American Football Betting

26/01/08

Fassel Says Manning May Determine Giants Fate Against Packers

By Erik Matuszewski

Jan. 18 (Bloomberg) -- Eli Manning's perseverance is the reason the New York Giants are within a game of the Super Bowl, says Jim Fassel, a former Giants head coach. Now he just has to outplay Brett Favre, the best passer in National Football League history.

``It's hard to play quarterback in New York, especially when you are young and the team is struggling,'' Fassel said in an interview. ``The key ingredient is Eli Manning playing at a higher level.''

The Giants, who face record-setting quarterback Favre and the Green Bay Packers in two days for the National Football Conference's berth in the title game, have won twice on the road and threatened to spoil the New England Patriots' undefeated season over the past three weeks. Manning, the top pick in the 2004 NFL draft, has thrown eight touchdown passes over those games.

``That's the brightest spot you've got right now for the Giants -- the play of Eli Manning,'' said Fassel, who coached the Giants to their most recent Super Bowl appearance, in 2001, when they lost to the Baltimore Ravens.

This year, they will have to overcome a Packers team led by Favre, who broke Dan Marino's career yardage and touchdown records this season. The National Weather Service forecasts a daytime high of 7 degrees Fahrenheit (-14 Celsius), with the temperature three or four degrees colder at kickoff at Lambeau Field in Green Bay, Wisconsin.

The Packers are seven-point favorites, according to Las Vegas Sports Consultants, which advises Nevada bookmakers on betting lines.

Snowy Victory

Favre, 38, threw three touchdown passes and a few celebratory snowballs in the Packers' 22-point playoff victory over the Seattle Seahawks on Jan. 12. The next day, the 27-year- old Manning led the Giants over the Dallas Cowboys 21-17.

The NFC winner will play New England or San Diego in the Super Bowl on Feb. 3 in Glendale, Arizona. The undefeated Patriots host the Chargers in the American Football Conference title game in Foxborough, Massachusetts, at 3 p.m. on Jan. 20.

In this weekend's second conference championship game at 6:30 p.m. New York time, Packers running back Ryan Grant said he hopes Green Bay's cold weather experience will be an advantage. Grant plowed through a snow-covered Lambeau Field for 201 rushing yards and three touchdowns last week.

Green Bay Chill

Favre has a 43-5 record during games in which the temperature was 34 degrees or below at kickoff, according to the Elias Sports Bureau. Manning has played in one game in which the temperature dipped below 30 degrees. The Giants lost that 2004 contest 23-22 in Cincinnati, when the temperature at kickoff was 24 degrees Fahrenheit.

``There's no point in being concerned,'' Manning said after practicing outside in temperatures just above freezing in New Jersey this week. ``You wear some warm clothes and you wear a hand warmer. It's still all going to come to how your team performs on the field.''

The Giants have done well away from home, winning nine straight games, including playoff victories at Tampa Bay and Dallas.

In those wins, Manning was poised, focused and confident, said coach Tom Coughlin, who replaced Fassel before Manning's first season. The quarterback wasn't ``skittish,'' the term Giants General Manager Jerry Reese used to describe his play after a 41-17 loss to Minnesota on Nov. 25, and didn't show the ``comical'' leadership abilities that former Giants running back Tiki Barber talked about early this season.

``He has really taken control of the game, control of himself, control of the offense,'' Coughlin said. ``He has done the things necessary for us to win, and it is a great time for him to be playing that way.''

Less Pressure

Manning, the younger brother of Indianapolis Colts quarterback Peyton Manning, finished the regular season by throwing four touchdowns in a 35-32 loss to the Patriots, and then connected on 20 of 27 passes in the Giants' playoff win against the Buccaneers.

In last week's win over Dallas, Manning recorded the highest passer rating -- a combination of several quarterback statistics -- of his 61-game NFL career.

