Junket-free gaming

Outside of southern Africa, the Macau-style VIP gaming model is rare

The VIP and mass-market live table games so popular in Macau are only a small part of the mix in sub-Saharan Africa, explains Mr Robbins of KaiRo International.

“Our top players have a bankroll of US$50,000 [comparable to the mid-level VIPs who go to NagaWorld in Cambodia]. They don’t want anything in the form of comps. What they want is to play and to be offered a fair game.

“In our African venues, the table games are basically American roulette, blackjack and poker. There was also a game of African pontoon, though that’s dying out now. We did have punto banco, but that’s died back quite a bit.

“We don’t run junkets or have to fly people in. It was different when I was working for Sun International. We used to fly people in from all over the world, including from the Far East, on junkets. That’s obviously an expensive exercise and you have to accommodate the players for four or five days because of the distance. The players are usually men, so you have to cater for their wives or girlfriends as well, and then make sure the men don’t get distracted and that they spend enough time in the casino. You also have to pay expenses, and provide a certain amount of credit, etc.

“The unique thing about Africa outside southern Africa is you don’t really go looking for customers. They come to you. There isn’t much nighttime entertainment. If you want a late night, the only place to go really is a casino. Asians find out from their communities where the place is to go,” he explains.

“With our venues, we’re not looking to compete with anyone. We’re looking at a new [business] model where you come in and it’s a slot machine based thing—more of an electronic casino—where the returns are very, very, favourable to the customer. We’re not really looking at hardened gambling. It’s more like entertainment.

“In our world, a person with two or three hundred bucks in his pocket is a VIP. That’s the way we train our staff. Our casinos are not very big, but we have big players, in terms of hit frequency and big payouts.