Reports on Nevada gaming.

I came across this recently and thought it might be of interest. http://gaming.unlv.edu/reports.html
There is also an articles section that some may find interesting.

UNLV professor David Schwartz often comments on the blog at the link here.

He runs the UNLV center for gaming research. His interest is more with the history of gaming with his book Roll the Bones.

The Wizard is more interested in the player side of gambling. David writes a lot about trends in gaming, and almost nothing about gaming probabilities and house edge.

David Schwartz has done his very best to keep calling attention to the fact that baccarat is the only table game that is recovering as the following table shows percentage changes over the last 40 months.

baccarat	+10.58%
craps	-18.32%
roulette	-18.34%
3 - card	-19.47%
sports	-19.99%
blackjack	-32.42%
race	-52.94%
other table games	-24.32%

Great link. I will definitely add his blog to my bookmarks.

Putting it in perspective: in February 2004, baccarat win accounted for 6.08% of total Nevada gaming revenue. In February 2011, it accounted for 15.98%. When the house gets lucky, that number is even higher; in February 2010, 21.77% of state gaming revenues came from a few baccarat tables on the Strip.

For those of you investors who are trying to gauge the performance of companies with heavy Strip exposure, there's an even higher reliance on baccarat: from 11.92% (2004) to 27.35% (2011), with the high point in 2010 (36.10%). Since the Strip totals also include resorts that don't have a lot of baccarat action, I'd guess that for WYNN, LVS, and MGM, that percentage is much higher.

my only knowledge of baccarat, other than the correct spelling, is that James Bond never lost at it.

Quote: buzzpaff

For those of you investors who are trying to gauge the performance of companies with heavy Strip exposure, there's an even higher reliance on baccarat

The difficult question is how much does the corporation spend to attract these players? It's not like a slot machine where you put it on the floor and plug it in.

When the total gaming revenue showed some signs of improvement, people were shocked when MGM Resorts release a quarterly report that was even worse than the last one.

In the single case of Hard Rock Casino which only has one resort, you could actually track one company in search of the baccarat profits. They released a press release to say that they were pursuing the mid-level baccarat player. To this end they hired staff, built hotel rooms, redesigned their casino to create a quite section that would be more appealing to baccarat players than the section outside of their concert venues. You could track the changes in their financial reports. The end result was almost predictably an improvement in gaming revenue, but an increase in costs that exceeded that improvement. The bankruptcy was almost inevitable.

Plus, given the decay in baccarat performance since last September, the market seems highly susceptible to overseas competition. That may not be a bad thing for Sands Corporation since they are a key player in all the markets. In fact, they seem to have given up on trying to attract the high level players to Vegas.