In the ever-changing world of media, the world's largest gaming company has changed its name from Harrah's Entertainment to Caesar's Entertainment. I'm sure the corporate officers who engineered this grand scheme see it as a necessary change for improvement to the company's bottom line.

Bill Harrah moved to Reno, Nevada in 1937 and opened a small club called the Owl on Oct. 29th. It was closed and out of business two weeks later. The name was wrong.

In 1938, Harrah partnered with Virgil Smith and opened Harrah's Plaza Tango. The club was successful. As Harrah moved to bigger and better quarters in Reno and Lake Tahoe the casinos always incorporated Harrah's name.

Bill Harrah passed away in 1978 and Holiday Inns, Inc. acquired Harrah's hotel casino company in 1980. Since that time Harrah's has opened casinos in Atlantic City, Laughlin, Joliet, Vicksburg, Tunica, North Kansas City...........the list goes on.

However, Caesars Entertainment became available and in June of 2005, Harrah's Entertainment completed a $9.3 billion acquisition of Caesars Entertainment, Inc.

Jay Sarno started Caesars in 1965. The casino opened in 1966 with classic Greek statuary, columns, and water fountains large enough to jump a motorcycle over, which is exactly what Evil Knievel did in 1967. Well, kind of. Although his 141-foot motorcycle jump over the fountains was successful, his landing was not.

Knievel was in a coma for 29 days with a crushed pelvis and femur, fractures to his hip, wrist and both ankles, and he missed the greatest media frenzy Caesars and Las Vegas had ever experienced. Sports Illustrated and ABC-TV's Wide World of Sports did extensive stories about Knievel, the failed jump, and Caesars Palace. Across the country, hundreds of other media outlets featured stories about Las Vegas, where gambling of all kinds was obviously accepted.

I'm sure the name change to Caesars Entertainment represents the company's desire to showcase their properties as upscale and vibrant. Certainly Harrah's older properties in Nevada such as Harrah's Reno casino is a case in point. Once the area's premier property with 2000 slot machines and 102 table games, the casino now offers just 850 slots and 48 table games and captures only a fraction of the local gambling market. And, that situation underscores the financial quagmire of not just Northern Nevada's older casinos but many holding the Harrah's name.

I know, it's just a name, right? But it seems so wrong for the corporate holding company to not have the Harrah's name!

Oh, well - Hail Caesars.

Photo Courtesy of (Angel Fire Press)

I've been hearing about loose slots my whole life. When you grow up around gambling you hear these things. Vig, house-edge, front-money, loose slots - the vernacular of casinos. The beautiful mother tongue of the gaming industry. Well, all right, the loose slots part is mostly the catch-phrase of the marketing department, which shouldn't really be considered part of the casino, but it is. Don't get me started!

Anyway, I love Reno. There, I said it, Reno and Lake Tahoe are awesome, and the slot machines and video poker games are very competitive. In fact, in a comparison done by my old friend Anthony Curtis at the Las Vegas Advisor, Reno as an area had less than a 5 percent hold on slots (which includes video poker). That means the return percentage was over 95 percent, on average.

Because the State of Nevada Gaming Control Board does not list individual resorts, and few resorts actually release their actual slot machine revenue (other than to say they offer loose slots), it is very difficult to qualify or quantify actual results. Nevada as a whole wins 6.14 percent, returning 93.86 percent. The Las Vegas Strip comes in at 7.19 - come on, those places cost a lot of bread to build, what did you expect?

Now just off the Strip, the Palms Resort sits with thousands of rooms in three luxury towers, and 1680 slot machines. Is it any surprise that they were willing to tell Curtis what their slot machine win percentage is? Probably not. With a paltry 4.54 percent win rate, they are 36.86 percent lower than the average slot on the Las Vegas Strip.

Is that a substantial amount? People clip coupons for 20 percent off their purchases and stay up all night to stand in line for Black Friday deals to save 40 percent. Anybody want to save 36.86 percent on their slot play?

Understanding Keno payoffs is really pretty easy. Don't expect any. All right, that's not fair. The truth is that many players insist on playing eight and ten-spot tickets, so their chance of hitting a winner are smaller than if they were to play a simple two or three-spot ticket.

Keno's been offered in Nevada casinos for about 75-years now and the casinos know they need to hold almost 30-percent of the total bets to make a profit and make it worthwhile to employ Keno runners and administrators. On the other hand, people play the lottery, and live keno pays off 50-percent more, so I'm not telling to not skip keno.

In fact, since many casinos still offer live Keno, when we go to eat, our family is likely to play a few Keno tickets. No, the Mapes (which closed 25 years ago) ticket does not represent the last time somebody I know won big at Keno. Lots of players hit good tickets, but not always at my table.

I like to play a three spot and my wife favors the four spot. Both of us expect what we get back - the occasional free play. When I hit two out of three on my ticket, I get back the $1 that I bet. That's cool, 'cause I either play it again if desert hasn't shown up, or I toke the Keno runner with it. Once in a while I hit a solid three spot when 1, 11 and 21 come up and then I can pay for the meal with the $42 payoff.

If I play three hundred three-spot tickets a year, the odds are I'll hit the solid three-spot four times, for $168, and hit "two out of three" 42 times for another $42. My return is $210 or 70 percent. That's pretty standard in live Keno and I can live with that. It's fun. That's $90 for a year's entertainment.

Different clubs have different odds, but regardless of how many spots you play on your ticket, the overall return for your games is going to be about the same, around 70 percent. If you play a three spot you'll hit it solid about 1.4 percent of the time or about four times in 300 games.

However, if you play an eight-spot, you will only hit it solid one time in about 230,000 games. That means if the gaming gods have their way, I'll be 766 years old before I hit it solid. My wife says it's not likely I'll live that long if I don't skip desert, so I'm doing the sensible thing. I'm sticking to the three-spots. Who say's I don't have a plan?

Winning football bets might be easy for some people, but I seem to be allergic to the cash out window, so I don't get to hang out with the winners too often. However, so many casinos have awesome sports books with huge TV's and a snack bar nearby, it's only natural that I can be found checking out the scores there when I'm in a casino.

Football bettors are a unique breed among casino goers. They are much more vocal about who and why they bet on certain teams, and they are a lot more vocal when rooting for their teams.

Unfortunately, most bettors have favorites: players, coaches and teams. That's a bad thing when it comes to sports betting and gambling in general. The very best sports handicappers have no favorites - except those teams that tend to cover the point spread each week.

If you have a favorite team, your view of that team, especially with regard to its chances of winning, is going to be influenced. This usually results in a bettor putting too large a bet on their team and also accepting a point spread that is not good. If you want to win more sports bets you have to take your own emotions out of the equation.

Once you've accepted the fact that there should be no emotion in making your bets, you also have to understand that the betting line at your local sports book is not as it seems. When team "A" is favored by 7 points, team "B" is not really 7 points worse. The point spread is set so the bets on each side even out.

The sports book has a built-in advantage when they take a bet of 11 units and pay you 10 more when you win. They hope to get the exact amount bet on each side so they can earn the "vig" - about 4.5 percent (1/2 x 1/11). They don't care which team wins because they win if they get even bets.

They have no emotional tie to either team playing, and you need to follow that lead. Have no emotion tie and make your bets strictly on the numbers you use to choose winners. Don't apply anything extra to your favorite team  - you'll do better in the long run.