
A judge with a penchant for history and Shakespeare may are determined that March 15, 2016 would have been a good deadline for Caesars to get lienholders up to speed with its bankruptcy restructuring plan.
Baffling moments in gambling, you state? What?
As top gambling journalists, it isn’t our job to be baffled; it’s our job to cut through the presssing difficulties with razor-sharp remarks and observations.
Sometimes, however, you merely need to throw your hands in the air and go WTF? Knowing that, right here are the top five many gambling that is baffling of 2015.
CSIG Rhetoric
The Coalition to Stop Web Gambling CSIG) is an expert at churning out baffling statements, and in 2015, these may have struck their zenith. The coalition subscribes to the ‘it’s-true-because-it-rhymes’ brand of rhetoric, and thus phrases such as ‘click your phone, lose your house’ while the variation that is slightly zingier your mouse, lose your house,’ went down gangbusters at anti-gambling cocktail parties in 2010.
Representative Jason Chaffetz’ (R- UT 3rd District) assertion that RAWA is a pro-states’ rights bill, despite all evidence to the contrary, was pretty ‘out there’ in the bafflement stakes, we thought. And meanwhile, John Kindt, a teacher at the University of Illinois Law School, was partial to quoting a scholarly study from 1999, the times of dial-up Internet, as evidence that ‘Internet gambling cannot be regulated.’
Finger on the pulse here, Professor.
However, the award for the baffling that is most CSIG statement of the entire year goes to a ‘news’ header on the company’s website which screamed ‘Online Gambling Hurts Farmers.’
The logic of why this demographic is particularly at danger is lost on us, and we understand CSIG is not averse to resorting to your use of emotive language to make an intellectually dishonest point or two, but farmers? The correlation that is only might make was that spades might be used by farmers to dig things, so there you go.
The Daily Fantasy Sports Scandal
The fantasy that is daily (DFS) scandal was pretty odd once you contemplate it. DFS continued its unstoppable rise throughout the first nine months of the season, with the utmost effective two web sites, FanDuel and DraftKings, securing billions of bucks in opportunities as the multibillion dollar industry started mulling international expansion and world domination that is eventual.
With all of this on the line, you may have thought that someone at the 2 kingpin organizations would have recalled to prohibit their players from taking part in games at rival sites.
Nope.
DFS became thoroughly unglued at the conclusion of September, when it emerged that the DraftKings employee had accidentally released player information prior to the week’s NFL games had begun. In the same week, this employee won $350,000 playing at FanDuel.
Accusations of ‘insider trading’ were possibly overblown, and the employee was eventually cleared of wrongdoing, but the public’s faith in DFS was shaken, and suddenly the industry was attacks that are facing all fronts, from player lawsuits to judicial investigations to denouncements from regulators and politicians.
Beware the Ides of March
That Caesars Entertainment’s debt stands at an unprecedented industry high of around $20 billion had been a fact that baffled the Nevada Gaming Commission at a gathering to discuss its messy bankruptcy proceedings this season.
The Commission called the problem ‘embarrassing,’ and suggested that the ongoing company refrain from ‘building any Ferris wheels for a while’ to chuckles from assembled users associated with press.
‘Everyone tosses the economy beneath the coach,’ snapped payment chairman Tony Alamo testily.
In searching for Chapter 11 proceedings for the main operating unit, Caesars was accused by its second lien creditors of restructuring its assets in a way that unfairly prefers its controlling personal equity backers, who were the guys that got Caesars in this mess within the place that is first.
Faced with lawsuits and accusations of fraudulent behavior, Caesars devised a restructuring plan that is new. Now the ongoing business is faced with the duty of getting its lesser bondholders on board. The due date with this is March 15 of next year, after which Caesars will totally lose control over its own bankruptcy proceedings.
Shakespeare scholars among you will recognize this date as the one known as ‘the Ides of March’ in the Roman calendar and the day that is fateful of Caesar’s assassination by his previous supporter, Brutus.
Who’d have thought that a bankruptcy judge would have this type of wicked sense of humor?
There were many baffling moments in 2010, we’d to make this piece a two-parter, so come back tomorrow for more bewildering gambling landmark moments from 2015.
Five baffling that is most Gambling Moments of 2015, Part Two
Revel owner Glen Straub finished up 2015 saddled with the entire world’s biggest bill that is electric. (Image: Tom MacDonald/WHYY)
Welcome back to Part Two of our run down of 2015’s most baffling happenings, in which we ponder a few of the more mystifying occurrences of the year inside and around the video gaming universe.
Chukchansi Charges
In July, former Chukchansi leader that is tribal McDonald accepted a plea discount and was sentenced to 485 days for false imprisonment after admitting to being the orchestrator of 1 of the most extremely idiotic moments in the history of the casino industry.
The prior October, he had lead an armed assault on the Chukchansi Gold Casino, near Fresno, California.
McDonald had stormed the home with some 20 accomplices, giving clients running for cover, and ordering security guards at gunpoint right into a secure area for the building. Guards were reportedly assaulted and handcuffed, but no casino customers were hurt.
This this indicates, was the culmination of a power that is bizarre between two rival Chukchansi factions vying for control of the casino. McDonald was indeed running the casino from the business that is nearby up until August 2014, whenever a rival group, led by one Reggie Lewis, turned up the night and literally took the casino over.
