A judge with a penchant for history and Shakespeare may decided that March 15, 2016 could be a good deadline for Caesars to get lienholders up to speed with its bankruptcy restructuring plan.
Baffling moments in gambling, you say? What?
As top gambling journalists, it isn’t our job to be baffled; it’s our job to cut through the presssing issues with razor-sharp comments and observations.
Sometimes, however, you simply need certainly to throw your hands in the fresh air and go WTF? With that in mind, here are the top five most baffling gambling moments of 2015.
CSIG Rhetoric
The Coalition to Stop online Gambling CSIG) is a specialist at churning out baffling statements, and in 2015, these may have hit 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’ plus the slightly zingier variation ‘click your mouse, lose your house,’ went down gangbusters at anti-gambling cocktail parties this year.
Representative Jason Chaffetz’ (R- UT 3rd District) assertion that RAWA is just 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 fond of quoting study from 1999, the days of dial-up Internet, as proof that ‘Internet gambling cannot be regulated.’
Finger on the pulse here, Professor.
However, the award for the most baffling CSIG declaration of the season goes to a ‘news’ header on the company’s web site which screamed ‘Online Gambling Hurts Farmers.’
The logic of why this demographic is very at risk is lost on us, and we realize CSIG is not averse to resorting towards the usage of emotive language to make an intellectually dishonest point or two, but farmers? The correlation that is only will make was that spades might be used by farmers to dig things, so there you go.
The Daily Fantasy Sports Scandal
The daily fantasy sports (DFS) scandal had been pretty odd once you contemplate it. DFS continued its unstoppable rise throughout the first nine months of the year, with the very best two web sites, FanDuel and DraftKings, securing billions of bucks in investments as the multibillion dollar industry started mulling international expansion and world domination that is eventual.
With all this at risk, you might have thought that someone at the two kingpin businesses would have recalled to prohibit their players from participating in games at rival sites.
Nope.
DFS became thoroughly unglued by the end of September, when it emerged that the DraftKings employee had accidentally released player data ahead of the week’s NFL games had started. In the same week, this worker won $350,000 playing at FanDuel.
Accusations of ‘insider trading’ were perhaps overblown, and the employee was fundamentally cleared of wrongdoing, but the public’s faith in DFS was shaken, and suddenly the industry ended up being facing attacks on all fronts, from player legal actions to judicial investigations to denouncements from regulators and politicians.
Beware the Ides of March
That Caesars Entertainment’s debt appears at an unprecedented industry high of around $20 billion ended up being a fact that baffled the Nevada Gaming Commission at a meeting to discuss its messy bankruptcy proceedings this present year.
The Commission called the problem ’embarrassing,’ and suggested that the company refrain from ‘building any Ferris wheels for a while’ to chuckles from assembled members of the press.
‘Everyone throws the economy underneath the bus,’ snapped commission chairman Tony Alamo testily.
In seeking Chapter 11 proceedings for its main operating unit, Caesars happens to be accused by its second lien creditors of restructuring its assets in a way that unfairly prefers its controlling private equity backers, who had been the guys that got Caesars in this mess into the first destination.
Faced with lawsuits and accusations of fraudulent behavior, Caesars devised a new restructuring plan. Now the company is charged with the task of getting its lesser bondholders on board. The due date because of this is March 15 of next year, after which Caesars will 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 former supporter, Brutus.
Who’d have thought that a bankruptcy judge would have this type of sense that is wicked of?
There have been many baffling moments this season, we’d to get this piece a two-parter, so come back tomorrow for more gambling that is bewildering moments from 2015.
Five baffling that is most Gambling Moments of 2015, Part Two
Revel owner Glen Straub finished up 2015 saddled with the world’s biggest electric bill. (Image: Tom MacDonald/WHYY)
Welcome back to role 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 gaming universe.
Chukchansi Costs
In July, former Chukchansi tribal leader Tex McDonald accepted a plea discount and was sentenced to 485 times for false imprisonment after admitting to being the orchestrator of 1 of the very most 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 safe area of this building. Guards were reportedly handcuffed and assaulted, but no casino customers had been hurt.
This this indicates, was the culmination of a bizarre power struggle between two rival Chukchansi factions vying for control of the casino. McDonald had been running the casino from a business that is nearby up to August 2014, whenever a rival group, led by one Reggie Lewis, resulted in the night and literally took the casino over.
While Lewis is excellent at surreptitiously taking over gaming properties, it appears his admin skills aren’t quite therefore hot, as he failed to file the accounts, which meant that the casino was dealing with a $16 million fine from the regulator and feasible closure.
