Loto-québec goes all-in on university students
SPONSORSHIP OF CAMPUS POKER TOURNEYS shows corporation is going after youngsters — with tacit approval from the PQ
The Quebec government’s ministry of higher education wants to let university students pay less tuition. But a separate arm of government is using another means to dip into students’ wallets.
It’s no doubt sheer coincidence, but the same month that the ministry is holding a summit devoted to keeping tuition ultra low, LotoQuébec is making an unprecedented effort to promote gambling among university students. It’s cosponsoring the University Poker Championship.
Promotional posters for the contest have popped up on campuses across Quebec. Players at each university will hold their own tournament, with the top four finishers going to the finals at Loto’s Casino de Montréal. The PR suggests that representing one’s school will carry a certain prestige. Some $20,000 in prize money is at stake. Two contestants will qualify for participation in next summer’s World Series of Poker — all expenses paid. Loto will even pay for a guest.
The tournament’s posters and website feature the image of an unshaven young man wearing a hoodie and holding aces. The figure bears an uncanny resemblance to Jonathan Duhamel, who at age 23 won $8.9 million in the 2010 World Series of Poker in Las Vegas.
The message is clear: Poker is cool and potentially lucrative.
To be sure, this poker offensive is by no means an attempt to compensate for the decline in government revenue caused by the rollback in student tuition. Loto-Québec says it won’t get a penny from the tournament: Participation is free. Even if many thousands of additional people eventually play Loto’s online poker, the money that this might yield for the provincial treasury would not nearly make up for the hundreds of millions of dollars that the tuition rollback is depriving government coffers.
This offensive should instead be seen as part of a larger, more ambitious marketing strategy that pre- dates last year’s anti-tuition protests. The strategy targets not only students but an entire generation of young people. It seeks to introduce them not only to poker but also to all of Loto-Québec’s other alluring, and sometimes addictive, “games.”
To understand this seduction scheme, come with me back to 2010 — a difficult time for Loto. The provincial agency had gone through six consecutive years in which the earnings it passed on to the government had risen below the inflation rate. Average spending on Loto’s offerings, the agency’s Plan stratégique 2010-13 sadly noted, had declined over that period from $696 per adult Quebecer to $659.
Loto officials were frustrated: The public’s mixed feelings on gambling had prevented the casino from modernizing and had also restrained the growth of video-lottery terminals. Meanwhile, betting at illegal online sites was flourishing. So were the Kahnawake gambling joints.
Loto feared a still bleaker future lay ahead: The agency said lotteries’ appeal to Quebecers younger than 35 was “clearly inferior” than it had been for earlier cohorts of that age.
So Loto decided that the only solution would be to go all out to entice — excuse me, appeal to — these reluctant 18-to-35-year-olds.
It’s been an uphill slog. Both 2011 and 2012 have yielded even smaller profits than before. The NHL lock- out hasn’t helped: Loto says the lost hockey games have deprived it of $5-million in income from Mise-o-jeu bets.
All this helps explain this month’s poker invasion of campuses. It also explains another February innovation: Loto is taking bets on winners at the Oscars — an event especially popular with young people. It’s a fun — and ostensibly harmless — way to introduce the uninitiated into trying their luck and to push gambling further into the mainstream.
Never mind that gambling can too often lead to indebtedness and despair.
Never mind that the Marois government sympathizes with the argument that, by and large, the cost of a university education is crushing students with debt and that they need to save money.
And never mind that evoking a professional card player like Jonathan Duhamel as an aspirational model can mislead young men into thinking studies might not be so important — that they, too, might strike it rich without working.
Some universities want to have nothing to do with this tournament. To their credit, they’re taking down the posters on their property.
Universities exist to lift new generations upward for the betterment of society. Bad enough that the Marois government is handicapping them by stripping them of needed funding. Now a government agency is showing further indifference to their mission.