Inside Asian Gaming

April 2010 | INSIDE ASIAN GAMING 43 Briefs good deal in AC. The eastern seaboard holiday and day trip venue is after all still the country’s second largest gambling market by gross gaming revenue. According to the Associated Press, Hard Rock would form a partnership with New York-based Och-Ziff Real Estate for a property at the southern end of Atlantic City. Hard Rock currently runs 13 casinos around the world, including one at City of Dreams in Macau. The company says it has not yet decided how many hotel rooms it will build in Atlantic City. In March New Jersey’s legislature proposed a law that would allow ‘boutique’ casinos with as few as 200 rooms, down from the current 500-room minimum. The Seminole Indian tribe of Florida wholly owns Hard Rock International. The company said its project would include “an ultramodern gaming floor, luxury hotel, world-class dining and entertainment,” a beachfront pool and a spa. It added the US$300 million project budget excluded the cost of the land. Many of the existing operators in the city are said to oppose lowering the minimum room requirements, arguing it would be unfair to let newcomers get into themarket with a smaller investment than the established casinos had to make. Round table talks on Camelot sale Camelot, the operator of the United Kingdom’s National Lottery, has been sold in principal to a Canadian teachers’ pension fund for US$583 million reports the BBC. Camelot’s current owner is a consortium that includes UK chocolate maker Cadbury. Camelot has been running the country’s National Lottery since the latter was launched in 1994. Approval of the sale is still pending from the industry regulator, the National Lottery Commission. It will take up to three months to consider the proposal. The proposed buyer, the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan— known in Canada as ‘Teachers’’—runs a retirement fund for more than a quarter of a million Canadian teachers. It already has a wide range of investments in the UK, including Birmingham and Bristol airports and a 27% stake in a water utility company. Lastyear,Camelotwasgivena10- year licence to run the Lottery—its third consecutive stint as operator. National Lottery product sales have shown an upward trend in recent months. Camelot attributes that to a growing number of people choosing to play online or via their portable phones. AGA ‘open-minded’ on Internet gaming The American Gaming Association is now “open to the concept of legalised Internet gambling,” the association’s president and CEO, Frank Fahrenkopf, told Card Player magazine in a recent interview. The new position is said to mark a significant change by the industry lobby group. The AGA had previously remained neutral on the issues raised by the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act (UIGEA) passedby theUSCongress inSeptember 2006.TheAct has the effect of making illegal any attempt by financial institutions to accept payment via any party for online gambling services from US citizens. It also forbids online gambling companies domiciled anywhere in the world to offer online betting services to US customers. Next stop for Station Station Casinos has filed a reorganisation plan in its bankruptcy case, says the Las Vegas Sun . Station proposes the sale of its interests in 13 of its 18 gaming properties as well as some land holdings. Four major hotel- casinos generating the bulk of the company’s revenue and a fifth property would stay under control of the revamped company. Ownership of Station Casinos and its remaining properties would then be shared between a group of lenders and the existing ownership partners Colony Capital of Los Angeles and the Fertitta family of Las Vegas. The properties staying within the portfolio under the plan would be Red Rock Resort, Palace Station, Boulder Station and Sunset Station. The fifth property is the Wild Wild West motel and casino and associated land on Tropicana Avenue in Las Vegas, west of Interstate 15. The Las Vegas Sun says court records show the Fertittas and Colony Capital would between them pay US$85.6 million for a 50% stake in the new company. That new entity would assume US$1.6 billion in mortgage debt as part of the deal. Platform Computing signs betting technology deal with Bet365 UK-based Platform Computing Ltd has signed a deal with online betting company Bet365 for technology to expand the latter’s ‘live in play’ sports betting offer. ‘Live in play’ betting is especially popular with Asian gamblers but is also growing in other markets including Europe. Live betting during sports matches requires bookmakers to process a lot of information in a short amount of time. Platform Computing specialises in so-called grid technologies also applied in the financial services industries. In the online gaming industry grid technologies allow fast processing of the calculations necessary to price bets correctly. “Grid technology also provides excellent ‘failover’ capabilities,” says Charles Jarvis, VP of Platform Computing in London. “For example, if you have two data centres (say one in London and one in Asia) and one goes out of action, but you are running grids across those data centres, the work scheduled for the data centre that fails can be automatically rescheduled to the one data centre that is up and running. Fingers crossed for Camelot sale Palace Station Casino, Las Vegas