It’s official: Wynn Resorts will start tearing up its Las Vegas Strip golf course on Jan. 3, 2018. Not much is known about what will 
replace it, as the budget hasn’t been set, and plans for the Wynn Paradise Park hotel won’t be unveiled until next spring. Wynn told Wall Street analysts “it is now seeing little in the way of disruptions from the events of 10/1 … [3Q17] results were strong across the board, including the nightclub business, where Wynn benefited from several headline events.” (In a laudable move, the company donated $8 million to Hurricane Harvey and Typhoon Hato victims.)
Wynn’s Macao results “reflected a stronger VIP performance and margin ramp at Continue reading
“I don’t want to say that I know exactly what Asians think is a period of mourning that’s appropriate, but I’ve heard that it’s sometimes a period of three months, four months, in that range.” — Caesars Entertainment CEO Mark Frissora on 
Also, Penn is looking toward the Canada market for expansion. As Deutsche Bank analyst Carlo Santarelli headlined his investor note, “We’ve seen this movie before.” The main item of interest on the conference call was the Tropicana Las Vegas, which has seen a revenue increase of 14% in 3Q17. Cash flow was said to be “more than doubling” given the reopening of a critical pedestrian bridge and of Robert Irvine‘s restaurant. Cancellations jumped 35% in the Oct. 1-15 period but “business volumes are slowly recovering.” Worst of all, future capex investments have been pooch-kicked until a year from now or thereabouts. Poor Trop. It never gets the love it deserves.
Sands Cotai Central as The Londoner, spend $275 million on St. Regis Tower Suites and another $250 million to convert Four Seasons apartments into hotel suites (I guess the condo market wasn’t so hot over there either). Mass-market play, a Sands staple, was up 12.5% last quarter. On the Las Vegas front, management said it was “recovering well” from the Oct. 1 shootings. Despite higher occupancy, room revenues were down 3%, a phenomenon that Deutsche Bank analyst Carlo Santarelli found “a tad confusing.” Thanks to the Mayweather/McGregor fight and convention business, MGM Resorts International is thought to have eaten some of Sheldon Adelson‘s 3Q17 lunch.
pursuit of Bridgeport as a casino site. Perhaps naively, Clinton hopes that Mohegan Sun and Foxwoods Resort Casino will set aside their duopoly to pave the way for a $675 million MGM casino — one that would interdict gamblers’ traffic from the New York City area. Skeptics believe the casino palaver is a fake-out, designed to draw the Bureau of Indian Affairs into denying the tribes’ joint-venture satellite casino in East Windsor. But Clinton says MGM is on the up-and-up.
participation rate, a long time knock on the secular industry outlook.” Management “spoke optimistically” about the prosperity of acquisitions — in case you thought Caesars couldn’t get any bigger — seeing “a sudden influx of opportunities.” Bad news for players, though: Caesars is going to save its pennies by sweating comps and other promotions, validating its image as the company where the customer almost matters.
years to ensure Crown was a good corporate citizen. And it wasn’t just James Packer being attacked, all of a sudden Crown was being attacked and that was putting the people who were in jail at risk.” — James Packer, on the arrest of the Crown 18. In the same interview, he reveals he ought to have sold out of Macao in 2014, the same year he tried and failed to buy The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas for $1.5 billion, He blames the collapse of Alon on his company’s debt burden and admits to the “ham-fisted ways we went into North America.” It’s unexpectedly candid coming from someone of Packer’s eminence.
of Mike Pence‘s latter acts as governor of Indiana was to sign an executive order allowing casinos to move ashore. (Only Tropicana Evansville has taken him up on it.) The dangers of requiring gambling houses to sit on barges was aptly demonstrated by Katrina, where the storm-tossed vessels became agents of destruction once torn from their moorings. For safety reasons alone, you’d think riverboat states would have woken up and smelled the coffee by now, but you’d be wrong. However …
committee in the Diet. This is a big boost to Abe’s pro-casino push, Although the LDP did not campaign on that as a priority issue (responding to North Korea‘s missile tests was of greater concern), this result reinforces the disconnect between Mr. Abe’s own popularity and the strong public disaffection from the idea of casinos. The former has clearly trumped the latter. The enabling legislation for integrated gaming resorts comes into effect next month, even as the regulatory bill remains a work in progress.
create a more-educated player. They’re focusing on “losses disguised as wins” or LDWs. That’s when you wager $2 and “win” $1.50 back, never mind that you’re 50 cents in the hole. The educational device is a series of videos. The rate of LDWs boils down to 180 per hour (as opposed to 140 actual wins), a stat the Total Rewards boys probably don’t want you to know.