Former Giants quarterback Phil Simms, now an analyst for CBS Sports, said Manning has benefited from an offensive plan that doesn't put as much pressure on him to take risks and make big pass plays.

``It has made him better,'' Simms said on a conference call. ``They're not lining up every week and going, `Okay Eli, we need 42 points, let it go.' It's not just Eli dropping back every single time and trying to make plays with his arm.''

The Packers and Giants met during Week 2 of the regular season, with Green Bay winning 35-13.

Running back Brandon Jacobs, one of the young Giants whose emergence has helped Manning, says he sees a more confident and composed quarterback in the huddle calling plays and in the pocket throwing passes.

``He's come into himself,'' Jacobs said. ``He's calm. He's not panicking. He's sitting in there and trying to make plays.''

To contact the reporter on this story: Erik Matuszewski at Giants Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey matuszewski@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: January 18, 2008 00:07 EST

31/12/07

All's well in the CFL, but just wait

Monster from the south draws ever closer

Dec 29, 2007 04:30 AM

Garth Woolsey

Sports Columnist

So, let's face it, the elephant's trunk is in the igloo. Is there room for the rest of it? How long until it wrecks the place, anyway?

Or, is there ample room up here in True Patriot Love country for football of both North American professional varieties, the Canadian and the State-side, the three-down and the four, the CFL and the NFL?

Those questions were being asked long before the Buffalo Bills got all aggressive and possessive and decided they'd stake a claim to Toronto and southern Ontario. Already home to the only non-U.S. franchises in the NBA and Major League Baseball, T.O. has resident moneyed interests who would snap up an NFL franchise faster than you could say ... "How m-m-m-m-any zeroes?"

Guaranteed, if we caught a ride on the NFL marketing rocket, the fans and the money and whoo-ha would follow. This is the largest market north of the Mexican border lacking the cachet of the NFL, save for Los Angeles, which has developed an immunity to NFL fever. They just watch on TV out there, like most Canadians.

In fact, Canadians see plenty of "our" football, live and otherwise. Average CFL attendance in 2007 topped 29,000, highest since 1983, and the Grey Cup in Toronto was a roaring success – even if many local residents barely knew it was going on (such is life in multi-tasking Millerville). TV ratings for the league far outstrip numbers for Canadian viewership of the NFL.

Still, the aforementioned elephant is enormous, relentless, voracious, odiferous, etc., and CFL commissioner Mark Cohon acknowledged the obvious during Grey Cup week. The son of McDonalds Canada founder George Cohon, a former employee of both the NBA and MLB, a tuned-in 21st-century kind of a guy, Cohon said: "I'm not sticking my head in the sand, that would be the worst thing for the CFL commissioner to do. So I think there's a real potential (for the NFL in Toronto)."

How could the Argonauts and Tiger-Cats survive such an eventuality, let alone prosper? The CFL in general?

"I'm not going to preside over a league that has a Grey Cup just out west," said Cohon (coincidentally, this season's final came down to a pair of prairie teams). "That's not what I was hired to do. Any type of relationship that we (the CFL and NFL) have has to make sure that the eight existing franchises are strong, growing and healthy. I think southern Ontario is critical to this league and I'll make sure I protect it and grow it."

Such is the challenge for '08 and beyond - finding some formula for more intimate co-existence. The Bills already have approval for eight games in Toronto, three exhibition and five regular season, over five years. That happens also to be the length of Cohon's mandate, five years. As a condition of employment he insisted the CFL governors give him unanimous approval along with the lengthy contract, knowing full well that few of his predecessors have enjoyed much stability since the 17-year reign of Jake Gaudaur, ending in 1985 (Gaudaur died this year at age 87).

The CFL, in some form or other, will survive NFL incursions. A game at Mosaic Stadium in Regina has much to recommend it when compared, say, to one at the Edward Jones Dome in St. Louis. The NFL is different than, not necessarily better than. Betting the Sunday ticket is a big part of the interest in the NFL, too.

