On his way to New York in 1995 to work for Doug Morris, a prominent music industry executive, Eric Semel made a detour that changed his life.
He left his home in Los Angeles and drove to Las Vegas, where he met with Stephen Wynn, the legendary casino developer who built up Mirage Resorts before selling it to MGM Grand last year. Wynn is a friend of Semel's father, Terry, the longtime co-chairman of the Warner Brothers studio and now chief executive of Yahoo Inc, the Internet portal.
PHOTO: NY TIMES
During a conversation with Wynn, Semel said he had confessed a secret desire to run a casino. "Given the opportunity, in another life, I always thought it would be really cool to work in Vegas," Semel, who is 32, recalled saying.
Wynn hired him immediately.
"His eyes lit up," Wynn recalled. "The chemistry clicked."
Semel apologized to Morris, who was also a friend of his father's, and spent the next six years working for Wynn instead -- first at the Mirage and then the Bellagio, becoming a savvy gambling executive himself.
After MGM Grand bought Wynn's company, Semel struck out on his own. Last month, he bought ukbetting.com, an online sports bookmaker in London, for ?6 million, or roughly US$8.5 million.
At first glance, it seems an odd choice to leave the gambler's paradise of Sin City for London, where gambling limits are almost puritanical. Regulations require gamblers to become members of a casino 24 hours before they can play. The government limits the number of slot machines, prohibits live entertainment in casinos and forbids gamblers from drinking alcohol while betting.
But a sweeping government review released last month proposes abolishing many of those restrictions. The review, subject to rounds of negotiations before its recommendations become law, also suggests legalizing all forms of online gambling, which would make Britain one of the few countries to allow it. Currently, casinos in Britain cannot offer Internet versions of blackjack, roulette and other games, but bookies can accept sports bets online.
Going a step further, Gordon Brown, the chancellor of the exchequer, is wooing online sports-betting sites with a tax break, hoping they will set up shop in Britain instead of places like the Caribbean or Gibraltar.
Online gambling is still dwarfed by casino gambling, partly because of legal questions surrounding who can make bets on the Internet. But over the next few years, with a number of countries likely to adopt more relaxed rules, annual revenue from online gambling is expected to double to US$5 billion, analysts from Bear, Stearns say.
None of which is lost on Semel, who is not the only American gaming entrepreneur eyeing Britain. Encouraged by the Isle of Man's decision to legalize online gambling, MGM Mirage has applied for a license there. Although technically part of Britain, the Isle of Man has its own Legislature and makes many of its own laws.
"The market in Britain has great potential," said Alan Feldman, an MGM spokesman.
Britons have a reputation for betting on everything from the weather to political elections, in addition to horse and dog racing. They place more bets per capita than Americans, but trail Australians, who are among the heaviest gamblers, according to Merrill Lynch.
Most punters -- as gamblers are called in Britain -- place bets with a few large firms, including Ladbrokes, owned by the Hilton Group; William Hill and the Rank Group, which owns casinos and the Hard Rock Cafe chain. New entrants face a challenge.
"While we expect expansion in the number of casinos, we do not foresee an explosion in new supply," Andrew Burnett, a Merrill Lynch analyst, said in a recent report.
That gives Semel unfavorable odds. With 8,000 customers, ukbetting is tiny, compared with the established players. In the 11 months ended May 31, ukbetting lost ?457,000 on revenue of ?7.4 million.
"It is a very tough market, and Eric will have a lot of competition," said Russell Foreman, chief executive of Aspinalls Online, founded by Damian Aspinall, part of a family that has a legacy of running casinos in Europe.
Semel said he took a chance on ukbetting because it was one of the few online companies that had not racked up huge losses in attracting customers during the Internet boom. Semel said he would use the ?5.5 million that ukbetting raised on Aug. 7 when it went public on the London stock market at price of 25 pence a share to transform it into a large digital wagering company that takes bets online, over mobile phones and through interactive television.
Semel is a bit of a gambler himself: he likes to shoot dice and bet on sports (his favorite team? Whichever carries his bet). But he also knows what it takes to succeed in the gambling business. "He observes and watches and plays his cards close to the vest," Wynn said.
And Semel is not easily discouraged. When he started with Wynn it was not in some cushy office job, but working nights on the casino floor.
"He put me through the paces," Semel said. "To see if I was really up for it."
Semel did the obligatory stints in surveillance and credit collections, until he was promoted to marketing director, responsible for pampering high rollers.
By then his fascination with Las Vegas had been cemented, having started more than a decade earlier. Like other teenagers growing up on the West Coast, for whom a visit to Vegas is often a right of passage, Semel made his first road trip at age 16, after he got his driver's license. He said his first glimpse of the lights arising from the desert blackness was "awe inspiring."
But the same time, he developed an interest in computers, buying an Atari video-game console with an acoustic modem before he had graduated from high school. He studied computer science at Tulane University, where the music scene, rich in jazz and funk, also captivated him. The Funky Meters, a popular New Orleans band, played at his wedding to Karen Davis, his college girlfriend.
After graduation, Semel shunned the movie business, he said, "because I didn't feel like I could be my own person," given his father's influence in Hollywood then. Even though Semel said his father eventually came to support his career choice, it took some convincing. He recalled his father's frosty "no" to suggestions that he could work in Las Vegas during school vacations.
When he thinks back on the other life he might have lived working for Morris, who is now chairman of Vivendi's Universal Music Group, Semel said he harbors no regrets. Semel said he knew from his first day at the Mirage that he had made the right choice.
"I was standing in the casino pits and I thought I was in heaven," Semel said. "My office had 12 craps tables, and action every night."
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