Recession Deals Winning Hand to Gambling Clubs : Economy: Local casinos are reporting higher revenues. Players seek escape or a windfall and are bypassing Vegas.

A man in a red waist-length jacket and his partner were betting as much as $6,000 in an Asian card game on a Friday afternoon in the Gold Room of the Bicycle Club in Bell Gardens.

In the Golden Terrace section of the nearby Commerce Casino, stone-faced poker players placed bets of $200 and $400 all afternoon and into the evening, vying for four-digit pots.

The recession may be responsible for growing unemployment, pinching municipal budgets, closing auto dealerships and crippling some manufacturing, but, so far, it has dealt a pretty good hand to at least four of the six gambling casinos in Los Angeles County.

The Commerce Casino in the City of Commerce is expected to have finished 1991 with its highest revenues ever--more than $75 million. At the Bicycle Club, gaming revenues in 1991 nearly equaled the record $84.1 million the casino brought in the year before. The combined revenues from the Normandie Casino and Eldorado Club, both in Gardena, are the highest ever, according to city records.

Despite years of suffering from legal and financial problems, business is picking up at the Regency Club in Bell. The Huntington Park Casino has been attracting less business recently, but a spokesman there said a Los Angeles County sheriff’s investigation into alleged profit skimming is more to blame than the recession.

“We’re about the last industry to get affected by the recession, and the effect is minimal,” said Ron M. Sarakbi, general manager of the Commerce Casino.

Sarakbi and several other club managers cited various reasons for their relatively good fortune.

Regular customers may be betting less and generally playing more conservatively. But they are still spending about as many, if not more, hours at the tables--good news for the casinos, which make their money charging fees by the hour and for every hand played.

The casinos also are picking up players who, in better times, would go to Las Vegas for a more costly gambling junket. Senior citizens with steady pensions are the casinos’ wild card against the recession; retirees make up the bulk of players during the day. And the opportunity to win quick bucks becomes increasingly attractive to many players seeking to ease their recession worries with a few good hands.

Rex Jones, who owns a small bookstore in Norwalk, sat at a poker table at the Commerce Casino on a recent afternoon trying to win $12,000 to hold off creditors. Jones, 51, was pushing hard, betting $15, $30, raising, bluffing. Every so often, he would hiss and throw his cards onto the table. He was trying to win enough money to graduate to the higher stakes games on the Golden Terrace.

“I have to win at the poker game or else I don’t survive,” Jones said. “This is the only place I can get that kind of money.”

Business has been slow for Orange County real estate salesman Hai Huynh, 36, which leaves him more time for gambling. Huynh, clad in a neat suit almost the color of money, laid down bets of as much as $1,000 in the Gold Room at the Bicycle Club.

“The harder it is to make money (on the job), the more people come here to gamble,” Huynh said.

Recessionary times also spur interest in gambling for more subconscious reasons, according to Richard Rosenthal, a Beverly Hills psychiatrist who specializes in gambling addictions. The card table provides comfort for some when the world seems to be crumbling.

“Gambling gives an illusion of power and control,” Rosenthal said. “The money is important . . . but the sense of control is more related to being right.”

The card games played at the county’s casinos include Texas hold’em, seven-card stud, lo-ball, pan, pai gow poker, super pan 9. Pai gow, a game using domino-like tiles, is another option.

All of the factors appear to be adding up to the best year ever for the Commerce Casino, which has 130 tables. Gambling revenues for the first 11 months of 1991 were $71.8 million, an increase of more than 12% from what the casino generated during the same period the previous year.

“Everybody keeps wondering when it’s going to affect us,” said Jim Dragomir, the casino’s director of advertising.

Revenues have dropped by a little more than 2% at the 168-table Bicycle Club, the largest casino in the county. As the rest of the nation sank in the recession, the club brought in $82.2 million last year, $1.9 million short of its record revenues in 1990, said George Hardie, managing partner.

Neither the Normandie Casino nor the smaller Eldorado Club, both in Gardena, would release revenue figures. But the growth in their business is reflected in the amounts they paid in city taxes, which jumped from $3.9 million the year before the recession to $4.9 million last year, said Tony Vieira, Gardena’s revenue supervisor.

Knowledgeable sources say the Normandie Casino is responsible for the growth in gaming revenues in Gardena. They say business at the smaller Eldorado Club appears to be down.

The Regency Club in Bell, formerly the California Bell Club, had declared bankruptcy and closed its doors in December, 1989. It reopened in July, 1990--when the recession began to sweep the nation--and has been picking up steam ever since.

Although revenue figures could not be obtained from the Regency Club, city officials reported the taxes the club paid to Bell more than doubled from nearly $250,000 in 1990 to more than $580,000 in 1991.

An exception to the gambling boom appears to be the Huntington Park Casino, where city records show that revenues declined. The casino paid the city $211,000 for the first nine months of 1991, compared to $265,000 for the same period in 1990.

But Jack Schwieterman, general manager of the casino, blamed the decline in business on negative publicity generated by a sheriff’s investigation into allegations of profit skimming and other improprieties. No charges have been filed, and casino officials deny any wrongdoing.

Some casinos have begun offering live entertainment and more tournaments--even installing wood carvings from China to impress the high rollers--in a bid to make sure profits stay high.

The Bicycle Club introduced a new tournament last year featuring world champion poker players, as well as its first championship-level pool tournament. The casino will begin to schedule bands that play 1950s music on a regular basis this month.

Gardena’s Normandie Casino started offering a Las Vegas-style musical and comedy revue in a new showroom last month to lure new players to the casino’s card room.

“Someone who comes here to see a show is not pressured in any way to play a game or learn a game,” said Blaine Nicholson, the casino’s marketing and entertainment consultant. “But we’re able to introduce California gaming to the general public.”

Meanwhile, at a time when construction nationwide is sluggish, many of the county’s casinos are taking their own gamble and expanding.

The Normandie Casino recently grew from 57 tables to 70 and added the showroom. Construction is under way to add about 40 tables to the Commerce Casino. And the Bicycle Club plans to add 40 tables and a restaurant this year.

Whether the gamble pays off remains to be seen, and casino managers are keeping their fingers crossed. The recession may win out.

“Before we expanded, all our tables were filled on a busy night,” said Nicholson of the Normandie Casino. “Since we expanded we have not filled every table. If the economy were better, I think we would have filled them.”