Casinos are everywhere

Nate Silver wrote a very interesting piece in Esquire about the explosion of casinos and how states maybe shouldn't count on gaming to help their state budgets. And it got me thinking...

First, there was one thing jumped out at me:

We have now reached the point at which residents of seventeen of the twenty largest metro areas are within a three-hour drive of a blackjack table. And Washington, D. C., will make it eighteen once Delaware permits blackjack, leaving only Dallas and Atlanta. Just about everyone who wants to gamble in the United States is already a morning's drive away from being able to do so; with the possible exception of isolated Texas, states that open new casinos will mostly be stealing customers from one another.

Between those 18 metropolitan areas (once Delaware approves their gambling), there will be 102,470,600 people -- just in the largest metro areas -- within a three hour drive of gambling.

From where I am sitting right now (in the 59th-largest metro area), I can be at one of four casinos that have blackjack within an hour -- Santa Ana Star Casino, San Felipe Casino Hollywood, Sandia Casino and Route 66 Casino. Put it at three hours, there are probably fifteen casinos that I can hit -- maybe more.

According to the American Gaming Association, there are five racinos (race tracks with slot machines) in the state, one of which is within an hour drive (The Downs Race Track and Casino).

The American Gaming Association says there are 21 tribal casinos in New Mexico. This is the seventh most in the country, behind Oklahoma (96), California (66), Minnesota (31) Washington (31), Wisconsin (29) and Arizona (24).

Three other states have more commercial gambling casinos: Nevada (266), Colorado (40), South Dakota (35, in addition to 11 tribal casinos), and Mississippi (29).

Of those states, only South Dakota has a smaller population than New Mexico. According to the 2008 census estimate, New Mexico had 1.98 million people, while South Dakota had 804,000 people. Nevada, in case you were wondering, had 2.6 million people.

So Nevada has one casino for every 9,774 people.

So what does it all mean? Well, mainly that I have too much time on my hands. And that if I had any money, I could gamble pretty easily.