While Lewis is excellent at surreptitiously taking over gaming properties, this indicates his admin skills aren’t quite therefore hot, as he failed to register the accounts, which meant that the casino was facing a $16 million fine from the regulator and feasible closure.
McDonald made a decision to take action that is drastic charged into the casino with firearms drawn. We’re not quite sure what his goal was, but he’ll have a lot of time to contemplate it in the pokey.
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Straub’s Strange Energy
Eccentric billionaire Glen Straub is a lively and um, interesting source of activity this year. The property magnate initially lost the auction to buy the distressed Revel Casino home in Atlantic City and immediately blasted the auction as ‘improper.’
Having suffered a bad bout of something, Straub explained, he previously flown from New Jersey to their home in Florida to retrieve his medicine, a proven fact that so coincidentally took him out from the picture during the last crucial phase of the bidding process.
However, when the champion associated with the bid, Brookfield Asset Management, got wind of Revel’s astronomical energy bill, a non-negotiable $36 million per it bailed on the deal anyway year. Straub stepped in, picking right up the $4.9 billion property for a song, at $82 million.
The idealistic designer initially stated he desired to reopen Revel perhaps not as being a casino, but as an ‘elite university’ where the globe’s brightest people could spend their days ruminating on solving global issues such as ‘famine, cancer and nuclear waste storage.’
Once he previously his hands in the property, though, he decided that he’d probably simply reopen it being a casino after all, albeit it one devoted to ‘life expansion technology,’ whatever that is.
By April of this year, it was none of those things. What it had been, however, according to the Atlantic City Fire Department, was a ’47-story fire danger,’ as Straub was refusing to honor the contract using the power that is adjacent and had been take off.
A insufficient flowing water through Revel’s pipes, and no electricity allowing firefighters access to the upper floors, intended that a fire outbreak might be potentially catastrophic.
The seemingly cursed casino property stays shuttered while Straub’s unpaid power bills encounter the millions. Possibly he can’t read them while sitting at nighttime.
The Fall of Macau: What Happened to the Gambling Fireball in 2015?
The fortunes of Macau were already tumbling as 2015 began. The downturn actually started back in June 2014, if the gambling hub recorded the first-ever monthly dip in revenues since Stanley Ho’s casino monopoly finished in 2012, a move which had effortlessly opened the Asian gambling region as much as international investment.
However, no one could quite have anticipated numbers to fall so significantly, and consecutively, month-on-month, for the remainder 12 months and throughout 2015.
Macau’s casinos were affected by the anti-corruption drive of Asia’s president Xi Jinping (center) in 2015, which largely impacted the gambling that is asian’s junket industry in 2010. (Image: Adrian Bradshaw/EPA)
Exactly What happened?
Just 8 weeks ahead of the downturn that is initial Macau had reported a record-breaking Q1 for 2014, with $12.6 billion in revenues. Which was up 19.8 percent from the quarter that is first of. And 2014 was on course to beat the season prior, itself a year that is watershed and Forbes ended up being calling Macau ‘one regarding the world’s fastest growing economies.’ The enclave had been ingesting in only two months what Las Vegas scored in a year.
Macau had benefitted significantly from the explosion in Chinese tourism in the preceding years. A greater freedom of movement and a burgeoning new Chinese middle-income group had certainly contributed to the gambling growth, and, as the Chinese economy began slow, so did the flow of gamblers from the mainland.
VIP Junkets Hit the Skids
But Macau’s bread and butter had been Chinese VIP high rollers. With a fondness for high stakes baccarat, these whales’ trips were facilitated by Macau’s multibillion-dollar junket industry. In reality, the junkets accounted for a few 60 percent of Macau’s revenues during the boom years.
Junket operators would act as middlemen, organizing trips and lending their consumers large sums of cash in order to suppress restrictions on the amount of money which could be brought from the mainland. VIPs would then settle their debts on their return to China.
Lots of these VIPs were, in reality, corrupt Communist Party officials whoever fortunes were produced from kickbacks or embezzlement of public money. Corruption had reached epidemic proportions in China, and Beijing had had enough, vowing to track fraudulent officials ‘to the ends of this earth.’
Fearing reprisals from Beijing, the VIPs began to avoid them of Macau, maneuvering to Manilla in the Philippines, or to Vietnam’s Ho Tram Strip to instead get their kicks.
Unprecedented Crackdown
The drive that is anti-corruption squeezing Macau throughout the latter 50 % of 2014. Aswell as scaring off the high rollers, Beijing had imposed restrictions on the usage of UnionPay, Asia’s only domestic bank card, which further stemmed the flow of middle-class money from the mainland.
Meanwhile, the introduction of a blanket ban that is smoking gambling enterprises failed to improve things.
But by early 2015, Asia had ramped it up a notch, initiating an ‘unprecedented crackdown’ on the junket industry, tightening regulatory controls and demanding more transparency from the junkets about their clients and the criminal history of their workers. By the junket industry was ‘broken,’ according to Rob Goldstein, LVS president september.
Brand New casino resorts, conceived during the boom time, still launched their doors this year, such as for instance James Packer’s Studio City Macau, while Steve Wynn’s Wynn Palace Macau due to start in the centre of next.
Despite the general malaise and stingy table games allocations for new casinos from the Macau regulator that will be bowing to pressure from Beijing, Packer said he remained positive about the spot’s long-term future, while conceding that Macau’s downturn was ‘worse than anyone expected.’