Been losing sleep over the Minnesota Vikings stadium fund that is running out of money because e-pulltab gambling turned out not to be the hottest thing since sliced bread? Fear not, citizen! The Minnesota state gambling board has a better idea: e-bingo.
The new form of linked charitable gambling was approved by the Minnesota Gambling Control Board on Monday, March 18.
The “linked” part is key. Instead of competing against other people in the same location, players will match up with patrons at bars across the state. That means larger prize pots, which is expected to attract more players.
Yeah, that’ll totally work! Once the prizes are bigger, and you have to compete against everyone in the state, and you have almost no chance of winning… wait, start again. I mean, once you get people putting their meager wages down on e-bingo instead of the other pointless gambling habits they’ve picked up, thus undercutting revenues from those games… no, no, this is going to work, really! It has an “e-” in front of it, how can it possibly fail?
Meanwhile, speaking of those boring old e-pulltabs that don’t even allow you to lose to people on the other end of the state, MinnPost has looked at the demographics of the zip codes that buy the most of them. If you guessed that it’s predominantly the desperately poor that are in the ten highest-grossing e-pulltab locations, you’re a winner!
And just in case you thought this story could get any better than having two of the top e-pulltab sites being Knucklehead’s Bar & Grill and Aajax Likker, MinnPost further notes that right after the e-pulltab law passed, the head of the charity alliance pushing for it resigned and moved to Hawaii. Just like the patrons at Knucklehead’s dream of doing, only he gambled on something that he could make pay off.
Early contender for fav FoS post of the year.
Second Ben’s nom that this is FPOY (and we’re only in mid-March–ain’t that some Madness!)
BTW, Neil, you gotta post about this:
1. Santa Clara builds a brand new $1 billion dollar stadium for a football team located nearly 50 miles away.
2. Said football team won’t take the name of Santa Clara, preferring to keep their old name.
3. Santa Clara then decides they’ve got a jones to host the Super Bowl in their new stadium.
4. NFL tells Santa Clara, fine, we’ll deign to come down to your new stadium to play our vaunted Super Bowl (holding our noses the entire way down the 101, natch), BUT only if you give up $20 million dollars of ticket tax revenue.
5. Santa Clara, facing payback of over $850 million dollars in loans on the stadium alone, facing budget shortfalls in primary school budgets of $30 million and more, decides to say “okay, we’ll give up the dough, that’s how much we love football.”
Some of the deets here:
http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_22817607/santa-clara-agrees-nfls-financial-demands-host-super
What a wonderful world.
“Aajax Likker”
Yeah, no beer for you.
You might even say this post is e-funny.
Clearly they are using the wrong vowel.
i-tabs would have people lining up for miles/hours, even those who had just purchased the i-tab 4s would have to immediately upgrade, even though there isn’t much about the new one that is different from the old.
Preying on the poor to build a stadium for those who could easily afford to pay for it themselves is,,,wait for it…e-vil.
Public stadium cash, the gift that keeps on giving… to me! Just make sure I get the dough, Minnesotans, or I’ve got some lawyers who will “pull your tabs” if you know what I mean.