Gary Ellis grew up working summers as a dishwasher at his family restaurant, starting at age 12. During his teenage years, Ellis dreamed that he would one day own a casino. He purchased the family restaurant, the Village Pub, from his parents in a 20-year payout that led to the creation of Ellis Island Casino, Hotel & Brewery.
As Ellis Island Casino, Hotel & Brewery grew as a favorite of locals and tourists alike, Ellis went on to own and operate Village Pub taverns and purchased two more locals’ casinos.
Still, he was not finished, and for 20 years worked to develop a mobile device concept called Marker Trax that digitizes casino credit transactions into a seamless system, modernizing a traditional 60-year-old casino credit process. Ellis also co-created Koin, a gaming resort solution that utilizes dynamic, fully integrated financial wallet features to offer customers access to their funds anywhere, anytime.
When you ask Gary Ellis what contributes to his entrepreneurial nature, he goes back to his roots, to his love for the food and beverage business, where watching every dime was a way of life and a recipe for success.
Casinos, taverns, and a brewery
Gary Ellis is the CEO of Ellis Island Casino, Hotel & Brewery; the Village Pub family of casinos; Casino Valle Verde; and the Mt. Charleston Lodge, all located in Southern Nevada. A native Las Vegan, Ellis started working for his family’s restaurant, The Village Pub.
He worked in all departments and in all capacities until 1985, when he purchased the business from his family and became the sole owner and operator of the business. With his sights set on expanding and eventually building a casino, Ellis stepped away from the “Pub” label and changed the name to Ellis Island.
That same year, Ellis struck a deal to build a 300-room Super 8 Motel next to Ellis Island, which would qualify the property under Nevada law as a Resort Hotel and enable Ellis to procure a non-restricted gaming license. The Super 8 opened in June of 1989. Ellis was granted his non-restricted gaming license in 1990. Ellis expanded the original property now known as Ellis Island Casino, Hotel & Brewery.
Paying homage to his roots, Ellis opened a small neighborhood restaurant/casino and named it The Village Pub. This business model proved to be very successful, so Ellis continued to expand throughout the Las Vegas area. There are currently 16 “Pubs” in town, as well as six in the planning stage, a “Yorky’s” and the Casino Valle Verde, a larger version of the “neighborhood” property. In 2018, Ellis also purchased the Mount Charleston Lodge.
Italian roots and work ethic
“I come from an Italian family and my father was in the food and beverage business back in his hometown in West Virginia.
“His father was entrepreneurial and had small food and beverage operations. He grew up in that business, and it was more tradition than anything that when you were old enough, you went to work,” Ellis recalled.
“My father and his family came to Las Vegas in about 1953 to visit family, and my grandfather had a vision. He said to my father, ‘we’re never leaving Las Vegas. We’re going to move here,’ and that’s what happened.
“They moved here and bought a motel downtown. I think the sign is still there. It was the Paradise Motel.
“They went through tough times and lost everything. So, my father had to go to work at 21 at the Golden Nugget as a shill, making $1 an hour, and he’d take as many shifts as he could,” Ellis said.
A brutal, tough business
Coming from a legacy family in Las Vegas, I asked Ellis how his food and beverage background shaped his business philosophy as he moved from restaurant owner to casino owner, to tavern owner, to tech entrepreneur.
“I think the restaurant business is a brutal, tough business. Every penny counts. I kind of succumbed to this through the years. The gaming part of the business has such great margins; you take can your eye off the ball with food and beverage and sometimes look at it as a loss leader.
“But in fact, every dollar that you can put back onto that loss leader drops to the bottom line. My experience in the restaurant business, watching those dollars, watching cost of sales, watching labor helped shape my business philosophy.
“Running that side of it, not relying on gaming to make you look smart, I think that’s the key.” Ellis stated.
You don’t have any money
Ellis’s father was primarily in real estate and wanted him to join that business. Ellis wanted to get into the gaming business and as a first step asked to buy his father out of the Village Pub.
“My father said, ‘You don’t have any money. How the hell are you going to buy me out?’ And that was a really good point. I asked for a monthly payment. He fought with me and didn’t like the idea. As luck would have it, he finally gave in. So, through the years, that was a 20-year deal,” Ellis recalled.
I asked Ellis when he decided to make the move into owning a casino.
“I felt that way most of my life. As I got into my later teens, I knew that’s what I wanted to do. Born and raised in Las Vegas, I always wanted to be in the gaming business. I had a direction. I had a goal,” Ellis said.
As luck would have it
“As luck would have it, maybe six months after I did the deal with my father, I had a local real estate broker call me. He had a group that wanted to build the largest Super 8 Motel in existence with 250 rooms next to Ellis Island Restaurant. I talked them into putting in 300 rooms so we could qualify for the resort hotel zoning, which would allow you to have a non-restricted gaming license.
“And we achieved that and got them to build the 300 rooms. They operated the rooms. I operated the casino. I bought them out years ago; but that was my entry into a non-restricted gaming license.”
Value and fun
I asked Ellis about his operating strategy for what became the Ellis Island Casino Hotel & Brewery.
