Inside Asian Gaming

INSIDE ASIAN GAMING | August 2010 8 Most people consider the Asian player an uneducated slot player. But we see the opposite. They’re quite a savvy player. They know they’re getting tracked and the reasons. Slots at MGM Macau growth in Internet access year on year. That’s going to breed a new generation of players who are exposed to electronic games, like them, and are going to take that to the next step and play electronic games in casinos and slot clubs—the same way their parents and grandparents grew up playing one on one table games or mahjong and currently bring that experience to the casino in order to challenge the dealer. It’s very early in the evolutionary process, but I think that signs are there and that we will continue to build the market and make inroads into it. In our property specifically [Grand Lisboa], we have seen an increase of probably 50% since we opened three years ago. We’re still struggling with rated play, providing the right incentives to players to help them understand there’s something in it for them if they embrace our marketing plans and strategies, and we’re still looking for better ways to present that and at how best to capture loyalty through that. Matt Hurst: Back in 2004 [at Sands Macao], we had a couple of players who would come in and drop HK$40,000 and we were blown away. Those people were big players that we bent over backwards to take care of. Two years later, at Wynn, we had a guy drop a couple of thousand US [dollars] into a machine. We called that ‘Big Wednesday’. It was a massive day. We were truly blown away. Now we have players in the Macau market who can drop over a million US [dollars] in a day. From HK$40,000—i.e. US$5,000—to a million US in five years is pretty remarkable growth. PJ: We constantly get slots at around 20% now of the mass floor revenue. It has been as Matt Hurst Cover Story