The world - hard for some to believe - does not end at the outer edges of the GTA; out there, for the most part, Canadian football rules rule.

The CFL has survived its own ill-advised, short-lived expansion into the U.S., overcome fly-by-night owners and weathered harsh economic storms. The dollar is strong, Canadians are feeling good about themselves.

Well, for now, anyway.

18/12/07

'Duel,' betting big on a winning streak

The new ABC reality series will run for six nights

By Diego Vasquez
Dec 17, 2007

With the writers' strike forcing many scripted shows into reruns, there are a number of new shows premiering at midseason.

This is one in a series of Media Life previews of those programs.

Name of show
"Duel"

Timeslot
ABC, Monday-Friday, Sunday 8 p.m.

Plot synopsis

In the same way the network launched the original run of "Who Wants to be a Millionaire" and NBC launched "Deal or No Deal," ABC is launching its latest game show "Duel" as a week-long event, with episodes airing at 8 p.m. each night Monday through Friday, with the finals at 8 p.m. on Sunday.

The contest, an adaptation of a French game show, is hosted by ESPN personality Mike Greenberg, and it's sexed up by two "chip girls," models Jennifer Aguero and Olivia Fox, reminiscent of "Deal's" bevy of models. Twenty-four players will take part in the game's initial run, with one winner crowned on Sunday's finale.

Here's how it works: Players start each duel with 10 chips worth $5,000 apiece. Greenberg asks a multiple choice question, and the players use their chips to bet on one or more of the choices, depending on how confident they are in the answer.

Chips wagered on wrong answers are taken away and added to an escalating jackpot, and whenever a player doesn't select the correct answer or loses all their chips, the duel is over, with the winner selecting another opponent.

The top four players from the week return Sunday for the winner-takes-all finals.

Outlook
Since it airs all week, "Duel" will face different time slot competition each night, making its performance a bit unpredictable. But to its advantage is the fact that it won't face many scripted shows, with the exception of CBS's "NCIS" on Tuesday, because most scripted shows are now in reruns for the holidays or because of the writers' strike.

"Duel" will be challenged by airing head-to-head against NBC’s one-off series "Clash of the Choirs" Monday through Thursday, but there's certainly room in the time period for both to succeed, especially on Monday and Wednesday, where there's no one dominant show on any network at 8 p.m.

Sunday looks a little tougher for the game's finals. In the 8 p.m. timeslot "Duel" will face an original episode of CBS's "The Amazing Race," which has a very loyal audience, and the first part of NBC's "Sunday Night Football" game between the Washington Redskins and Minnesota Vikings.

The buzz
Media people are generally high on the potential of "Duel" for a few reasons, the first and most obvious being the writers' strike. It has already forced most networks into reruns, leaving viewers hungry for something original.

"In this environment, anything that's fresh and challenging, people will flock to," says Karen McCallum, media director at Esparza Advertising in Albuquerque, N.M.

Another reason the media community is high on the game is its format. Like "Millionaire," it depends heavily on trivia, but it gains an extra edge because of its poker-like format.

"It's trivia, but there's also an element of poker, which has done well on cable," McCallum points out.

Finally, the show is produced by BermanBraun, the company run by former Fox head Gail Berman and former ABC head Lloyd Braun, both of whom have had success with reality in the past. "American Idol" launched on Berman's watch at Fox.

"Berman just has a great sense of what will attract American viewers," says McCallum.

10/12/07

$1.7 million illegal gambling ring busted

by Sarah Evesham

The American football season is known to inadvertently create a rise in illegal street gambling, but a nationwide crackdown has resulted in significant arrests in Albany County, New York.

Albany County sheriffs intercepted an alleged gambling ring earlier this week, and arrested the four main men behind the operation. The leader is named as Cory Reynolds, who was arrested and charged with enterprise corruption and gambling promotion.

