Inside Asian Gaming

June 2011 | INSIDE ASIAN GAMING 15 such as precious metals to denote membership levels in the manner of credit cards. Galaxy Macau gets right to the heart of the matter. Divided but united The main floor at Galaxy Macau is vast but not nearly as intimidating as The Venetian. Like Wynn Macau, it is broken up into zones, but unlike Wynn Macau you still get a sense of the whole and you have a horizon to work with. This allows guests to navigate their way around easily. If you want to find Elektroncek’s new 34-station three-game Organic Island installation ( sic bo , roulette and fish ‘shrimp’ crab), for example, that’s no problem. The sightlines are such that you can see the overhead display of the installation from almost any point when you’re in that half of the floor. Let there be light Some Western observers have commented that the illumination of the main floor looks too bright. They might like to consider the fact that in many working class and lower middle class Chinese homes in Hong Kong and Macau as well as in the PRC, living rooms are powered by bright strip lights, not by tiny lamps dotted around the place as in manyWestern homes. And for Chinese people—who value baccarat as ‘the fair game’ because of its low house advantage—a well-lit gaming table can only be a good thing. “There’s less chance of someone at the table cheating and getting away with it,” is the likely outlook of the average mass market player. As one executive of a rival operator said to us on the opening day: “I really think—probably for the first time in the mass-market in Macau—an operator got the lighting just right. No cage fighting There are plenty of cages located along the sides of the mass floor—unlike some properties we could mention where guests deserve a marathon winner’s medal by the time they a) locate; and b) walk to; the cage. One glitch we did notice, though, is that the queues of people at the cages on the second day were snaking back into the slot and table playing zone. That could be a function of several things, including the unusually high traffic levels and the relative lack of live operational experience on the part of at least some of the cage staff. If the issue persists, an easy fix should be to move some of the banks of slots further in from the side of the room, though the same issue might be slightly harder to fix in the table zones without creating a sense of crowding. A big VIP offer Much comment and analysis has naturally focused on what Galaxy Macau will do for the mass market. But in a place where around 72% of gross revenues come from high roller baccarat, no new property can afford to overlook the VIP segment. Galaxy Macau has a lot of product and variety, with eight main VIP rooms around the property as well as high limit tables and slots as the bandstand- like centrepiece of the main floor (a characteristic shared with the unsung SJM-licensed Babylon casino at Fisherman’s Wharf ). The feedback we got from industry sources is that commission rather than revenue share is most commonly the business model being used in the Galaxy Macau VIP rooms (at least in this opening phase). Perhaps the more important general point is that Galaxy doesn’t try and rob Peter to pay Paul in its dealings with junkets. In other words, it doesn’t try simply to restructure its offer and clawback its profit in some other way, such as squeezing the junkets on soft costs such as player‘comps’. Galaxy has built a reputation for building solid and mutually beneficial relationships with the junkets. Galaxy Macau Centrepiece—the high limit slots and tables on the main floor