Rather than continue waiting for Arizona casino czar Daniel Bergin to reverse himself and give them permission to open a Class III casino, the Tohono O’odham Nation has done an end run. It 
will open with 1,089 Class II electronic bingo machines. Since the state can’t regulate tribal Class II gaming, there’s not much Bergin and Gov. Doug Ducey (below) can do about it except sputter and threaten to cancel the Tohono O’odham’s entire gaming compact with the state. (If he does, S&G will change his name to Indian Giver Ducey.) The tribe is suing Bergin and Ducey to compel them to certify the casino. As tribal attorney Danielle Spinelli said, “Enough is enough. The nation is entitled to some relief now.” She added that the tribe would suffer adversity by having to offer only Class II gambling.
There’s the big question: how the market will respond to Class II, which is practically a new — and retrograde — phenomenon in Arizona, where there are only 40 Class II machines in the entire state. Desert Diamond Casinos & Entertainment CEO Andy Asselin said consumers won’t know the difference, but I wonder. (The state, ironically, 
agreed with Asselin.) As the Arizona Republic explains, “Class 2 gaming machines are like electronic bingo games with a central computer server on which there are at least two players competing for a jackpot.”
Meanwhile, the Tohono O’odham are hard at work on preparing a temporary casino in what will eventually be the back-of-the-house area, roughly the size and shape of a Wal-Mart. Opening with “slots in a box” seems like leading with your chin but the tribe clearly wants to present the state with a fait accompli, perhaps creating economic pressure to bow to events and keep the casino open.
* Well, somebody had to say it and that somebody was Deutsche Bank analyst Carlo Santarelli (along with colleague Danny Valoy), who deemed the Cotai Strip in Macao overbuilt, producing “more losers than winners in the medium term.” The duo isn’t buying the “build it and they will come” mindset, which has already disproven itself in Las Vegas. “With five major properties in our analysis (Galaxy/Studio City/Parisian/Wynn Cotai/MGM Cotai), the annual increases imply roughly US$375 million of annual fixed costs come online with each major opening,” they added.
Noting that $18 billion worth of new product is heading to market, they said Galaxy Phase Two and Macau Studio City (pictured) 
faced a challenging environment. Even so, Galaxy remains bullish, adding new retailers like Burberry and Prada to its shopping mall. Santarelli and Valoy liked Wynn Macau‘s and MGM Resorts International‘s prospects best (even though they have the smallest market share), implying that Melco Crown Entertainment, Sands China, et. al. are overexposed. (Sheldon Adelson hasn’t done anything in Macao by half measures.)
However, Sanford C. Bernstein Ltd. analysts liked Melco’s prospects better, particularly with regard to premium mass-market 
players. Citing “superior service,” game inventory and player hosts, a trio of Bernstein analysts wrote that “Melco Crown has the highest mass table efficiency (i.e., win per unit per day) amongst all six Macau casino operators.” At present, there is a clutch of megaresort openings next year, starting with Wynn Palace on March 25, followed in July by Adelson’s Parisian Macao and, somewhere between October and December, MGM Cotai. Bringing up the rear is Stanley Ho, whose Lisboa Palace debuts in late 2017, by which time economic trends in Macao will hopefully have reversed and the market has absorbed all the new capacity.
As if things weren’t bad enough, a Wynn Macau VIP-room operator is saying it got fleeced by one of its employees. However, the extent of the missing cash appears to have exaggerated.
* The Culinary Union is pretty frosted after 220-odd Palms employees got pink-slipped. Owners Texas Pacific Group and Leonard Green Partners are outsourcing all restaurant operations, which the Culinary says is being done to thwart an organizing drive. TPG and Green have broken so many things that didn’t need fixing that my wife and I no longer patronize the Palms.