Acting on information from an informant, police secured a warrant to tap Reynolds' phone and gathered evidence of an illegal operation. It is alleged that over $1.7 million had been wagered.

Casino Wire is part of the UK casino media network

04/11/07

Gridiron giants prepare for phoney war

From The Sunday Times

November 4, 2007

With two winning streaks on the line, the Colts and Patriots are playing for bragging rights in Indianapolis tonight

Brian Doogan

TONY DUNGY, head coach of defending Super Bowl champions, the Indianapolis Colts, brought a little perspective last week to the National Football League's (NFL) "Clash of the Titans". Today's game pits the Colts against Bill Belichick's New England Patriots, three times Super Bowl winners since 2002. For the third consecutive season the Colts are 7-0, tying a record set by the Green Bay Packers in 1931. The Patriots are 8-0 and, at their present rate of scoring ? 331 points midway through the season ? they remain on course to obliterate the record total of 556 regular-season points set by the Minnesota Vikings in 1998.

Last Sunday at Foxborough, New England quarterback Tom Brady, who has been intercepted just twice this season, threw for 306 yards and three touchdowns in a 52-7 annihilation of the Washington Redskins. It wasn't even that close. Brady's metro-nomic form must surely place Colts quarterback Peyton Manning's record total of 49 touchdown passes in a season, which he accumulated three years ago, in jeopardy.

Some commentators are describing today's showdown between these rivals as "Arma-geddon", but Dungy knows that there will be much more to play for when the dust settles at the RCA Dome in Indianapolis, whatever transpires.

"Let the whole thing play out," he advised. "It's only November. In 1998 the Vikings were 15-1 and everyone said they should have been 16-0 when they went into the playoffs. Then Gary Anderson missed a field goal [and the Atlanta Falcons, who went on to reach Super Bowl XXXIII, won the game in overtime] and I haven't heard anyone talk about the 1998 Minnesota Vikings since.

"We all know what the Patriots have accomplished and we know how well they're playing. But when Peyton had his great season in 2004, we supposedly couldn't be stopped. We didn't play well down the stretch, however, then we went to New England and lost a playoff game, 20-3, and nobody cared how many points we'd scored any more. The year after that, we won 13 in a row and supposedly, we couldn't be stopped but we lost our first playoff game. So it's a little early to be crowning anybody. This is a game the whole league is focused on and it's a big game, but it's still a regular season game and you've got to keep it in perspective."

Their previous encounter resulted in a thrilling 38-34 triumph for the Colts at the RCA Dome in last season's American Football Conference (AFC) championship game when Manning inspired a memorable comeback from an 18-point deficit in the second quarter.

This was the third successive victory for the Colts against the Patriots. Significantly, they have not lost at the RCA Dome since the Pittsburgh Steelers inflicted a 21-18 defeat in the AFC divisional playoffs in January 2006, their winning run at home stretching through 13 games. Another victory over the Patriots should secure for them home field advantage in the playoffs. While Manning has contributed heavily to his team's ascendancy and the winning of the four most recent games by at least 18 points, the Colts boast the best pass defence in the NFL and they have conceded the second-fewest points total so far. Yet the Colts are betting underdogs, the first time this has been so for undefeated, defending Super Bowl champions playing at home in NFL history.

"The Patriots are playing sound football and they thrive on people who don't play sound. You make mistakes, they make you pay for them every time," Dungy suggested. "The betting line is all about public opinion and the way they've been playing and that's what makes this game so exciting. When you get into this business you want to measure yourself against the best in nationally televised games where there's a lot of interest. But people who think whoever wins this game will be guaranteed to win the Super Bowl are just wrong."

The game's key contest will be between Brady and Manning. In addition to holding the NFL record for the most touchdown passes in a season, the 31-year-old Colts quarterback holds records for the most consecutive seasons with more than 4,000 yards passing (six) and most seasons with 4,000 or more yards passing in a career (seven).

