what Professor Thompson bases his “fact” on. Does he have a master list somewhere of trip and lifetime win/loss records for every high roller at every casino in the state? If he can state so confidently that Watanabe is number one on the list, it shouldn’t be too hard for him to tell us who is number two, and what his/her lifetime and average trip losses are. Who had the previous record for the biggest annual loss in a casino. When did the first player lose more than $10 million in a single year? If you can say without a doubt that no one’s ever lost money like this before, you should be able to answer these questions easily.
Ordinarily I wouldn’t critique someone else’s statements to the media, but the more I thought about this the more I felt I had to. These days, statements like that in a newspaper are automatically assumed to be “true,” particularly on the web, and especially by Wikipedia editors, and it becomes an established “fact.” But unless Thompson has access to a secret cache of data that he’s never used in any publication, there’s no real source for his statement–it’s just an opinion, no matter how sure of himself he sounds.