Inside Asian Gaming

Dec 2007 | INSIDE ASIAN GAMING 15 PokerDome said in a statement it planned to open with eight tables but hoped to increase the capacity to 25 or 30 tables as soon as another floor of the casino is renovated and operational.The DICJ, how- ever, has said that permission for this room to open had not been granted at the time of the PokerDome announcement, and wheth- er that permission will now be granted at all remains to be seen. SJM also plans to have a Texas Hold ‘em room in its flagship Grand Lisboa casino. Compared to SJM’s traditional core product, VIP baccarat, the business model of poker is very different, with players buying in to the game to create a ‘pot’ and the house taking a ‘rake’ from the pot to cover expenses. At the Grand Lisboa, the house rake for Texas Hold ‘em is expected to be 5%, so an inter- esting question is how the revenue will be split at the PokerDome Group-operated room at the Diamond Casino, if it receives the go-ahead. Under SJM’s traditional 40:40:20 rev- enue-sharing model with casino partners (the partners provide the venue while SJM provides the license) the taxman gets 40% of revenue, the owner of the venue (such as the Diamond Casino) gets 40% and the ca- sino licensee (namely SJM) gets 20%, but has to provide dealers and gaming staff. With labour costs soaring in Macau, SJM is in the process of changing all its agreements to a new 40:55:5 model, whereby the taxman gets the constant 40%, and SJM now only re- ceives 5%,but no longer has to provide gam- ing staff. The venue owners, meanwhile, get 55% and have to bear all labour costs, but may prefer the new arrangement because it gives them more flexibility and control in staffing their casinos. Over half of SJM’s ca- sino partners have already signed up for the new arrangement. The casino licensee, venue owner and room operator (such as PokerDome) will have to decide how they split the rake. The government will likely simply tax the rake at the same rate as other casino gaming reve- nue (with 35% going to direct tax, and 4-5% as mandatory social and welfare contribu- tions). A less likely scenario, however, could see the government tax poker players’ win- nings, as happens in the US (in addition to the tax on the casinos’ rake revenues). The pot builds quickly Whatever the final regulatory and busi- ness model structure of poker rooms in Macau, Jeffrey Haas, President of the APPT, thinks the more poker the merrier for all. He says: “The door opened when we asked permission for our event. Now the door has fallen off its hinges thanks to the momentum we have created. There will definitely be more poker coming to Macau. We’re hoping to have the best events here year after year to grow it into something where thousands of players can participate in a major event at least once a year.” In the west, poker has been considered ‘cool’ever since Frank Sinatra sat down at the table with his Rat Pack chums in Las Vegas in the 1950s and 60s. More recently, Holly- wood actors Ben Affleck and Matt Damon have joined the bandwagon and there are celebrity poker games on television. When the singer Justin Timberlake toured Aus- tralia in November his management con- tacted the Crown Casino in Melbourne and asked if they could arrange a game against Joe Hachem, the 2005 World Series of Poker champion. Mr Hachem duly obliged. A few days later Mr Hachem was on a plane travel- ling to the Macau tournament. In Asia though, the real engine of pok- In Focus After obliging Justin Timberlake’s request for a game in Australia, Joe Hachem hopped a flight to the Macau APPT APPT Macau 2007 Main Event winner Dinh Le