Wynn scolds Japan; Dan Gilbert gets something right

Despite height restrictions and an indifferent (at best) local government, Steve Wynn seems hellbent on putting a casino in Tokyo. Like everybody else, he’s also looking at Yokohama and Osaka — likelier finalists in the Japan casino derby. In an interview with Nikkei Asian Review, Wynn was a master of opacity. “We build destination resorts. We employ thousands of [people]. To do what we do, we have to make very big investments. All of these factors together mean that the only place we can go with our program is to great cities with a great culture,” he waxed. “So the size and the richness of the Japanese market [make it] the perfect [place] in which we can plant our flower. Our flower is not suited to every place. We have a complete dedication to quality.” Tokyo, Osaka and Yokohama, he implied, were the only cities that met that floral standard.

“For me, the hotel, the resort, is the show. The casino room is a passive, not dynamic part, because every casino table in the world is exactly the same. They have no power. Every slot machine looks the same. A baccarat table is a table with green fabric. It’s nothing,” Wynn continued, adding, “The non-casino is the cause of the casino.” (Not in the Nipponese business model it’s not!) Wynn also took the opportunity to lecture the Japanese government at great length about how it had to go easy on regulations and admission rules or else he might take his ball and go home. Whether the Diet appreciates being scolded by a gaijin casino operator remains to be seen.

Wynn concluded, “But if you build beautiful resort, they’ll come to Japan for the resort. And then, if they want to gamble, they’ll gamble in Japan.” With casino operators wagering $10 billion or more on proposed Nipponese megaresorts, Wynn must be smoking some of Nevada‘s newly legalized marijuana if he thinks casinos are going to be lagniappe rather than the main propulsion system. After all, doesn’t Wall Street keep calling Japan a $25 billion/year gambling market?

* Perplexing underachiever Jack Cleveland posted modest gains in August and it looks as though Dan Gilbert‘s people are getting the hang of this casino thing. They cut back on slot inventory, added more table games and revised the layout of the casino floor, replacing endless ranks of slot machines with smaller clusters of “interactive” (I have no idea what the reporter means by that) slots, presumably wide-area progressives like Wheel of Fortune. They’ve also stopped bunching the tables and slots so closely together, which no doubt highlighted the table-game pit.

* Internet gambling is still on the table in Pennsylvania. However, its fate depends on whether the state Senate backs off its insistence on a killing 54% tax rate or accepts the 16% preferred by the House of Representatives.

* The closure of Kevin Costner‘s Midnight Star casino at the ripe old age of 26 elicited a yawn from the Rapid City Journal’s editorial board. “The town simply screams of western history,” it broad, dismissing any thoughts of any sort of crisis in the Deadwood casino industry as no more than “just a bump in the road.”