Where Brady surpasses Manning, in statistical terms at least, is in the number of Super Bowls he has won, three to Manning's one. "You are seeing two very professional guys at the top of their game, who are in great systems that take advantage of what they can do," said Dungy. "I think the country gets to see the best of both guys." So will we tonight.

29/10/07

Soccer and NFL: How the other fans play

By John Branch

Published: October 26, 2007

LONDON: The soccer game was about to start, so the men - and they were all men - hurried to place bets at the window on the stadium's concourse. They all soon left to take their seats. None carried a beer, because fans at this game were not allowed to drink alcohol while sitting in the stands.

The favorite sports of the United States and the United Kingdom share a name. And the passion for football, the kind played mostly with the foot and a round ball, is often compared to football, the American brand, played mostly with the hands and using an oblong ball.

But how fans on either side of the ocean put those fervent allegiances to action and enjoy the game are vastly different - even beyond in-stadium gambling, game hen sandwiches and beer-free stands.

The differences will be on display Sunday, when the two sporting cultures meet, along with the New York Giants and the Miami Dolphins, at Wembley Stadium. Some Britons in the stands will be fans of American football who find it quite normal to munch on salt-beef sandwiches, not salted peanuts, during a sporting event.

But this was White Hart Lane in north London, the home of Tottenham Hotspur. And Thursday's UEFA Cup game with Madrid's Getafe offered a glimpse into the stark differences in the fan experience of big-time soccer and the American game.

Tailgating, a charcoal-flavored outdoor waiting room to fill the hours before a National Football League game, is a foreign concept here. There are no expansive parking lots, and most fans, men and women, arrive by train or subway. They filled nearby pubs and fast-food restaurants before making their way into the stadium.

Others chose to stand in the near dark and eat next to trailers, the kind seen at American carnivals offering waffle cones over a counter on one side. These served no waffle cones, but did offer cheeseburgers (4.50 gbp, about $9) and hot dogs (3 gbp).

A trailer park of sorts was set up in front of what was a gas station but now houses one of the three large Spurs Stores along High Road that sell everything from scarves to hats, mugs to baby clothes, all in the proper club colors of blue and white.

Of all the things to buy, beer was not one of them. The trailers are not licensed to sell it, leaving more business for the pubs. Beer is normally sold inside the stadium, but UEFA has its own rules for Cup games, apparently to keep unruliness at a minimum.

The offerings on the concourses are limited, largely because the cramped concourses themselves are limited - a series of dead ends rather than one looping walkway. For nearly 20 years, by law, stadiums like this have been segregated, as one security official put it, into smaller and more manageable sections of people to combat roving hooliganism.

The 36,000 fans at White Hart Lane may rise and cheer as one, but they do not enter or exit that way. They enter through prescribed gates, and once in, there is no mingling with those whose tickets directed them to other gates.

Fans of the opposing team have their own entrances, bathrooms and concessions. Their section is outlined in fluorescent orange and green, the colors worn by the dozens of security guards hired to protect visitors.

One area with few restrictions is gambling. It is a striking difference to American sports, which are generally nervous about perceived links to gambling and prefer to believe that sports betting is confined to Nevada. But Tottenham, like other soccer teams, offers it in the stadium, and even wears gambling on its sleeve - or, more accurately, its chest. A main sponsor of the team is mansion.com, a casino and poker Web site. The company's logo and name dominates its jerseys, below the club's revered small cockerel and ball crest.

Betting windows of Ladbrokes, another team sponsor, are open for various bets through halftime. So people bet - on the winner (Tottenham was a 2-5 favorite), on the score (3-0 would get a bettor 10-1 odds), on who scores the first goal or who scores three goals.

Those behind the windows say the overwhelming majority bet on the home team - "That's why we're always hoping the away team wins," one worker at a betting shop said before the game.

The wish was granted. Getafe won, 2-1, and those who bet on the Spanish team, if there were any, cashed in at 5-1 odds.

