Category: Casino News

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Cuomo all-in on New York sports betting; Playoff fever begins

There’s nothing like a budgetary dose of Covid-19 to bring some people to reality. Case in point, New York State Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D). He has been against mobile sports betting for years—much to the state’s detriment—but will embrace it in next week’s State of the State address. This is big, especially for the gaming industry, but we’ll get to that momentarily. As the governor put it, “New York has the potential to be the largest sports wagering market in the United States, and by legalizing online sports betting we aim to keep millions of dollars in tax revenue here at home, which will only strengthen our ability to rebuild from the COVID-19 crisis.” (We think California will be a bigger market still but the voters have yet to speak on the issue.)

How will Cuomo finesse his previous insistence that mobile sports betting was unconstitutional? He’s dropped a hint that it’s merely up to the Lege, while also flirting with the idea of marijuana legalization. The tax haul from sports betting might be no more than $6 million a month but that’d be $72 million more than Cuomo has now. The Empire State would also be able to claw back 20% of New Jersey‘s sports-betting revenue, provided that the rules are sufficiently attractive to players. (None of this in-person registration crap, guv.) While Cuomo has dropped his demand for a constitutional amendment, he does expect online providers to team with brick-and-mortar casinos, throwing a lifeline to struggling upstate operators.

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Adelson, Packer canoodle & other news

While America burns, Sheldon Adelson is fiddling in the French Caribbean, aboard his mega-luxury yacht. The vessel was moored next to that of James Packer, who welcomed Adelson as guest for his lavish New Year’s Eve celebration. This meeting of the moguls only served to further fuel speculation that Sheldon is cutting a deal with Crown Resorts to buy Venelazzo. If so, it would be the first astute business move Packer has made in the United States, where his previous atttempts to crack the market—especially in Las Vegas—were a shambles, placing bets on every three-legged horse in sight. Of course, Packer would have to get Nevada regulators to overlook that little matter of being unable to get a Sydney casino license …

Remember how casinos in Japan were supposed to be open in time for the 2020 Olympic Games? And how the games were postponed until this year? And how there is still no opening date for the casinos, if ever? Well, the Olympiad is already $7.2 billion over budget and hasn’t been held yet. This exceeds the record, $6 billion overage of the 2012 London games, proving that Olympic incompetence is nothing new. (By percentage, the worst excess was 1992 Barcelona‘s 266% overrun.) Not only is the Japanese government quibbling with the International Olympic Committee over who should pick up the $2 billion of the tab related to Coronavirus postponement, the Nipponese public is getting restive: 34% of survey respondents favor outright cancellation, while another 36.5% want additional delay. 75% think Coronavirus is not going to be tamed anytime in the immediate future. The only recent Olympiad to come in remotely close to budget was Athens in 2004, which goes to show you can’t beat the ancestral home of the games.

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Quote of the Day

“This is not déja vu. This is something far worse than occurred in Watergate. We have a criminal president of the United States in Donald Trump and a subversive president of the United States at the same time in this one person, subverting the very basis of our democracy and willing to act criminally in that subversion … In any other presidency, this tape would be evidence enough to result in the impeachment of the president of the United States.”—former Washington Post reporter Carl Bernstein, who knows from Watergate.

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This just in …

MGM Resorts International is all over the news today. It just made a play for BetMGM partner Entain. It’s offering a stock swap of six-tenths of a share of MGM for every share of Entain, a transaction that Credit Suisse analyst Ben Chaiken values at $11 billion. “Entain has informed MGM that it thinks the offer significantly undervalues the company and future growth,” Chaiken continues. He called the increased commitment by MGM to online sports betting and to i-gaming (a party to which MGM was late) a “clear positive” but adds that the proposed deal is “not particularly needle moving to MGM as part of the overall conglomerate. It sounds like Entain has asked MGM to come back to them with more robust rationale for the business combination, and presumably a higher offer.”

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