When contacted Thursday morning by CT Mirror, the Mohegans’ chief of staff, Chuck Bunnell, said the tribe already had decided to honor the state’s exclusion list at its casino. And they’ve worked it out with the state of Connecticut that if you choose to exclude from the state that you will be given an option to also include yourself for exclusion from Mohegan – online, and bricks and mortar,” Bunnell said. The Mohegan amendment has been published, but the Mashantucket Pequots’ one has not. It authorizes the casino owners, the Mashantucket Pequot and Mohegan tribal nations, and the CT Lottery to take sports bets and the tribes to offer casino games on smartphones and other digital devices.
The tribes maintain their self-exclusion lists, as do most commercial casinos. The playing cards dealt in casinos also have a similar form of unique identification in the form of barcodes printed on them in invisible ink. “When you self-exclude, you’re raising your hand saying that you have a problem and you need help, and for the state to make that more difficult to get that help, I think, is a real problem,” Goode said. It is simple math; the casino expects to make a certain amount of money for each round of blackjack. The biggest problem facing US players is getting money in and out of online casinos. Diana Goode, the executive director of the Connecticut Council on Problem Gambling, said she was frustrated by the refusal of the Department of Consumer Protection to mandate that the self-exclusion list applies to gambling at the casinos and not just online wagering.
“The Mohegans are deeply committed to the issue of problem gaming. The Department of Consumer Protection cannot issue the master licenses necessary for the tribes to go forward until the Department of Interior publishes in the Federal Register its acceptance of amendments to their gambling compacts with the state. Because the Pequots won judi slot federal recognition by Congress, not the typical review by the Department of Interior, its compact amendments are not automatically published in the Register. Rodney Butler, the Pequots tribal chairman, said Thursday he had asked Interior to comply. Hours later, Butler said through a spokesperson that the Pequots had the same commitment and would work out the details with the state.