16/10/07

Gambling on a glitzy future

It took Las Vegas more than five decades to go from desert to glittering gambling mecca but, in just five years, a tiny Asian territory has surpassed Nevada as the world's No 1 casino centre. Just how did Macau do it ... and can its remarkable growth be sustained?

From Niall Fraser in Macau

MUCH IN the way as Elvis Presley and Tom Jones beat a path to Las Vegas in the 1970s, last week, two of the biggest teams in America's NBA - including arguably its most bankable star, LeBron James - arrived in Macau for a basketball extravaganza. Next month, tennis legends Roger Federer and Pete Sampras will lock horns at the same venue, which is still on a high after the visit of Alex Ferguson's Manchester United all-star cast and a performance by soul diva Diana Ross earlier this year.

These are changed days for this tiny (just 28sqkm) former Portuguese colonial outpost, with a population smaller than Glasgow's, which five years ago would have struggled to attract Sid James if he had still been around.

US billionaire businessman Sheldon Adelson recently opened a resort with the biggest casino floor in the world here - and complained that the 11 million square feet of real estate it occupies "was awfully inadequate to meet demand".

Add to that a gambling-mad population of 1.3 billion just up the road, in an increasingly wealthy mainland China where betting of any sort is illegal, and you can see why, in gaming circles, all the money is on Macau.

In the four years from 2002, gross gaming revenue from Macau's casinos has almost tripled from US$2.8 billion a year to $7.2 billion - outstripping Las Vegas, which pulled in $6.6 billion last year. Over the same period, the number of casinos in Macau has risen from 11 to 26, leading to a 10-fold increase in the number of gaming tables and slot machines. Some 22 million visitors hit the tables last year, a figure expected to rise to 36 million by 2010.

Add to that, revenues from the city's horse and greyhound racing, supplemented by thriving books run on British and European football games and US basketball matches, and you have a heady mix that is driving the development of gaming around Asia.

Sean Monaghan, a Singapore-based Asian gaming analyst, says: "The transformation of Macau is truly phenomenal, it is impossible to run out of superlatives when talking about the place. What Macau has done in five or so years it took Vegas more than 50 to do - and it shows no sign of letting up."

A decade ago it all looked so different. As Macau's handover to Chinese rule in 1999 loomed, the city was labouring under an ineffectual Portuguese administration that struggled to control the entry into the casinos of organised crime groups eager to cash in on the crumbling monopoly of Chinese tycoon Stanley Ho Hung-sun, who had held the only licence to run casinos since 1962.

The final years of his reign were chaotic, as Triad gangs battled for control of the highly lucrative VIP rooms in Ho's casinos, sparking a gangland war that lasted four years and cost the lives of government officials, police officers and dozens of gangsters.

Ho, whose four-decade reign as casino king has made him one of Asia's richest men, managed to distance himself from the rampant organised crime surrounding his casinos and is still very much in the game - owning one of the three casino concessions handed out after liberalisation in 2002.

The enigmatic ballroom dancing octogenarian's dynasty is not going away anytime soon either, as both his daughter, Pansy, and son, Lawrence, have been cut in to the boom-town deal, running lucrative casino sub-concessions with American and Australian partners.

But his former fiefdom - which, like Hong Kong, is termed a "Special Administrative Region" of China - changed forever in 2004 when former Boston shoe-shine boy Sheldon Adelson opened the Sands casino under the new, Beijing-backed, liberalised and (ostensibly) cleaned-up regime and within 12 months had recouped every cent - and more - of his investment.

Fellow US gaming mogul Steve Wynn was quick to get the next piece of the action before Hong Kong and Australian consortiums followed suit. In Macau, casinos are now opening at a rate of one a month and there's little of Gordon Brown's concern over problem gambling seen here.

