Thursday, February 9, 2017
From time to time, the success of the Resorts World Casino New York City at Aqueduct has been chronicled here for the purposes of assessing its impact on the purses at Saratoga, Belmont Park and the Big A. Yesterday looked to be a good time to address the latest update. Guess what to my wandering eyes did appear? Somewhere along the way - last October - the New York scenario changed drastically, and I've been trying to sort out the details with little success.
Here's the scoop. The first thing I noticed was that the Big A casino was sailing along toward another record year as of the Oct. 8 figures, which was 28 weeks into the fiscal year. The weekly "credits played" varied from a low of $365,409,003 for the week ending June 25, to the high of $425,598,771 for the week ending April 2, which was the first week of the fiscal year.
However, for the week ending Oct. 15, the figure tumbled slightly to $357,838,894, and the next week it went into freefall at $257,017,432. A quick check below that showed that the figures remained below $300 million right through Feb. 4. A little detective work followed, and I stumbled upon another chart, labeled "Nassau OTB at Resorts World Casino," and the first week of figures listed was through Oct. 15. Aha. Only $16,439,404, but enough to see why the Big A casino dropped that week.
After that 16 more weeks of figures, from a low of $108,216,130 to a high of $128,192,171. Obviously, that's why the Big A casino's numbers plummeted. I guess I missed any announcement in October of what was transpiring, so I started to dig. Was this a new casino? I found an article from Newsday dated Oct. 5 with the headline "NY gaming commission approves Nassau $26M casino deal."
What followed was a dizzying review of the terms of the deal, citing so many different figures it made my head spin, but all designed to help bail out Nassau OTB, which apparently has several branches. Nowhere, however, did it explain where the Nassau OTB figures were coming from. What physical plant were players going to in order to give Nassau OTB its own page in the lottery section, along with the casinos at the Big A, Saratoga, Batavia, Vernon Downs and the other New York casinos?
The original Resorts World Casino and the Nassau OTB Casino have different phone numbers. I tried both, and the same message, in the same voice, answers both. "All representatives are currently busy with other customers," the voice said. Surprise. It told me to hold on, and someone would be with me shortly. Shortly turned into hours as I made repeated calls to both. So I tried the New York Gaming Commission, and a young lady told me someone would get back to me. That was at mid-day yesterday. I'm hoping it will be in this lifetime.
By the way, the Big A casino's credits played was at $15.2 billion through Feb. 4 and there are seven weeks remaining to the fiscal year. Last year's record was $20.4 billion. They won't come close. Nassau OTB has credits played of $1.8 billion thus far.
Maybe there will be some further explanation today.
3 P. M. today - I finally had someone answer the phone at Resorts World Casino New York. A very nice young lady had no idea what I was talking about. She couldn't even refer me to someone else, or she didn't want to.
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