Sometimes the germ of a project begins with something very common.
"Ohio Hedges Its Bets," a three-day series on the gambling industry published Oct. 27-29 in The Columbus Dispatch really started when a Business News copy editor began pooling money from staff members to drive two hours to Indiana and buy Powerball tickets.
One writer pointed out that ever since the multistate lottery games began in states adjacent to Ohio, the staff had rarely pooled its money for the Ohio Lottery.
What was happening in Columbus, we thought, probably was happening all across the state, not only with the lottery but also with other types of gambling.
Just how big is the legal gambling industry in Ohio and the nation, we wondered, and what impact have casinos, multistate lotteries and other forms of betting in neighboring states had on Ohio?
Setting out to find data on the subject, we found that some statistics would be easy to uncover, because they were collected by the states. A large amount of data also was compiled by the casino industry.
State lottery
For instance, some computer-assisted research was used to plot the impact of new border-state gambling options to the decline in Ohio Lottery (www.ohiolottery.com) ticket sales.
By using the state's own lottery sales numbers for several years, and then breaking them into ZIP codes, the figures could be plotted on a map.
The Ohio Lottery Commission provided an electronic database of sales for the past several years. That database was pretty thorough, with a breakdown of sales by each vendor (gas station, convenience store, etc.). Each vendor listing had a street address as well as a city and ZIP code for the business where tickets are sold.
That made it fairly easy to analyze with Microsoft Access. We basically grouped and totaled the sales figures by ZIP code, then moved that into our ArcView mapping software. Once we had a list of sales by ZIP code, it wasn't tough to map that across Ohio. The results were compelling: They showed that the sales decline was much more severe along the state's borders than in the middle of Ohio.
The state also keeps statistics for bingo games and horse racing, two other large gambling sectors.
Out-of-state casinos
But other conclusions were much more difficult to determine, particularly trying to find out how much money Ohioans gambled at out-of-state casinos.
The result was a time-consuming exercise that required searching for financial and marketing data from public and private local, state and national sources, and then applying old-fashioned math to the numbers.
The findings could not be precise because of the limitations of the data available, but the approach produced a reliable estimate.
Fortunately, The Dispatch had the assistance of the Buckeye State Poll, conducted by Ohio State University in conjunction with the newspaper, to help serve as a secondary source to back up some of the numbers.
The questions posed by the poll, conducted in April, looked at the gambling opinions and habits of Ohioans and where - if anywhere - they gambled.
Gambling revenues
States maintain decent statistics when it comes to revenues from gambling after all, tax money is derived from it - so that's always a good place to start. Most states also provide the most basic of their lottery data online.
In a state like Indiana, which has riverboat gambling, a gaming commission maintains statistics about slot machines and gaming tables. West Virginia's devices - video slots only - are overseen by the Lottery Commission (www.state.wv.us/lottery).
Sometimes the casino information is easily accessible. For instance, Mississippi's gaming commission (www.msgaming.com) has data on its Web site that gives the percentage of casino business from residents of other states.
For the most part, however, states maintain data only on the amount of money wagered and lost by individual casinos. Once you obtain those results, it takes a little legwork to get numbers for a specific state. Indiana has riverboat casinos, and its gaming commission (www.state.in.us/gaming/) reports monthly on the amounts of money gambled at and won by each casino for slot machines and table games. The commission's annual report - also online - includes the total numbers for the previous year at each casino. For all intents and purposes, the amount won by the casino is the amount that is lost by its customers.
The legwork comes in when you need to find out how much of that money came from Ohioans. According to several statisticians and business experts, the easiest method for determining those amounts is to get market-share data.
Most of the border-state casinos were willing to divulge the percentage of their customers who visit from Ohio. When the market share was not provided by a casino, it was determined from other sources, ranging from estimates by state officials to a study that one university conducted by counting license plates in casino parking lots.
Las Vegas
Calculating the Ohio gambling numbers from Las Vegas was a bit more complex.
The Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Bureau (www.lasvegas24hours.com) is a good source of information on the amount of money won by casinos in the city, as well as airplane traffic and visitor profiles. According to the bureau, 87 percent of people who visit Las Vegas gamble. Those who gamble spend an average of $559 per visit. So, how many of those people are from Ohio? As with other airports, McCarran International Airport (www.mccarran.com) maintains statistics regarding the true origin and destination sites for commercial flight passengers traveling to and from Las Vegas. Using these numbers, it's possible to get a total number of Ohioans coming to Las Vegas via commercial flights (since the number will be for arrivals and departures, it must be divided by two to get only arrivals).
By taking the Ohio number against all commercial passengers, it's possible to get a percentage number of Ohio passengers that then can be applied to the charter flight statistics, in which origin destinations are not calculated.
Add up all those passengers and then multiply it by .87 (remember, 87 percent of all visitors gamble). Then multiply that number by $559 (the average lost per visit) and the total is the amount that Ohioans lost gambling.
Since the amount of money lost is about 8 percent of all money bet at the casinos, the total that Ohioans bet can be ascertained by multiplying the amount lost by a multiple in the neighborhood of 12.5 percent.
This calculated number of Ohioans gambling in Las Vegas meshed with the numbers determined in the Buckeye State Poll. Thus the amount of people gambling at casinos in other locations can be determined by using the poll.
Adding it all up, The Dispatch was able to estimate conservatively that Ohioans bet $11.7 billion and lost $1.8 billion on legal gambling in 1999. And a large chunk of that all that money gambled outside the state - resulted in tax revenues for states other than Ohio.
Our approach in tackling the complex topic of gambling can be applied to other subjects in which precise data does not exist: With a little creative thinking, reasonable estimates based on a solid foundation can be made.
Barnet D. Wolf can be reached by e-mail at bwolf@dispatch.com.