Casino Enterprise Management

For 15 years, Kevin Parker has worked in, and launched, casinos. Since 2009, he has served as the director of casino operations at Colusa Casino Resort in Colusa, Calif. His casino experience ranges from properties with  349 machines and six table games to those boasting 2,115 machines and 75 table games. He spoke to us about his start, his hobbies, lessons learned about launching casinos, how a hamburger led to a new mobile gaming solution and a little red truck that dropped him off on the way there.

After decades of commitment to being green before it was a fad, plus a year of retrofitting,  Barona Resort & Casino in San Diego has earned a level of recognition never before achieved in tribal gaming. Barona recently received LEED® Gold certification from the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) for its resort hotel. It is the first tribal resort in the country to earn this level of internationally recognized certification. 

AGEM has grown significantly over the past few years in both membership and influence. Read to learn more about the AGEM Advantage, what the association is working on, and what its members will be showcasing at G2E.

The average smartphone user is an educated 35-year-old with a family and an income 50 percent higher than the national average. Currently, there are about 30 million smartphone users in the United States. Most of them use Apple iPhones, but Android platform phones are also increasingly popular. The number of smartphone users is expected to increase to more than 100 million by 2013.

You could feel the excitement buzzing through the theater. Nick Khin, president of Aristocrat Americas, kicked off the 2010 Oasis 360 Summit at The Palms in Las Vegas by telling the audience his outlook is much more positive than it was a year ago. More than 350 people attended the summit, representing more than 125 sites and breaking the record for the highest number of properties participating.

In last month’s issue of CEM I talked about how you could do something to generate more revenues by making Shuffle Master’s iTable—one of the two greatest gambling gizmos of this century so far—do gangbuster business for you. If we look into our crystal ball, I think it’s pretty clear that within a few years we’ll see iTables dotting the table game landscapes across the country ... if the casinos that put them in go that extra mile to make them work.

In my capacity as a consultant to the gaming industry, I not only produce operational and efficiency profiles of casino resorts, but also reports for gaming manufacturers. These reports focus on players’ preferences and range from the hardware design to the ergonomics of the products, the software and the game components. Although the details and applicability of these reports are always confidential to each client, there are nevertheless many generalities that can be culled from them.

For about the last 10 years, industry experts and electronic gaming machine (EGM) manufacturers have been discussing a brave new world in which you can easily change the games that are available to your slot players in the EGMs on your floor, right from your desk. In a nutshell, here’s the current state of affairs.

Anyone following the capital markets leveraged finance and high yield bond charts recently will undoubtedly rush to the nearest medicine cabinet for a strong dose of motion sickness antidote. The opening and closing, constricting and expanding of debt market windows in 2010 has been uncanny.

Check out the latest innovative products to hit the gaming industry here. This month we highlight American Dynamics' victor, a unified security management system, FutureLogic's GEN 3 printer, Rye Park's drop slides, Spectronix's TournaMax ES, Tidel Engineering's Sentinel Bulk Coin Dispenser with Coin Recycler, Dexwet's Inside GI1.2 and Morse Watchmans' SmartKey Single Locker Module.