“From the start, we pledged to create a world class facility that will be a draw for people throughout the entire region,” said Mashantucket Tribal Chairman Rodney Butler of the tribe’s satellite casino in East Windsor. Nice try, Mr. Chairman, but color us underwhelmed. The renderings 
unveiled this week are an improvement on the East Windsor 1.0 one, with which readers of this space are nauseatingly familiar. Foxwoods Resort Casino and Mohegan Sun had plenty of time to rethink the project while being strung along by the Interior Department. And while the delay has yielded a sleeker, more futuristic look, we question whether the project has enough ‘curb appeal’ to pose a serious threat to $940 million MGM Springfield, which is only three months from opening. The Mohegan/Foxwoods project, by contrast, is just a vacant lot. Even if construction began today, it wouldn’t be a finished casino until December 2019.
For the record, the casino is designed to hold 2,000 slots and 60 table games, so it will not lack for gambling inventory. Aside from two or three restaurants and some retail, there will not be much variety to East Windsor. It will be a gambling play, pure and simple. The entire project will cover 188,000 square feet. One potential hiccup is the need to redo the nearby intersections to handle increased traffic. It’s not clear who’s picking up the bill for the infrastructure improvement. Hopefully it’s on the tribal tab and not John Q. Taxpayer.
* As business improves along Mississippi‘s Gulf Coast, the city of Long Beach could be about to get its first casino. A defunct K-Mart and Sav-A-Center will either be bulldozed or repurposed to make way for 1,200 slots, 20 tables and 300 hotel rooms. It’s the culmination of two years of property acquisitions and permit pursuit. We wish the developers good luck as they prepare to take their pitch before regulators.
* Macao‘s government didn’t issue Lawrence Ho any table games for $1.1 billion Morpheus, forcing the operator to cannibalize 40 tables from existing Melco Resorts & Entertainment properties. “When 
reviewing the application for gaming tables, the Macao SAR government has strictly adhered to the principle of limiting the number of gaming tables to not exceed a 3% annual compound growth rate for 10 years starting from 2013,” a regulator told the press. In essence, MGM Cotai‘s 100 tables and Parisian‘s 100 gobbled up the year’s allocation. Ho is confident that he will be allotted new tables for Morpheus next year.
Nomura analysts wrote, “We do not view the issue as a negative. Macau is capacity constrained, not in its number of gaming tables but in its number of hotel rooms (or lack thereof) which is Morpheus’ main appeal. In our view, the most important driver for Melco isn’t its table count. It is the quality of Melco’s customer base, which we expect will improve with Morpheus.”
In other Melco news, the company is co-sponsoring TV spots that promote responsible gambling. The one above is stark, artistic and memorable, and something for which Ho should be applauded. “The healthy expansion of the industry is of utmost importance to the sustained development of Macao and Melco is fully supportive of government policies encouraging responsible gaming,” the CEO said. The spots began running on Teledifusão de Macau on Tuesday and will continue for an unspecified length of time.
