Gambling

CHICAGO - When the White House sent a last-minute invitation for Asif Ali Zardari to attend the two-day NATO summit, they were taking a highly public gamble. Would sharing the spotlight with President Obama and other global leaders induce the Pakistani president to allow vital supplies to reach alliance troops fighting in Afghanistan? But long before the summit ended Monday, the answer was clear: No deal. Zardari's refusal to reopen the supply routes left a diplomatic blot on a summit that NATO sought to cast as the beginning of the end of the conflict in Afghanistan.

Addiction counselors tell their clients, "We can't help you until you admit you have a problem. " It's time for American financial institutions to admit they have a gambling problem. JPMorgan Chase & Co. last week announced losses, perhaps greater than $5 billion, from bad derivatives bets. Last year we saw UBS suddenly lose $2.3 billion and the hedge fund MF Global implode from derivatives trading. And let's not forget the 2008 failures of American International Group Inc. and Lehman Bros., which triggered an economic crisis we're still recovering from.

To help make your next trip to Las Vegas a winner, I tested iPhone apps (they also work on iPod Touch and iPad) that you can use to book a room, sharpen your card skills or even say, "I do. " Many have an Android version that works on multiple platforms, including phones and tablets from Motorola, Samsung and Nokia. Las Vegas Reality Pros: An augmented reality app uses your phone's camera and GPS to navigate the Strip. If you're not in Vegas, it offers a virtual tour — which placed the Mandalay Bay near my sofa and landed the Tropicana on my cat. Cons: The airport and convention center are the only off-Strip locations.

CHICAGO - When the White House sent a last-minute invitation for Asif Ali Zardari to attend the two-day NATO summit, they were taking a highly public gamble. Would sharing the spotlight with President Obama and other global leaders induce the Pakistani president to allow vital supplies to reach alliance troops fighting in Afghanistan? But long before the summit ended Monday, the answer was clear: No deal. Zardari's refusal to reopen the supply routes left a diplomatic blot on a summit that NATO sought to cast as the beginning of the end of the conflict in Afghanistan.

A visitor to Richie Sklar brought a box of chocolates. "Is there a Racing Form in there?" Sklar asked. "Just kidding. I'm able to get the Form." A convicted race fixer, Sklar is nearing the end of a six-month sentence. The federal government nailed him for bribing jockeys to hold horses in two Arabian races and one for thoroughbreds at Los Alamitos three years ago. But investigators were disappointed and frustrated when they couldn't uncover more, and said Sklar's penalty was lenient.

For California's casino customers, it's the real wild card -- a secret that the Native American gambling industry holds close to the vest. The mystery concerns the payout rates for slot machines: How much of the money pumped into the thousands of chirping contraptions -- the life's blood of the state's 50 Indian casinos -- is returned to players as winnings? Casino executives have the answer, but they tend to guard it like the house vault. State regulators are clueless.

Your story on the smoking room in the Bicycle Club casino in Bell Gardens (Aug. 19) referred to smoking and gambling as vices. Granted that smoking is viewed as a "vice" by many. Gambling only becomes a vice when the act is abused. One famous example is playing the stock market. We are cautioned to risk only what we can afford to lose. FRANK MYERS Downey

In the fall of 1993, Michael Jordan — often regarded as the greatest player ever to shoot a basketball — shocked the sports world by announcing he was retiring from the NBA. Then he stunned fans again by deciding to pursue his long-held dream of playing pro baseball. Within months, the then-31-year-old high-flying guard known as "His Airness" was bobbling easy flies and swatting at bad pitches as a struggling right fielder for the minor-league Birmingham Barons. This surreal fillip in sports history, which ended up bisecting Jordan's phenomenal NBA career, forms the basis of "Jordan Rides the Bus," director Ron Shelton's documentary that premieres Tuesday on ESPN.

Two decades ago, real estate mogul Randy Black turned this blip on the Arizona border into a boomtown when he opened the first of four casinos. Nearly 1 million visitors a year followed, and hotels, restaurants and stucco homes seemed to sprout from sand. "It seemed to be one of those things that 'Geez, it's just going great. It's never going to end,' " said Victor Kotalion, who left Las Vegas in 1990 for this arid patch off Interstate 15.

