By: Nicholas Sohr

Maryland can’t get its slot machines in fast enough. Pennsylvania, it seems, has the opposite problem.

The owners of Mount Airy Casino Resort have won approval from state regulators to actually reduce the number of slot machines by 150, to 2,275.

It seems the resort in the Poconos is suffering from a microcosm of the problem Maryland Lottery Director Stephen Martino (who is, as I type this, going over the results of the test run at what will be Maryland’s second casino) warned us about in September. He stopped by The Daily Record just days before Hollywood Casino Perryville opened in Cecil County.

“At some point in time, everybody is going to start cannibalizing from everybody else,” Martino said. “Certainly that’s what you’re seeing in Atlantic City. Atlantic City is distressed. Their numbers are down significantly.”

Martino called it “mutually assured gambling proliferation” — states have to legalize slots, and later table games to keep up with their neighbors. Atlantic City, as he said, has already been slammed by the rapid expansion of casino gaming in Pennsylvania.

Check out this map of casinos in Pennsylvania. They may look like cute little Monopoly pieces here, but to New Jersey casinos, I’m sure they look more like a blinking, flashing, chiming wall of slot machines keeping Keystone State gamblers from venturing farther east.

And now it appears Pennsylvania casinos are sweating the in-state competition, too. Mount Airy is about an hour away from the Mohegan Sun (near my old stomping grounds in Wilkes-Barre, Pa.) and a little farther from the Sands in Bethlehem.

Maryland’s largest three casinos — Hollywood Casino Perryville, Maryland Live! Casino (next to Arundel Mills) and a yet-to-be licensed slots parlor in downtown Baltimore — will be even closer together.

But it’ll be years before the competition between them becomes evident. The Maryland casinos will pull from a larger base of potential customers, including would-be gamblers in the wealthy suburbs of Washington, D.C., and Baltimore. Of course, there’s competition from Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Delaware, too, but likely less from Atlantic City than there is in Pennsylvania.

Still, the introduction of a casino close to Mount Airy came just before a dramatic decrease in its slots revenue. Before the Sands opened, Mount Airy’s machines were usually good for more than $200 or $210 in revenue per day. But after Sands opened in the spring of 2009, the revenue often falls below $180 per machine, per day.

For example, the first week in Aug. 2008, Mount Airy had nearly a year of operation under its belt and posted a $211 revenue figure.  Last year, that slipped to $175 and bounced up this year to $193.