Practically none. You can gamble in as many of Macao’s nearly three-dozen casinos as you wish, once you’ve converted your dollars to patacas, the official currency of Macao. There is no limit to the number of dollars you can bring into Macao, although Chinese citizens are restricted to the equivalent of $3,150 per trip, of which more below. You might have difficulty – unlike a U.S. casino – in gaining access to a VIP-player room, sites of hardcore, high-stakes gambling. Most of these are controlled by junket operators (see QoD 1/25/2016) who sublease them from the casinos in return for paying the house a commission known as "guaranteed rolling chip turnover." ("Rolling chips" are credit extended to players.)
Also, you probably wouldn’t travel to Macao directly. Most tourists fly into Hong Kong and then take a ferry or jetfoil to Macao. Eventually, a 31-mile system of bridges and tunnels will connect the two Special Administrative Regions, as they are known under China’s "one government, two systems" form of government, which keeps the free-market systems of Hong Kong and Macao largely in place.
Steve Friess, a journalist who formerly covered Macao while living in Beijing, says, "The big issues going on right now have to do with Chinese mainland players and how much they can or are willing to move out of the country to play with.
"This goes all the way back to the original problem Steve Wynn had with Macao but Sheldon Adelson shrugged off — the house cannot provide credit and the state offers no means of legal collection of gambling debts. So there’s always been a weird dance that goes on … one method to access cash outside the country for Chinese nationals was to ‘buy’ very expensive jewelry at counters near or even in the casino-resorts with debit cards. Then, for a premium, the ‘jeweler’ would let the person ‘return’ the item for cash."
Use of UnionPay ATMs in pawn shops to get around currency restrictions has recently spurred a government crackdown, part of a larger campaign to combat graft in China. (The Chinese are only too happy, however, to bring in business from Taiwan, India, Australia, and other international destinations.)
"There aren’t any limitations on movements that I know of beyond, I suppose, if law enforcement suspected something," Friess resumes. "It’s not like in mainland China where it kind of depends on what sort of visa you’re on. That is, traveling to certain places requires notifying provincial authorities, etc. But Macao doesn’t have anything even similar. It’s not to say that it wouldn’t happen if there were pro-democracy demonstrations that rattled Beijing, as has happened in Hong Kong. But Macau as a whole has been pretty non-political in that way because the entire casino-resort economy is based on Beijing’s willingness to allow it to exist."
