You Better, You Bet

No, it's not another chart displaying Charlton's slump in form, it's the recent share price of PartyGaming Plc (owner of PartyPoker) which saw its value slump by 57.9% yesterday to 45p. The trigger for the collapse was the surprise news that Congress had managed to pass a bill blocking the processing of payments to online gambling sites.

The gaming companies and the US authorities have been going head-to-head for a number of years now, so any investors who bought into the PartyGaming IPO at 116p per share on 27 June 2005 will be wishing they'd 'folded' when the price hit a peak of 176p on 28 July. Alternatively they should have heeded the advice of perhaps the greatest investor of them all, Warren Buffett: "If you've been in the game 30 minutes and don't know who the patsy is, you're the patsy."

On the same day that Senate majority leader Bill Frist confirmed that "Gambling is a serious addiction that undermines the family, dashes dreams and frays the fabric of society," giant casino operator Harrah's received a highly leveraged $15.1bn offer from two private equity firms. Really, you couldn't make it up.

I would be inclined to have more sympathy with Frist's sentiments if it wasn't for the fact that there are entire states like Nevada whose very solvency depends almost entirely on gambling. It seems like you can 'undermine your family' and 'dash your dreams' if you happen to be born in Vegas, but live in New York and fancy a flutter on Kevin Lisbie to score first goal, and you're now deemed a common criminal.

As they say around here, "go figure."