Charles Town, Other Casinos Target Asian-American Market

As they add card games to their acres of slot machines, casinos in Delaware, Pennsylvania and West Virginia are targeting Asian-American gamblers by focusing as much on buffet tables as on gaming tables.

The newfound attention to details is part of an open play to pull customers from Atlantic City, N.J., and tribal casinos farther north, and it has advocacy groups objecting about the racial implications.

Following the lead of high-end casinos in Las Vegas, operators such as Dover Downs and Delaware Park are hiring directors of Asian-American player development, expanding dining areas and menus, and considering foreign-language advertising in newspapers and on billboards.

“It is a demographic that does not tend to play slot machines,” explained Andrew Gentile, chief operating officer for Delaware Park, in Wilmington.

But they do like to play baccarat and pai gow, a version of poker based on an ancient Chinese tile game, said Ed Sutor, president and CEO of Dover Downs Inc.

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“There’s no secret that if you go to Las Vegas and you go to some of the upscale hotels you will find that those hotels cater to the Asian market,” said Frank Fahrenkopf Jr., president of the American Gaming Association, a trade group that lobbies on behalf of the gaming industry.

After the MGM Grand opened in Las Vegas in 1993, officials reworked an entrance based on the company’s trademark lion after learning some Asian gamblers considered the open mouth of a lion to be bad luck, Sutor noted. He also said some casino elevators don’t have buttons for the fourth floor because four is considered an unlucky number in some Asian cultures.

John Finamore, head of regional operations for Penn National Gaming, which is adding table games at its casinos in Charles Town, W.Va., and near Hershey, Pa., said there are roughly half a million Asians in the Baltimore-Washington market who can now gamble closer to home. The company has hired an Asian consultant to help with its marketing plans and is adding a noodle bar and expanded Asian food offerings at Charles Town.

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“It’s just in the culture,” he [Tim Fong, a psychiatry professor and co-director of the gambling studies program at the University of California-Los Angeles] said, adding that the gambling tradition among Asians is tied to themes such as predestination and fate.

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“The fundamental thing is that these businesses are predatory,” said Ellen Somekawa, executive director of Asian Americans United, a Philadelphia advocacy group that has been fighting plans to build a casino near the city’s Chinatown neighborhood. “We’re concerned that it will have a harmful effect on the Asian-American community and all the communities in Philadelphia.”

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At the same time, he [Fong] noted that studies have shown the rate of gambling addiction among Asian-Americans to be higher than in the general population, which he said may be partly attributed to the lack of services targeting problem gamblers within the community.

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