Parliamentary lone wolf and anti-gambling crusader Andrew Wilkie released a whistleblower video, which will prompt an investigation by Australian regulators. “On the recording, unidentified people whose faces were heavily pixelated accuse Crown’s casino in Melbourne of fixing poker machines by removing built-in controls designed to regulate gambling rates,” reports Reuters.
bump stocks that enabled Paddock to fire so indiscriminately). To that end, she’s obtained a court order that MGM preserve anything “of evidentiary value,” an order that will be revisited on Oct. 30. MGM, for its part, is taking Paddock’s suite out of rotation permanently. “This was a terrible tragedy perpetrated by an evil man. We have no intention of renting that room,” read a company statement. Good on MGM.
million in subcontracts — hardly the behavior of a company that’s stalling for time. Although it may not look like much at this time, resort President Edward Farrell says Genting “spent hundreds of millions of dollars so far” in site preparation alone. That includes putting up various types of windows to see how they’ll react to the harsh Las Vegas sun. (Genting, obviously, is not going to risk a repeat of the Vdara Death Ray.) One familiar sight is a stand of trees that date back to the Stardust and which Genting is preserving for transplantation to Resorts World.
feigning ignorance. (As long as was using his political office to help Sands, why didn’t Trump name-drop his pal Steve Wynn?) Considering that Sheldon Adelson had met with the secretary general of Abe’s Liberal Democratic Party, I’ll choose to think that Abe’s reaction to Trump was a faux-naif move designed to make him appear above the fray.
tempted to say they speak for themselves, the AGA rolled out some pretty powerful numbers. For instance, tribal casinos generate over $33 billion in wagers and $96.5 billion in economic impact. The leading states in terms of tribally derived revenue (taxes and other subsidies) were California ($3 billion), Oklahoma ($2 billion), dark-horse contender Washington State ($1.2 billion), Florida ($1 billion) and Connecticut ($828 million) — so you can see why the latter is so hellbent on protecting Foxwoods Resort Casino and Mohegan Sun from MGM Springfield. Last place went to Alaska, with a puny tax haul of $442,310. We’d suggest to the government up there that it ought to get down with this tribal-gaming thing.
gaming” in Indiana — although Pence never clearly defined exactly what he opposed — his uphill reelection campaign was sucking greedily from the teat of Centaur Gaming, owner of the Hoosier State’s two racinos. Aforesaid campaign also received $1 million from Sheldon Adelson, although we don’t know what the “pro quo” for all those quid was. Now that he has a million-dollar marker on Pence, Adelson could presumably call it in to get the vice president to lobby against Internet gambling (which President Trump has favored in the past). To take Adelson’s money is always a Faustian pact, although we’ve yet to see what his particular claims on Pence’s soul are.
globe, to refuse the obligations of international leadership and our duty to remain ‘the last best hope of earth’ for the sake of some half-baked, spurious nationalism cooked up by people who would rather find scapegoats than solve problems is as unpatriotic as an attachment to any other tired dogma of the past that Americans consigned to the ash heap of history.” — Sen. John McCain (R), 
also promotes the Gordon Biersch 
volumes have remained subdued … but favorable VIP hold has offset a decline in volumes,” he added. In the third quarter VIP-derived gaming revenue grew 35% versus only 7% in mass-market play and a 13% bump in slot winnings. VIP play represents 58% of total gross gaming revenues, as opposed to only 37.5% from that Great White Hope, the mass market. “We note the decelerating mass GGR growth/performance could be attributed to a number of factors, including capital controls on ATMs, pawn shops, or crackdown of underground banks, all of which have made it more difficult for mass players to move cash,” Greff theorized.