"The only problem gamblers in Macau are the ones who bring in too much cash in a suitcase from mainland China and get found out by the Communist Party bosses up north," says Paulo Avezdo, a long-time Macau resident and the publisher of a monthly business magazine.

It's just before 8am on a hot and sticky Monday morning and mainland Chinese gambler Zhang Liaoning is sat at one of the newly opened Venetian Resort Hotel's baccarat tables, chips piled high in front of him with a glass of steaming hot Chinese tea, only the air conditioning disguising his sweat at the turn of the next card. Above him in the sprawling 11 million square foot complex, which has made a tacky yet spectacular attempt to replicate ancient Venice - canals, gondolas and all - are 3000 hotel suites, 350 top brandname shops and a 15,000-seat entertainment arena.

It may be early, but at least half the 850 gaming tables on offer in the complex are busy. An overwhelming majority of the gamblers are from either mainland China or Hong Kong and most of them have been there all night.

This is the 24-hour Cotai Strip, Macau's audacious attempt to out-Vegas Las Vegas by creating a gambling avenue unlike anything Asia has seen. Hong Kong and Australian consortiums, including James Packer's Melco PBL Entertainment group, aim to open another three such complexes on the strip which has risen from what was a sprawling piece of swampland just a decade ago.

None of this fazes Zhang, who comes from the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou. From his position at the table, he says: "We Chinese have always come here to gamble. The place is good, it looks nice, very big but what happens at the tables is what is important. Even my wife prefers the tables to the shops but maybe if she gets bored she will take a look."

Such is the lure of the Cotai Strip to investors that last month - despite being unable to get a licence to operate a casino - another of the Vegas "big boys", Harrah's Entertainment, bought into the region, snapping up a little-used golf course there. Harrah's Asia-Pacific region president, Michael Chen, insists the gaming and entertainment giant are only in it for the golf but no-one is buying that explanation.

David Green, Pricewaterhouse Coopers' Macau gaming analyst, said of the deal: "So far, Harrah's has been one of the most notable big players missing from the market. I think it is fanciful to think that they would simply want to run it as a golf course in perpetuity. I look at it as a land bank exercise, a move in the hope that a concession might become available in 2009."

But while the cash flows in and the garish glass, neon and metallic frontages of the temples to the gaming dollar continue to sprout up, some cracks are beginning to show in the Macau success story.

Casinos form the bulk of the territory's tax revenue and have also - even before liberalisation - been its biggest employer. With the entrance of the US casino operators, wages have been driven up, sucking in school leavers, civil servants and university graduates who can earn more as a croupier than they can anywhere else in many other jobs. Tens of thousands of cheap construction labourers from mainland China have flooded the market, creating tension which boiled over into angry street demonstrations by local Macanese on May Day this year.

Macau University assistant professor Elio Yu says: "Aside from the cheap labour issue, the casino boom is causing a skills shortage in other sectors and further down the road, who knows what negative effect this might have on the rest of the economy."

Infrastructure is also creating problems, such has been the breakneck pace of development and influx of visitors. Macau - reckoned to be the most densely populated place on Earth - is struggling to move the hordes of mainland Chinese and Hong Kong gamblers from the ferries and planes into the region and out to the tables where the money is made - and lost.

The situation will only be exacerbated when an ambitious project to build a 29km road and rail-link between Hong Kong, Macau and the neighbouring Chinese city of Zhuhai is complete, bringing even more people to gamble.

Then, of course, there is the spectre of corruption. Several corruption scandals have erupted in the past year: the former transport minister, Ao Man-long, is facing charges of graft and money laundering in one of city's largest scam cases. And an unnamed official in the same department was arrested in July for allegedly embezzling public funds. He was suspected to have used the money to bet on football matches.

Britain's honourary consul for Macau, Glenn McCartney, says: "When you have the kind of accelerated growth we have had here there are bound to be social problems as a result. Yes, there have been a lot of winners, but there are the losers too and that problem needs to be addressed."