Scobe Speaks: Predictions for 2004
by Frank Scoblete

I love to play prophet and I am darned good at it. When my two sons were little guys, instead of strapping men as they are now, I once made a prediction about a movie called Mac and Me, a spin-off of the ET theme, a movie my sons did not want to go see. "Guys," I said, "I predict you are going to love this movie. If not, I’ll eat a frog." After several choruses of "You promise? You promise you’ll eat a frog, Daddy?" I convinced them I was serious and we went off to see Mac and Me, which was a horrendous movie, one of the all-time awful movies, and a two-hour commercial for MacDonald’s and Coca Cola.

My sons hated the movie. I hated the movie. And, of course, I now had to eat a frog. "You have to eat it live, Dad," said my youngest son, Michael. "The whole frog, guts and all," said my oldest son, Greg. Of course I had no intention of eating a frog, live, dead, cooked, or candied. But I couldn’t tell them that. So I pushed it off with, "I’ll have to get myself mentally prepared to do it."

I figured they would forget about it. They never forgot! For months, every day, they’d ask, "When are you going to eat that frog?" I’d say, "Soon." At some point, it must have dawned on them that I really had no intention of eating a frog but they still wouldn’t let go. Over the years, they decided to torture me with frog gifts – porcelain frogs for Christmas, rubber frogs for my birthday, paintings of frogs for the heck of it.

Every once in a while, to this day, those two men will say, "Hey, when are you going to eat that frog?"

I answer, "Soon, soon."

I vowed then I would never make any more predictions after that one went awry. But I started making more predictions soon after that disaster, so to assuage my moral guilt for lying to my sons and not living up to my vow, I then vowed never to make any more vows!

Here are my predictions for 2004 for the various regions:

Donald Trump will sell the Marina or the Plaza to Park Place Entertainment, now called Caesars Entertainment…It will finally come out that the Claridge and Resorts are both haunted. Since these are the two resorts that attract the most senior citizens in AC, as the WWII generation leaves us, some still want to stick around for the gaming action and their spirits, being naturally attracted to the places of their youth, have been returning for years to these two properties… Borgata will institute an aggressive bus-marketing campaign. Borgata came into the AC market eschewing the bus people but now the "Big B" executives, as they are known, realize that midweek, especially in winter, the bus people are a must, even if some are a bit musty, in order to make ends meet…Sands will institute an aggressive campaign to realign its marketing image from the aggressive campaign that realigned its image last year from the image it had realigned the year before that.

Blackjack profits will continue to decline in 2004 as casinos take aggressive measures to increase profits by making the games less attractive to play…Craps play will continue to increase, as will casino profits, due in large part to many people who think they can beat the game with controlled shooting. Even so, more and more casinos will get rid of their boxmen at craps because as one executive will be heard to say, "All they do is sit on their butts!" Disputes will be resolved in 2004 with the magical words, "Pay the table!" The craps players will be happy…The new show outside TI (what used to be Treasure Island) will be a dud because the lithesome, scantily-clad girls in the show will come down with various colds, flu, and frostbite in the winter months and have to be replaced with women who come from sturdier yeoman stock but who are not as attractive or lithesome. In the final performance of the show, one of the three people in the crowd outside will be heard to say, "Where are the pirates, Daddy?"…Instead of the tiger attack on Roy causing consternation among performers about working with big cats, even more shows will feature the animals on the theory that car crashes are the reason people go to the car races…The Vegas buffet wars will really heat up in 2004 and some casinos will be giving away free buffets during certain times even if you don’t play! This will continue until a national survey shows that people who go to or live in Las Vegas are much fatter than people who don’t and the casinos pull back on the food promotions citing "the public interest."

All casinos in Illinois will close in 2004 because of the heavy tax burden imposed by the government. The state will then take them over and appoint civil service workers from the Motor Vehicle Bureaus to run the games. Players will drive to Indiana, Wisconsin and Europe to avoid waiting on the long lines and the casinos will shut their doors, permanently, just before Thanksgiving 2004…The other surrounding states, seeing the success of the Illinois State Legislature in raising casino taxes to 70 percent, will also institute such tax increases in 2004. Their casinos will close in 2005.

Tunica County will become the "gambling capital" of the country in 2004 owing to its good games and easy comps. However, some executive in 2004 will say, "You know, we could make even more money from blackjack if we copied what they are doing in Vegas!" If he is not promptly shot, the future of Tunica after 2004 is too murky for me to see clearly…The Gulf Coast region will continue to be a pleasant place to play and fish and visit Southern mansions almost no one could afford or would want to live in…The mosquito will be named the State Bird of Mississippi.

A separate nation of gaming within the world of gaming, some Native American casinos will start to look to Isleta in New Mexico and Foxwoods in Connecticut as models of how to structure their games, floors, and customer relations. As they eschew the Vegas/Atlantic City corporate concepts, their profits will soar and their customer base will continue to expand dramatically…Indian tribes that never existed will come into existence in order to build casinos…In fact, one tribe, the Scoblete Tribe, will attempt to open a casino in Manhattan, claiming they were the tribe that sold the property illegally in 1626 for "some beads" and "we didn’t even get a buffet!"

Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein will both be captured, one dead, one alive (you choose) in early October, [Scoblete got this right but the wrong year for Saddam!] just in time for Bush to be reelected President, which he will be in a landslide, except in the state of Massachusetts, which will be renamed Taxachusetts. Blacks, Hispanics and other minorities will now take a back seat to the most discriminated minority in America – short people. According to a recent study by Professor Timothy Judge at University of Florida, short people make much less money than tall people. In fact, for every inch in height a person has over another person, his or her income increases by $789 per year. Thus, a 6’2" person makes on average $9,468 more per year than a 5’2" person!..In 2004, the NBA will be forced to accept "height-challenged" basketball players to bring the NBA in line with the average American height for males of 5’10" – in short, each team must now hire the short.

Okay, those are my predictions for 2004. If they aren’t right, I’ll eat a frog.