“You know, people want to have fun. They want value. If you are worth $100 or $100 million, people love value. We try to maintain that, and we try to maintain a fun atmosphere. I think the combination has worked for us through the years.
“We always catered to locals. I thought that would be consistent with the casino we had. I always say we’re one block off Disneyland, Disneyland being the Strip. It’s kind of analogous to factories in other towns where there’s a lot of workers and they support local businesses.
“We catered to the employees on the Strip and that really built the business. And then through the years, more and more of the Strip price points went up and up. We created a value market for tourists. We had breakfast specials and lunch and dinner specials. And the price point was much lower. When we built the brewery, there were only a couple in town, so that was appealing. For the small property that we had, the brewery became our volcano. That was kind of our attraction,” Ellis revealed.
With the heart of a food and beverage guy, Ellis also had a practical reason for opening the brewery.
“The brewery also financially made sense because every time I gave away a Budweiser, it cost me 58 cents. When I brewed our own beer, it was eight cents. So, when I gave away our beers, as opposed to a Budweiser, it put 50 cents on the bottom line. It was a plus for us,” Ellis said.
Beer and karaoke
Ever the cagey operators, Ellis Island Casino Hotel & Brewery became famous for karaoke.
In an interview, Christina Ellis, one of Ellis’s three daughters who works along with her father, said, “I love that everyone I meet in town has an Ellis Island karaoke story.”
As Gary Ellis tells it, the start of karaoke at Ellis Island Casino Hotel & Brewery was a perfect fit for his spunky operating style.
“There was an ordinance for resort hotel zoning that required you to have six hours a day of entertainment. That was very expensive at the time.
“I used karaoke as the entertainment requirement to qualify for the resort hotel zoning. I asked what if our customers were the entertainment, even as bad as they might be? And they agreed to it,” Ellis shared.
Ellis Island Casino, Hotel & Brewery has won over 80 national and local awards for its restaurants, Passport Players Slot Club, Karaoke lounge and Micro Brewery. Most recently it was named the #1 brewery in the Mountain West Region and #9 in the country by New Brewer National Magazine.
Village Pubs
Keeping with his F&B roots, Ellis owns and operates 16 Village Pub Taverns around the Las Vegas area, with six more on the books.
“There are only two licenses available today, the non-restricted, and then, unless you’re buying a grandfathered property, the 15-game restricted license locations. We’ve grown the gaming portion of our business with the restricted locations, although we do have a few grandfathered in locations. It was a natural because the locals’ market is very strong here,” Ellis related.
Valley Verde and Mount Charleston Casinos
“Valley Verde is a property that has the 100-game license with a sports book. Mount Charleston was brought to me years ago by a local broker. I knew of Mount Charleston and loved going up there.
“We bought it, and we were in the process of remodeling. We completed the infrastructure, new engineering for the structure, and then it burned down a few years ago and so we’re in the process of rebuilding,” Ellis said.
From casino operations to tech solutions
At the same time, Ellis was operating casinos and a chain of taverns he was taking steps to move from operations into the world of high-tech casino system solutions, all the while declaring that he is “Not a tech guy.”
In a development that took 20 years, Ellis felt the system for giving players markers was an inefficient and expensive 60-year-old process, especially if the person who was given the marker walked to another casino.
“It was a very simple idea that made sense. Especially when money left our building. If it was $100 or $100,000, this happens everywhere. The fact that somebody could take the casino’s cash and walk across the street to another casino with a credit line from casino ‘A’ going in the pockets of casino ‘B,’ that seemed like, wow, that’s not really an ideal business model for markers.
“So that’s how it came about. It was a very simple idea. I think that’s what convinced me to move forward. I was thinking that this is easy to do. Well, it’s technology, so it’s not so easy to do, but it has been worth it, “ Ellis stated.
In 2018, Ellis launched Marker Trax, a cashless, digital alternative to a casino marker. The product is the first of its kind to offer regulatory-compliant casino marker technology that takes inefficiency out of issuing advances and provides casinos with the tools to manage their casino credit underwriting and repayments. The Marker Trax system allows players to be scored and given access to their markers in minutes.
Marker Trax is a digital version of the traditional casino credit/marker process. Rather than someone approaching the casino cage for a line of credit that’s distributed in cash, Marker Trax customers can apply for and utilize a credit line via their mobile device and a casino’s loyalty program.
Marker Trax is a mobile system that lets casinos lend a bankroll to players. When the player cashes out, the player can only withdraw the amount they won. Marker Trax settles the player’s marker before issuing the winnings.
Marker Trax also utilizes real-time reporting, so operators and players can constantly stay up to speed on the status of an account; and, to help with payback, anytime a player cashes out winnings, any payment balances due are automatically paid back first. (For example: I owe a $50 payment; I win $500 on the slots and cash out; Marker Trax pays that $50 payment and cashes me out $450.)
A 20-year creation
“When I came up with the idea, I thought it’s got to exist somewhere, right? And if it does, I would like to have it. But we could not find it. It took a while to get through the intellectual property patenting process. Then we put more intellectual property around the idea. So that took years. I was not fully concentrating 100% of the time on it, letting the attorneys do their thing.