Your Aug. 21 editorial "The Trouble With Casinos" describes the downside of casinos in our California society: Importantly, a major gambling venue puts strong demands on police, fire and other services, but the critical issue is the estimated 1 million Californians who are tragically addicted to gambling. If we understand the nature of addiction, isn't it accurate to characterize our state leaders on this question as enablers, and their decisions as lacking in simple ethics? And as we expand our state's partnership with gambling interests and corollary dependence on our cut of the money, aren't we addicting ourselves?

LAS VEGAS - It sits along a stretch of median on the less-glamorous south end of this city's glitzy gambling Strip, a stubborn holdover from another era. Yet, as the days turn to night and back into day, it beckons as many tourists, human tumbleweeds and adventure-seekers as any newfangled casino. They come to see, touch and photograph the iconic "Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas Nevada" sign, a 1959 scramble of colors, typefaces and flashing light bulbs. They come in droves, as if on some obligatory Vegas pilgrimage, arriving in taxis, rental cars, stretch limos, golf carts, pickup trucks, motorcycles, double-decker tour buses.

With a caffeine headache and 60 bucks in my britches, I head out to the pony rides on a Friday night - to glittery, improbable Hollywood Park, now officially Betfair Hollywood Park. The Inglewood track's spring-summer semester has just started, and on Friday evenings it has what amounts to a horse-racing revival: a little wagering, a few food trucks, followed by a live concert reasonably priced. It's easy to see why these Friday night festivities are such a hit with young people like us. "I love ponies," the little guy says.

It's a safe bet that most of L.A. has never heard of "Farmer" Page, the Jazz Age ruler of an empire of cards and dice who was denounced in news accounts for running "one of the most elaborate gambling halls on the Pacific Coast. " In many ways, he could have stepped out of a Raymond Chandler novel. In his youth, Page sold papers near 2nd and Spring streets before learning the finer points of horse racing from his brother Stanley, a jockey who became a prominent bookmaker. Page also was involved in Tony Cornero's legendary gambling ship, the Rex, anchored off Santa Monica and ran the Clover Club, the famed Sunset Strip casino catering to movie stars that flourished in the 1930s despite numerous attempts by law enforcement to shut it down.

Can you trust a gambler to tell you the truth about how much cash he's blown? The Las Vegas Review-Journal raised the intriguing question this week when reporting on Sin City's annual visitor profile study, a gauge of who's visiting Las Vegas and where their money is going. By many measures, Las Vegas tourism is starting to regain its footing, though officials are concerned that a spike in gas prices or other financial turmoil could stall the nascent recovery. In 2011, for example, gambling revenue at casinos on the Strip was up 5.1% compared with the prior year.

It was one of those crazy, hard-to-figure-out Sundays for the Hendrick Motorsports team at the Auto Club 400 in Fontana. The literati of the NASCAR crowd might even say it was the best of times, it was the … no, let's stick to racing. So, the star of the Hendrick team on Sunday was Dale Earnhardt, Jr. , whose wise pit management allowed him to steal a third-place finish. He employed a strategy called short pitting, where he comes in earlier than he might otherwise for fresh tires to gain track position when everyone else is running on slower tires.

Richard Milanovich, who as chairman of the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians helped to usher in a new age of wealth and political muscle for many Native Americans through the expansion of tribal casinos in California, died Sunday at Eisenhower Medical Center in Rancho Mirage. He was 69 and had cancer. During Milanovich's nearly three decades as chairman, the Agua Caliente tribe rose from a harsh desert existence to the glitz and riches that accompany casino-fed wealth. The transformation coincided with the rebirth of Palm Springs, home to one of the tribe's two posh casino resorts and large swaths of tribal land, and economic gains across the checkerboard reservations in the Coachella Valley.

March Madness starts this week and there's a lot of money at stake, including more than $1 billion in wages paid to distracted workers and $2.5 billion in illegal bets. The NCAA basketball tournament will suck 90 minutes out of each workday for 2.5 million workers, according to a report from employment consulting firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas . If last year is any indication, employers will pay out $175 million in wages to workers who are sneaking peeks at games online, checking scores or managing office pool brackets during the first two days of the tournament, according to Challenger.

Reporting from Peoria, Ariz. — Seated at a table on the far end of an auxiliary locker room that was turned into a makeshift interview room, Yu Darvish clasped his hands. He twiddled his thumbs. He looked at his interpreter, at the ceiling, even at the tape recorders placed in front of him, but almost never at the person asking him a question. The high-priced Japanese free agent had pitched two scoreless innings in his first game for the Texas Rangers, but didn't smile once. He spoke softly and said little.