Friday, February 7, 2014

Nassau OTB Whale bets $23,000,00


and helps kill, cripple and/or mutilate Nassau OTB, a public benefit corporation, and not a society for
WHALES WHALES WHALES

If the best of the  Chinese had been running NYC it would not have gone to heaven.
Americans can't seem to do simple things  well like run a gambling operation?



IN BRIEF; Nassau OTB Plans A 'Racing Palace'

By Stewart Ain
Published: May 25, 2003
In a move that could add $4 million to the Nassau County budget, the Nassau Off-Track Betting Corporation plans to open the Race Palace, a betting hall in Plainview dominated by a wall of television screens capable of simulcasting 17 different sporting events worldwide.
''We want to connote to everybody that this is an upscale place,'' said Lawrence J. Aaronson, the corporation's president. ''When some people think of OTB, they think of a New York City sidewalk location. This is a classy, Art Deco, extremely upscale building.''
The building now houses the Vanderbilt catering hall. Mr. Aaronson said he expected to complete the purchase of the building this week for $6.35 million. ''We're looking to finance this for $8.2 million, which includes about $2 million in renovations,'' he said.
Plans call for the first floor to be leased back to the Morey Organization, which will continue to operate the Palmers restaurant and bar that opened in March. The second floor will house the OTB operation, which will include 200 theater seats and 120 desks with personal television screens, and a smaller bar and restaurant.


Asian Business News

The Cheapest, Richest Casino in Macau

Some Find Profits in Asia's Low Rollers; A Bare-Bones Establishment Emerges as a Big Winner

By
Updated Feb. 5, 2014 9:10 p.m. ET
By embracing technology while courting low-budget gamblers, Jay Chun's Kam Pek casino has claimed some of the city's highest profit margins. Kate O'Keeffe/The Wall Street Journal
High-rollers who bet millions without batting an eye have turned Macau into the world's gambling capital.
Macau, the world's largest gambling hub, reported surprisingly slow revenue growth in January--the slowest since October 2012. Was it the result of the Lunar New Year falling during the month this year, or a further indication that China's economy is slowing? Heard on the Street columnists Alex Frangos, Abheek Bhattacharya and Aaron Back weigh in.
But a bare-bones casino where gamblers pay for their own drinks has emerged as an unlikely winner in the Chinese territory by trumpeting its HK$20 ($2.58) minimum bets.
Jay Chun says his Kam Pek casino, housed in a downtown office building across the street from the glamorous Wynn Macau, WYNMF +2.41% caters to the gamblers that other Macau casinos don't want. By embracing technology to tame the city's high costs, he says, Kam Pek achieves some of the highest profit margins in the city.
Macau's annual gambling revenue shot up from less than $3 billion in 2002 to $45 billion, or seven times that of the Las Vegas Strip, last year. But in the race to serve the city's high rollers with increasingly luxurious casino resorts, low-budget gamblers were left without many options.
Over the past year alone, average minimum bets at mass-market, or non-VIP, gambling tables in Macau have more than doubled to HK$1,000 ($129) from around HK$400 ($52), says analyst Aaron Fischer of brokerage CLSA. That compares with minimum bets of $7 to $50 at casinos in Las Vegas and most other casinos globally, the brokerage estimates.
Lower-budget gamblers in Macau are "a huge market to tap," says Lee Wee Keat, an analyst at Singapore's DBS Vickers Securities.
Macau's customer mix is "like a pyramid," says Mr. Chun, chairman of Paradise Entertainment Ltd. 1180.HK +7.69% , the publicly traded company that manages Kam Pek. "Everyone focuses on the top, but we focus on the bottom."
Casinos spend lavishly on their best clients, many of whom hail from mainland China. For example, they offered private jets for all-expenses-paid trips to Las Vegas to ring in the Lunar New Year, which began Friday.

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At Kam Pek, top customers were offered the chance to redeem their loyalty points for popular dried-seafood products to celebrate the holiday, but they still had to pay for their own drinks. Gamblers can also use points to enter the "Fun Machine Cash Cube," which gives them 30 seconds to grab crumbled bills blown around by a fan.
If customers want to spend the night at Kam Pek, they are offered one of about 30 basic rooms the casino doles out to its better players for a quick rest, but "they can't complain...it's for free," says Mr. Chun. "Most of the time they're waiting for the border to open," he adds, referring to Macau's border with mainland China, which is shut overnight and doesn't reopen until 7 a.m.
About half the casino's patrons are from mainland China, 30% are from Macau, and many of the rest come from Taiwan and Korea, Mr. Chun says.
Kam Pek has also solved some of Macau's most vexing problems:—the high cost and low availability of labor. The city's gamblers like table games, in particular baccarat, which require lots of dealers. That's a problem because dealers can only be drawn from Macau's 600,000 citizens, and just 1.8% of them are unemployed, which makes them expensive.
Macau's Kam Pek casino says its 900 electronic gambling machines cater to an abandoned class: low-budget players. Paradise Entertainment Ltd.
The solution: live-video gaming that allows eight, rather than 100, dealers to handle 900 gamblers. The dealers sit alone at tables, continuously drawing cards for a video that's broadcast on gamblers' personal electronic stations. The gamblers, who can see only the dealers' hands and the cards on their own screens, can bet on multiple tables from their seats. Each dealer "is basically like a robot," says Mr. Chun. "It's a pretty easy job."
On a recent Friday afternoon, the casino, which occupies 220,000 square feet across five floors, was crowded, smoky and raucous. Decor includes fish tanks, motorbikes and Portuguese-style tile floors, a nod to the city's former colonial rulers.
Mr. Chun operates Kam Pek under the casino license of SJM Holdings Ltd. 0880.HK +4.63% , Macau's largest casino operator. When he took over the property at the end of 2007, it was generating HK$9 million in monthly revenue from fewer than 1,000 visitors a day.
Now it brings in 13,000 gamblers a day who generate HK$100 million in revenue a month. The casino's labor costs are more than 30% below the rest of the market, he says.
Kam Pek's parent company, Paradise Entertainment, has also profited from another Macau government policy plaguing competitors: a cap on the number of gambling tables in the territory. As each electronic gambling machine counts as only a fraction of a traditional table under government rules, more casinos have been ordering Paradise's machines to fill their floors.
The company has international ambitions as well. In November, Paradise Entertainment launched machines at the Sands' Palazzo casino in Las Vegas. Palazzo has erected a sign celebrating its $5 minimum bets as the lowest in town. "We think their product is uniquely positioned to accommodate customers with potentially lower gaming budgets, a segment which has largely been abandoned in North America due to the cost of labor," says Ron Reese, a Las Vegas Sands Corp. spokesman.
Write to Kate O'Keeffe at Kathryn.OKeeffe@wsj.com
Corrections & Amplifications
The Kam Pek casino brings in 13,000 gamblers a day. An earlier version of this article incorrectly said the casino brings in 13,000 gamblers a month.
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