It’s not just for China anymore. Scientific Games is reporting success with its Chinese-themed slots, including in North America. Yes, games 
with titles like Jin Ji Bao Xi, which doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue but is gaining traction with slot players worldwide. “If you go back to ‘Duo Fu Duo Cai’ it was designed for Macao, and now it’s a product all around the world and successful all around the world,” said Managing Director for Asia Ken Jolly. You’d be jolly too if your slots were performing better than expected. The secret? Good game math. “One of our mathematicians is extraordinarily good – particularly when it comes to concepts and volatility,” Jolly told GGR Asia. Congratulations on SGMS to having transcended language barriers and borders.
Scientific Gaming is also moving—along with Aruze—into a kind of preemptive strike on the Japan market. Both companies are displaying pachinko-like slot games. Since Japanese consumers are strongly anti-casino but are hooked on pachinko, could developments like these split the difference enough to make Nipponese customers flock to casinos once they’re built? It’s far too soon to say. But the game’s reliance on factors other than a random-number generator could help it connect with stateside punters. “I tell people Sir Isaac Newton invented this game,” explained SGMS games designer Jeff Nauman. “It is pure gravity. There is so much natural anticipation with the ball bouncing around, and then it doesn’t bounce the same way twice—which is the beauty of it.” Or, as Nauman says, “The beauty of what we have here is you can’t get a more trustworthy result. You release it, you see where the values are, and it either lands there or not.”
* Having been crimped by new betting limits in the United Kingdom, bookmaker William Hill is looking to the United States as fertile 
territory. 700 U.K. betting shops were closed, causing a shift of focus to Internet gambling and U.S. expansion. Across a 17-week period, same store revenue fell 16% but the blow was softened by a 60% increase in Yankee winnings. William Hill operates a mind-boggling 113 sports books in Nevada alone. The buyout by Hill of CG Technology ends an error- and fine-prone era in Silver State gaming. We’re sure the transition to new ownership will be a major step upward.
* Lots of news from MGM Resorts International, all of it encouraging. Note the subtle dig at the competition when Marc Jacobson mentions that the company’s Las Vegas Aces are the city’s “first professional basketball team.” Your move, Caesars Entertainment. Speaking of MGM, did it take Blackstone Group to the cleaners on the Bellagio sale? One casino pundit thinks so.
* How big of a bomb is $48 million Charlie’s Angels? By mistake I wandered into the screening room where it was playing last Saturday—and was the only person there. My wife and I had gone to see Last Christmas, which has a heart as big as all London. (Besides, Michelle Yeoh rules.) Somebody’s fourth quarter is going to be spoilt by the Charlie’s Angels flop. The worst part of the whole experience was that I had to watch the traumatic new trailer for Cats … twice. There is not enough brain bleach in all of Christendom to efface that horror.
Jottings: When you’ve had only a few months of sports betting is “record revenue” either unexpected or meaningful. We think not … Economic impact at a full-scale Danville, Virginia, casino would dwarf the alternatives, an OTB facility or a “historical racing” box of slots. No surprise there. The Pamunkey tribe hopes to be in the running if Danville is approved for gambling. The casino would be expected to draw heavily from the Greensboro and Raleigh-Durham metro areas … Visitation to Macao is up but consumer spending is down, especially in non-
gambling categories, a worrisome metric. At least day-tripping is up 30.5%. Global warming also poses an existential threat to Macao but leadership, like politicians worldwide, is just twiddling its thumbs … Despite much regulatory agita, casino revenue up in the Philippines vaulted 21% in the third quarter. But at $1.1 billion in 3Q19 there’s not enough money there to lure American companies … Major casino companies still have a lot to learn about mobile applications, says one expert. Smaller companies and tribal casinos are setting the pace with which Big Gaming must keep … Their industry having gone to the dogs, Florida greyhound-racing owners are demanding $250 million in compensation for a business that’s extinct by the end of next year … Nevada regulators approved a relatively toothless sexual-harassment policy that requires casinos to have clear procedures in place to help harassed employees but exempts them from having to report lawsuits and settlements. Somewhere Steve Wynn is grinning.
