Caesars Entertainment is going on the road, as it were, to test-drive its first foray into skill-based slots. It’s going to install six Gamblit Gaming slot carousels at Harrah’s Rincon, 
with 36 slated for Las Vegas deployment next year. The games include Smoothie Blast (where you try to assemble a virtual smoothie) and Grab Poker, in which players assemble the best hand they can by “grabbing” cards off the touch screen. The move by Caesars is the leading edge of a trend to attempt to reverse a worrisome decline in slot play: from $355 billion in 2007 (Las Vegas’ apogee) to $291 billion in 2014. The Gamblit machines are designed to appeal to Millennials’ love of interactive gambling and get past their boredom with the repetitious nature of conventional slot play. (Believe me, I understand.)
Nevada Gaming Control Board Chairman A.G Burnett told Bloomberg News “he expects some manufacturers to make their games progressively harder as the players score higher, a big change from the static play of a game like blackjack.” Casinos have obviously learned from their previous experiment with slots that incorporated skill elements and were, as Anthony Curtis puts it “vultured by advantage players.” Caesars isn’t the only casino company hot on the skill-based trail. The Downtown Grand was an early advocate and Bellagio already sports an Atari-based Centipede game, made by International Game Technology. For those who are shy about testing their table-game skillz in front of a bunch of strangers, Las Vegas Sands could soon roll out electronic table game stadiums, depending on how its introductory one at Sands Bethlehem performs. As casino CEO Mark Juliano put it, “It gives them a bit of time to learn these games without feeling they’re making a mistake and doing something wrong.”
* MGM National Harbor is making a statement by engaging none other than Bob Dylan to create an iron sculpture. This isn’t as crazy as it sounds: Dylan grew up on Minnesota‘s unforgiving Iron Range and engages in metalwork as a pastime. Of his MGM sculpture, “Portal,” he said, “Gates appeal to me because of the negative space they allow. They can be closed, but at the same time they allow the seasons and breezes to enter and flow. They can shut you out or shut you in. And in some ways, there is no difference.” That’s just the sort of cryptic utterance we’ve come to treasure from the bard.
MGM is getting into the Maryland market at just the right time. The Free State is riding a wave of gambling revenue, up for nine consecutive months. Its casinos grossed $100 million in August. Maryland Live, of course, was out in front with $56 million, a 7% gain over last year. (Only Penn National Gaming‘s seemingly misconceived Perryville casino posted a loss of business, down 9.5%.) Horseshoe Baltimore was essentially flat, a few decimal points shy of $28 million. Ocean Downs was up 2% and Golden Entertainment‘s Rocky Gap Casino Resort nudged 3%.
* Showing resource, the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe is getting into the daily fantasy sports arena. The Minnesota tribe’s site, Grandfantasysports.com, has gone live, with the stat-crunching and scorekeeping farmed out to SportRadar US. The tribe hopes that the DFS site will drive business to its two casinos, in Mille Lacs and Hinckley. It is open to players in California, Colorado, Kansas, Minnesota, Mississippi, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, West Virginia and Wisconsin. As for those twin Goliaths of DFS, DraftKings and FanDuel, they’ve so far avoided the media overkill that brought on a backlash last year. FanDuel’s Labor Day weekend media buys were just under $16,000 (ironically, mostly on the NFL Network — the league hates sports betting but just can’t resist a slice of the DFS pie), while DraftKings laid out over $400,500. However, due to the latter’s recent infusion of venture capital, CalvinAyre.com warns that “the drunken-sailor-level spending may yet begin in earnest any day now.”
* You have to delve to the bottom of the story to find it but it looks like Hooters Casino Hotel has a new owner and it’s Paragon Gaming, which is already running the casino operations for Westgate Las Vegas. By snapping up such low-hanging fruit, Paragon could soon have a significant presence in the Las Vegas market, which it has long avoided (surely not purposely) in favor of Canadian operations.
* Maine‘s Oxford Casino, born in the 2008 election, is doing so well it’s embarking on a $25 million expansion. However, there are still a number of environmental-impact hurdles to be jumped.
* Scientific Games is rolling out a Cher Live slot game at Fantasy Springs Casino, in Indio, California. Having the seen the supposedly actual Cher twice at Caesars Palace, I can say with confidence that the slot machine will seem more lifelike than Cher herself.
Is Paragon going to keep the Hoot brand?
I suspect the reason slot play is declining is that the casinos are killing the proverbial golden goose by having the machines so tight that there is no chance of players leaving winners. Skill-based slots will not return players to games with 10-12% house edge.