What now for Sihanouville (part1)

From sleepy beach town to booming gambling mecca to bust, the transformation in Sihanoukville seems to be complete. With the governmental decree that all online gambling operations cease by January 1st in the Kingdom of Wonder, Sihanoukville is now a complete ghost town. So the question remains, was happens now? The expats that once inhabited this peaceful town are now all nearly gone, the Cambodian locals have all been priced out of their own city and now the Chinese that caused all this in the first place are gone as well. What now remains is a broken town with the remaining few left to pick up the pieces in the hopes of a better future that may never come.

First a little background is required. The big misnomer about Sihanoukville, and any casino town in Cambodia really, is that most of the gambling revenue is generated on the casino floor. This could not be further from the truth as what is made on table games is a mere drop in the bucket compared to the real money maker for these casinos, online gambling. When entering a casino in Sihanoukville one will notice that much of the gambling floor is dedicated to rows and rows of empty tables with absolutely no players. The table is only populated by a single dealer, always a young and pretty Khmer girl, with a video camera pointed at her. What is going on here is that she is dealing hands of baccarat that is being broadcast back in China where gamblers can get their fix in a land where such activities are illegal. Certain studies have shown that nearly 85% of the casinos revenue is generated from these virtual games. So when the government decreed all such activity illegal starting in 2020, it was no big surprise that the Chinese that once flooded into Sihanoukville left in droves.

So why the ban? To answer this question I think it is really important to note that the Chinese get a really bad rap in all of this. That's a word that gets thrown around a lot, namely "Chinese" and it is always in a negative connotation. Let us really think about what has happened in Sihanoukville over the past few years. You take a sleepy little town with just under 100,000 inhabitants and then suddenly introduce an additional 300,000 people from a foreign land. And of course these people came because gambling licenses, both live and online, were issued out as easily as the Sunday paper. With no real regulatory body nor a commission to overlook the casinos in any meaningful way, the newly licensed entities then set up operations to serve a clientele that lived in a land where the service being provided was completely illegal. And as there were no rules governing how these licenses were used they were then leased out, sub-leased and sub-sub-leased to groups who had no business running any sort of operation let alone one that involved gambling. Given all this, who did we think was going to show up to take advantage exactly? Every society has both members that impact society in a positive and negative way. I think it is safe to say that Sihanoukville got much of the latter when it came to this recent boom.

(To be continued in part 2)