Head-scratcher at Shuffle Master

Come March 15, Shuffle Master CEO Mark Yoseloff finally gets to leave the company — something he’s wanted to do for a while but which has been stymied by the difficulty of replacing him. Just how difficult was it? So much so that Shuffle Master’s board settled on a relative lightweight: Timothy Parott, who was Aristocrat Technologies‘ CEO of American operations for 2006-08. Prior to that, Parrott — a newcomer to the manufacturing side — had been out of day-to-day casino operations for eight years. To make a bad slot-machine pun, it was a move from well outside “the box.”

Industry scuttlebutt had it that subsequently discredited Aristocrat Leisure CEO Paul Oneile wanted to exert more direct control of Aristocrat’s North American operations and that the Parrott appointment furthered that brief. (Parrott’s exit from Aristocrat Technologies roughly coincides with the appointment of Jamie Odell to succeed Oneile.) It looks like the power behind the Shuffle Master throne will be board chairman and former Greenspun Corp. President Phil Peckman, who steered the Greenspuns into the casino business but subsequently fell from favor.

You’ve been served. Can a casino be held responsible for being in receipt of (allegedly) ill-gotten gains? The Venetian gets to be a guinea pig. Lucky them.

“An instructive example of Murphy’s Law.” That’s the verdict from Liz Benston on the botched, bungled and increasingly beleagured Tropicana Atlantic City sale process. If anything has gone right in that snipe hunt, it’s escaped my notice.

This entry was posted in Aristocrat, Atlantic City, Australia, Regulation, Technology, Tropicana Entertainment. Bookmark the permalink.