Inside Gaming: Wynn Palace Cotai to Open, Court Rules Against NJ Sports Betting

In this week’s installment of Inside Gaming, the Wynn Palace Cotai is almost ready to open, albeit with fewer gaming tables than they would have liked, a federal appeals court shoots down New Jersey’s latest effort to legalize sports betting, and those wanting to bring casino games to Nebraska fail in their efforts to get an amendment on this fall’s ballot.

Wynn Palace Cotai Opening Soon With Fewer Tables Than Desired

After eight years’ worth of planning and four-plus years after the initial groundbreaking, the Wynn Palace Cotai resort and casino will at last be opening its doors in less than two weeks, albeit with fewer gaming tables than Wynn Resorts had hoped to have up and running.

The $4.2 billion property located on Macau’s Cotai Strip will open on August 23 following several delays. Along with a 1,700-room hotel, a spa, an 8-acre “performance lake” complete with gondolas, abundant convention space, and numerous restaurants and shopping options, the casino will initially feature 1,145 slot machines and 100 gaming tables, with 25 more tables to be added on January 1, 2017 and 25 more on January 1, 2018.

The property can accommodate up to 500 tables, and Wynn Resorts had hoped to have 400 although knew some time ago governmental restrictions would limit the number of tables they would be allowed to have.

As Bloomberg reports, Macau’s Secretary for Economy and Finance Lionel Leong explained in a statement earlier today that the limitation on the number of tables “is based on the 3 percent table growth each year in Macau from 2013 to 2022” that was instituted earlier this year.

The limit is part of a larger effort to reduce the growth of gambling in Macau and promote other kinds of revenue amid the ongoing, lengthy decline in gambling revenue experienced by the Special Administrative Region over the last two-plus years.

The “3 percent” cap refers to the number of total gaming tables in Macau, imposing a limit on how many more tables can be added each year by all properties. The fact that two other resorts will be opening in Cotai later this year and another at the start of 2017 therefore affected how many tables Wynn Resorts would be allowed to have.

As recently as late last month, industry analysts projected they would be allowed 200-250 tables, and so the limit of 100 at opening should significantly impact the Wynn’s bottom line for the Cotai property during its first months of operation.

“A 150-table deficit reduces the earnings power of Wynn Macau by $85 million in 2017,” opined analyst Harry Curtis, as CNBC reports. Analyst Grant Govertsen additionally noted that the limit “does raise concerns on how an operator can ultimately get to where they need to be on a longer-term basis with only …

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