“I wanted to continue to pursue the patent, which we did. As difficult as it was at times, we eventually received the patent. That inspired me to move forward with creating a tech company, which is not easy. You know, technology is a difficult area of business. Although it’s been good.
“Tom Jingoli and Steve Sutherland over at Konami had an interest in it. They liked it, and so they built the first one. We have IGT and Light & Wonder and then Aristocrat with signed deals, too.
“We have maybe 20 casinos up and running and we’ve got maybe 120 or 140 that are signed up,” Ellis declared.
Recently, Ellis and the team at Marker Trax have moved the original functionality of the technology forward, debuting consumer product Moolah Play last year. “Moolah Play is able to consider a customer’s true ability to pay back a credit line, and expected future profitability, in issuing credit. It provides more accurate and inclusive underwriting and brings more qualified customers onboard than ever before.”
Koin
In 2021, Ellis developed Koin with Gary Larkin, which he says is similar to Apple Pay for casinos. Ellis states that Koin is reimagining the gaming resort experience for the digital age.
Koin is taking the cashless wallet experience we’re used to in so many walks of life into the gaming environment, theoretically allowing you to pay for casino gaming, dining, show tickets, hotel reservations, all from the same digital wallet setup.
Koin is a gaming resort solution that utilizes dynamic, fully integrated financial wallet features to offer customers access to their funds anywhere, anytime. It offers resort operators a fully integrated cage, table games, and retail management system.
“Not only that, but we are working toward functionality within AND outside of the resort environment. Think: Play your favorite slot, then pay for dinner at the resort, and then for your gas on the way home, all from the same app.
“We do not really identify it as a wallet, although, in many ways, it operates as a wallet. It’s more than that. It’s a full payment ecosystem. It’s a network and it expands out beyond just the gaming space,” Ellis said.
A family tradition
Like his father and grandfather before, Gary Ellis keeps the family tradition and works with his three daughters in the business.
Today he oversees casinos, a chain of taverns and two expanding tech businesses, which are part of a growing family enterprise that all started with the traditions and attitudes of his early days saving every penny in the family restaurant business.
Entries in the Faces of Gaming series:
- Adam Wiesberg – A journey from sign salesman to dealer to El Cortez GM
- Gary Ellis – Las Vegas entrepreneur (now reading)
- Alan Feldman – From Mirage and MGM to responsible gaming expert
- John Acres – the Thomas Edison of gaming
- Alex Alvarado — Vice President, Casino Operations at MGM National Harbor and Casino Aficionado
- Lauren Bates — A successful VP at Konami and Chair of Global Gaming Women, all before her 40th birthday
- TJ Tejeda and EZ Baccarat – Reimagining a centuries-old game
- Chris Andrews — Don’t cry for the bookmaker
- Wes Ehrecke — From gasohol and pork chops to president of the Iowa Gaming Association
- Steve Browne – Casino philosopher, master gaming instructor and father of a rocket scientist
- Noah Acres – Shaking up the industry one player record at a time
- Kate Chambers – ICE queen, casino exhibition maven and keeper of fairy dust
- Joe Asher — From the newsstand and racetrack to sports-betting icon
- Paul Speirs-Hernandez — Randomness, chance, reward, and luck
- Ainsworth’s Deron Hunsberger — From finance and sales to president
- Roger Gros — Chronicler of the gaming industry for four decades and counting
- Debi Nutton — Everi board member, gaming trailblazer
- Cache Creek’s Kari Stout-Smith — Dancing backwards in high heels
- Andrew Economon — Making downtown Las Vegas cool again
- Richard Marcus — From the wrong side of the casino tables to the right
- Willy Allison — From New Zealand bloke to world game-protection leader
- Tom Jingoli — From gaming enforcement agent to COO of Konami Gaming
- Tino Magnatta — Interviewing the interviewer, 3,000 and counting since COVID
- Deana and Brady Scott — Still talking shop with the owners of Raving Consulting
- Kevin Parker — “Putting everything into everything I do”
- Laura Penney — Putting in the Work as CEO of Coeur d’Alene Casino
- Andre Carrier — Paying it forward
- Jean Scott — The original casino influencer, still frugal gambling after all these years
- Anika Howard — From Harrah’s First Interactive Employee to CEO of Wondr Nation
- Anthony Curtis — Gambling Guru, Las Vegas Expert, Customer Advocate with Street Cred
- Mark Wayman — An executive recruiter with a brand and something to say
- Melonie Johnson — From rural Louisiana to resort-casino leadership
- Brian Christopher — From actor, Uber driver, and cater waiter to slot celebrity
- Allan Solomon — From accountant and tax lawyer to pioneering casino owner
- Kenny Epstein — A Niche from Nostalgia
Tom Osiecki is a casino consultant who writes an occasional column for CDC Gaming called Faces of Gaming, about interesting and engaging people in the gaming industry.
Tom Osiecki is a marketing and management consultant for Raving Consulting and can be reached for consulting engagements at 775-329-7864.
If you know of a fascinating personality in the gaming industry you would like to see profiled, please send Tom Osiecki an email at tosiecki@cdcgaming.com
