How UNLV’s big conference on gaming comes together

Brett Abarbanel never realized just how important gambling would become in her life.

She always knew she was going to someday become a professor of gambling — she just didn’t know how that was going to happen.

Growing up in the shadow of the beautiful Del Mar Thoroughbred Club near San Diego, Abarbanel, now the executive director of UNLV’s International Gaming Institute, learned about horse racing and gambling at an early age while working at the track, made some spending money playing poker while attending college and even married a professional gambler.

This month, Abarbanel will lead further studies of the gaming industry when the institute she leads hosts the three-day 19th International Gambling and Risk-Taking Conference May 26-28 at Bellagio.

Launched by University of Nevada, Reno, economist and business professor William Eadington in 1974, the conference brings academics, researchers, industry leaders, professional gamblers, and regulatory and government officials together to exchange theories and ideas about the casino industry.

When Eadington died in 2013, one of his UNLV counterparts, Bo Bernhard, then the Gaming Institute’s director, took over its operation.

Conducted every three years, the last time the conference was held in 2023, more than 500 attendees from 25 countries participated, discussing business, economics, public policy, mathematics, social sciences, and harm prevention.

This year, in addition to the usual presentation of research papers, panel discussions and keynote addresses on varying topics are scheduled.

MIT Professor Anette “Peko” Hosoi, widely recognized for examining the role of skill and luck in sports and other activities, will address her mathematical framework to professional sports, fantasy sports, cyclocross racing, coin flipping and mutual funds, illustrating where each falls on the skill-luck spectrum in an opening keynote address.

Conference topics

Among the other topics scheduled for discussion at the event include:

— Real-time artificial intelligence for predictive responsible gambling using live wagering transaction data.

— Why the courts and Congress should — but won’t — outlaw prediction markets.

— Barriers between cannabis and gaming in Nevada and the potential for integration.

— Risk governance in eSports gambling: Addressing integrity and regulation in a rapidly evolving ecosystem.

— An in-depth analysis of slot machine vlogs on YouTube.

— The theory and practice of successful sports betting.

— Math, data and cognitive bias: Educating teens to make informed decisions about gambling.

The logistics of the Gambling and Risk-Taking Conference is a massive undertaking, but Abarbanel approaches it with her usual big smile and sense of humor. Her colleagues pitch in and enjoy working with her to put the program together.

“Just watching how she interacts with everyone who’s involved and treats them all with equal respect, equal friendship is incredible,” said Alan Feldman, director of strategic initiatives at UNLV’s Gaming Institute.

“Her knowledge of all aspects of games and gambling is honestly remarkable,” Feldman said. “She can address what’s going on in eSports, what’s going on in non-monetary games and gaming, obviously gambling in all of its forms, sports, online, land-based, tables, slots. She just has an amazing mind and an ability to keep that all accessible.”

It started at Del Mar

Abarbanel’s broad knowledge of all things gaming started at the Del Mar track, built by American singer and actor Bing Crosby, where she shadowed a variety of track workers to learn everything there was to know about horse racing and gambling.

“You know, it’s ‘where the surf meets the turf down at Old Del Mar,’ right?” Abarbanel said, recalling Crosby’s song about the track. “’Take a plane, take a train, take a car.’ Those are the words right out of his song. It’s a gorgeous, gorgeous racetrack.”

She was about 16 the first time she went to the track and in ensuing summers she worked a variety of odd jobs there, including riding in the ambulance that trailed the horses to be ready for potential injuries to horses or their riders and handing out the bouquets to the winning horses and their owners at the end of a race.

Her favorite job, she said, was in the press box, “hanging out with all the math nerds.

“That’s where I discovered I was one of them,” she said.

She majored in statistics at Brown University in Rhode Island and took a job grading papers for $8 an hour.

That was around the time that the poker craze took off nationwide.

“So I had a friend at Brown who found out that I was majoring in statistics, and he said, ‘Oh, I would love to have a young woman majoring in statistics in my poker game. Can I bankroll you?’ And after about, I would say, three to six months, I was bankrolling myself.”

A move to Las Vegas

She met her future spouse, a professional gambler, while playing poker and he was interested in moving to Las Vegas. She figured with a degree in statistics she’d be able to find work somewhere in the city. She ended up taking a job in data analysis at the UNLV International Gaming Institute that enabled her to work while pursuing a master’s degree.

“After I finished my master’s degree, I shopped around for jobs a little bit,” she said. “A lot of the slot machine suppliers hire mathematicians, so I interviewed at a couple of positions like that. But in the end, I really had fallen in love with the academic world. My father was an academic, serving as a physics professor at University of California, San Diego, and a few other places before that for around 60 years. So I knew the academic world and I thought it was a pretty interesting world for me. I got my Ph.D. here at UNLV in our amazing College of Hospitality and continued on at UNLV.”

As a student, she received the Best Thesis and Best Dissertation awards for her work on sports book patronage and online gambling user experiences, respectively.

She wrote a paper about women’s participation in poker but became involved in all aspects of the gaming industry, including an emphasis on problem gambling and addiction.

“I worked on the Nevada Problem Gambling Project, which has been here at IGI for about 20 years now,” she said. “I’ve worked on different operations analysis, innovation and technology projects. And for about the last 15 or 16 years, one of my core areas is looking at the overlap between video games, eSports, and gambling.”

Her work in problem gambling earned her a research affiliate appointment at the University of Sydney School of Psychology’s Gambling Treatment and Research Clinic.

Top job in 2023

Abarbanel was named executive director of the UNLV International Gaming Institute in January 2023.

Now, a big part of her mission is to stay on top of issues associated with gaming and her coordination of this month’s conference keeps Las Vegas and UNLV as the gold standard for research on the industry.

“The 19th International Conference on Gambling and Risk-Taking is chock -full of gambling research, gambling discussion, anything around gambling and risk-taking.” she said. “You’ll see academic research, you’ll see industry perspectives, you’ll see gambler perspectives. Everything that’s relevant here, these are the things that we’ll be talking about over three days. No matter what your interest is, there’ll be something for you May 26-28 at Bellagio.”

Background on Brett

Here are five things you probably didn't know about Brett Abarbanel:

-Her go-to film franchise: Bond. James Bond. "The best Bond film is 'Goldfinger' and the best Bond is Sean Connery. 'Goldfinger' was a classic. It's perfect. No complaints. Maybe not so much the representation of women, but you know, that's 1964. It's a movie of its time, right? And I think we should think about stuff in that capacity."

-Her biggest poker win was her spouse, Jared. "I picked him up at a game after bluffing him out of a small pot. I also won that pot, so a more accurate answer is: my spouse plus a bonus $100."

-She's a big fan of Philip Pullman and Kurt Vonnegut. "I really enjoy the 'His Dark Materials' series by Philip Pullman. I've read that a couple times. It's been fun to see those get made into movies and HBO shows and that sort of thing. And if anyone ever successfully pulls off 'Slaughterhouse Five' in film media, I'm going to be really, really impressed."

-Her favorite travel destination is Finland. "My favorite place to go is Finland, because I am a loud American lady and Finland is a lovely, peaceful, quiet place. So whenever I'm there, I just feel it's a sense of Zen. And I really like the people. I've had the opportunity to go there a few times, and not just in general, enjoy myself, but also enjoy myself working."

-On a lazy Saturday afternoon, you'll find her walking her German shepherd on the trails of Henderson. "She really loves to see other dogs and humans and going out on hikes is a nice way to get that experience. Henderson has an incredible Parks and Recreation Department and an incredible series of trails. We never have a shortage of choices about where to take her."