McDonald club player casino no deposit bonus codes nov 2017 made a decision to take drastic action and charged into the casino with guns drawn. We are maybe not quite sure what their goal was, but he’ll have a lot of time to contemplate it in the pokey.
Straub’s Strange Energy
Eccentric billionaire Glen Straub happens to be a lively and um, interesting source of activity this year. The property magnate initially lost the auction to buy the revel that is distressed property 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 house in Florida to recover his medicine, an undeniable fact that so coincidentally took him out from the picture during the final crucial phase of the bidding process.
However, when the winner of 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 on up the $4.9 billion property for a song, at $82 million.
The idealistic designer initially said he wanted to reopen Revel perhaps not being a casino, but as an ‘elite college’ 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 their hands on the property, though, he decided that he’d probably just reopen it as being a casino after all, albeit it one devoted to ‘life expansion technology,’ whatever that is.
By April of this present year, it was none of the things. What it was, however, based on the Atlantic City Fire Department, ended up being a ’47-story fire risk,’ as Straub had been refusing to honor the agreement because of the adjacent power plant and had been cut off.
A lack of flowing water through Revel’s pipes, with no electricity to allow firefighters access to the floors that are upper intended that a fire outbreak could be potentially catastrophic.
The seemingly cursed casino property stays shuttered while Straub’s unpaid energy bills run into the millions. Perhaps he can’t read them while sitting at nighttime.
Nov Macau: What Happened to the Gambling Fireball in 2015?
The fortunes of Macau were currently tumbling as 2015 started. The downturn actually started back in June 2014, when the gambling hub recorded the first-ever monthly dip in revenues since Stanley Ho’s casino monopoly finished in 2012, a move that had effectively opened the Asian gambling region as much as foreign investment.
However, no one could quite have expected numbers to fall so dramatically, and consecutively, month-on-month, for the rest of the 12 months and throughout 2015.
Macau’s gambling enterprises were afflicted with the anti-corruption drive of China’s president Xi Jinping (center) in 2015, which largely impacted the gambling that is asian’s junket industry this present year. (Image: Adrian Bradshaw/EPA)
Exactly What took place?
Just two months ahead of the downturn that is initial Macau had reported a record-breaking Q1 for 2014, with $12.6 billion in revenues. That was up 19.8 percent through the quarter that is first of. And 2014 was on program to beat the season prior, itself a watershed year, and Forbes had been calling Macau ‘one for the planet’s quickest growing economies.’ The enclave was ingesting in just two months what Las Vegas scored in per year.
Macau had benefitted significantly from the explosion in Chinese tourism in the preceding years. A greater freedom of movement and a burgeoning new middle that is chinese had certainly contributed to the gambling boom, and, as the Chinese economy began slow, so did the flow of gamblers through the mainland.
VIP Junkets Hit the Skids
But Macau’s bread and butter had always been VIP that is chinese high. 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 work as middlemen, organizing trips and lending their clients large amounts of profit order to curb restrictions in the number of cash which could be brought from the mainland. VIPs would then settle their debts on their return to Asia.
Many of these VIPs were, in fact, corrupt Communist Party officials whoever fortunes were produced by kickbacks or embezzlement of public money. Corruption had reached epidemic proportions in Asia, and Beijing had had enough, vowing to track fraudulent officials ‘to the ends associated with earth.’
Fearing reprisals from Beijing, the VIPs started initially to avoid them of Macau, maneuvering to Manilla in the Philippines, or even to Vietnam’s Ho Tram Strip to instead get their kicks.
Unprecedented Crackdown
The drive that is anti-corruption squeezing Macau throughout the second 50 % of 2014. Aswell as scaring from the high rollers, Beijing had imposed restrictions on the usage of UnionPay, Asia’s only domestic bank card, which further stemmed the movement of middle-class money from the mainland.
Meanwhile, the introduction of a blanket smoking ban inside gambling enterprises didn’t improve things.
But by early 2015, China had ramped it up a notch, starting an ‘unprecedented crackdown’ in the junket industry, tightening regulatory settings and demanding more transparency through the junkets about their clients and the history that is criminal of employees. By the junket industry was ‘broken,’ according to Rob Goldstein, LVS president september.
Brand New casino resorts, conceived through the boom time, nevertheless started their doors this year, such as for instance James Packer’s Studio City Macau, while Steve Wynn’s Wynn Palace Macau due to open in the middle of next.
Inspite of the general malaise and stingy dining 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.’