I’ve been going to G2E (or the World Gaming Congress) in one form or another for the better part of four decades, first as a green PR writer, later as a slot VP signing off on hotel rooms and hospitality suites, and lately as a guy who just tries to see everything worth seeing before his feet give out. And in all that time, the pre-show checklist hasn’t changed much:
- Confirm you’re still on the travel squad.
- Lock down the essentials: hotel, flight, IDs, TSA clearance, show badge.
- Hit as many early vendor G2E previews as you can stomach.
- Get your preferred party invites on your calendar before you double-book.
- Choose your seminars and note their locations in advance, because the seats in the back where you check your email unnoticed fill up fast.
- Pack chargers, cords, and batteries (you will forget one anyway).
- Stock up on more business cards than you think you’ll need or make sure your eCard is up to date. Either works. Neither is optional.
- New shoes? Break them in at home weeks in advance. G2E is not the place to learn that painful lesson.
But somewhere in the last few years, a ninth item snuck onto that list, and now it’s practically carved in stone:
- Read the September 2026 Eilers report(s) before you land in Vegas.
If you’re one of the operators feeding data into their Central Game Performance Database, it’ll show up in your inbox a day or two before you fly out. The timing is anything but accidental. It will be fresh in your head when the pitches start. And they will start. Every manufacturer on that floor has already found their favorite line:
- “We’re #1 in Large Form Factor cabinets.”
- “We cracked the Top 25 on New Games Emerging Suppliers.”
- “Our game outranked L&W and Everi in Low Denom, Mechanical Reel.”
You’ll hear some version of that pitch a dozen times before lunch on Day One. So, it’s worth knowing exactly what “Eilers” is, and why an entire industry often treats one company’s spreadsheet like scripture.
In the beginning
The nickname “Eilers” stands for Eilers & Krejcik Gaming (founders Todd Eilers and Adam Krejcik) with an early assist from veteran gaming writer Frank Fantini (Fantini Research).
The whole thing traces back to Eilers’ time in the Air Force, stationed at El Segundo while he worked on an MBA at Loyola Marymount. Looking for his next move, he landed an entry-level gig covering gaming stocks at Roth Capital Partners in Newport Beach. That’s the door he walked through. He worked his way up to running Roth’s gaming coverage, and along the way met Krejcik, his future partner. Todd specialized in land-based operations and Adam took to interactive and digital.
Both noticed the same thing anyone who’s sat through a slot manufacturer’s investor call has noticed. As Eilers recalled recently, “New products were always doing well, and everyone was always gaining market share. But if you added up the ship share that everyone cited, it always ended up above 100%, which we knew wasn’t correct.”
So, they started doing something almost nobody in equity research was doing at the time: they called or met with casino slot directors and asked them what was really happening on their floors.
It sounds obvious now. It wasn’t then. As a result, they had more info than most of their financial colleagues. But Todd soon realized even that wasn’t enough: “I would get differing views from operators, and it was kind of tough to make sense of that. We really needed to get more data points and talk to more people. That’s kind of how the market research started with the slot survey.”
The trick that made operators actually “talk”
Plenty of people had tried building something like this before. All of them ran into the same wall: no casino wants its house numbers floating around. The problem was that operators never wanted to share their own data, even though they were desperate to get some unbiased information from others.
The fix was two ideas, both simple, both a little clever:
- Index everything. Instead of reporting your raw win-per-unit numbers, you would only provide a percentage-like number of the performance relative to its own house average (that’s indexing). A casino with a house average of $100/day that has a machine producing $100/day reports that game to Eilers as 1.00. +A $300/day performer is 3.00.
- A major property averaging $600 WPU would report a $300/day game as a 0.5. Thus the same earner could result in a wildly different index, because it’s measured against a different baseline. It’s a clean way to strip out house size and let’s us compare a game’s actual pulling power across completely different casinos. Simply: it gives an accurate snapshot of the game’s overall popularity and profitability.
- Make the report free for anyone who contributes. They give operators the compiled survey at no charge in exchange for providing their own index numbers. The business model is to then sell access to this data to the people who’d happily pay for it (that’s manufacturers and the investment crowd including, ironically, some of Eilers’ former colleagues back at Roth).
They started with about 15 operators joining the survey. Then Eilers brought in Frank Fantini, a respected gaming writer who’d been covering the industry since 1990. He had a loyal readership on both the operator and investor sides. The participant list doubled almost overnight. EKG eventually bought Fantini’s stake outright, and they’ve been growing ever since.
Today the Central Game Performance Database (aka “the report”) covers 923 casinos and 678,535 slot machines. That’s not a niche data set anymore. That’s a good chunk of the industry (specifically, 45% of the market).
What’s actually worth reading before G2E
EKG puts out reports now on nearly everything: route operations, electronic table games, Class II, digital, interactive, regional breakdowns, Latin America, Europe, and custom work for individual clients. It’s a lot.
But if you’re heading to G2E and only have time for two of them, make it these:
- The Game Performance Report – This breaks game themes down by Core (generally titles you can buy and own), Premium Leased, and WAP. Each of those can be further split by denomination. There are similar breakdowns for Mechanical Reels (Class II and Video Poker)
- The Cabinet Performance Report – This is the same kind of ranking for nearly a dozen types of physical machine hardware.
Two specific items of note in the latest report are: 1. The ratio of “Owned” vs “Leased and WAP.” The latter category hit an all-time high of 16.1% this month; 2. Their monthly “Operator Poll” showed, 73% said what they are “most excited to see on the G2E Floor” are “Core/For Sale Slots” (aka Owned) games compared to just 18% “Leased & WAP” games. Interestingly, that is almost the exact opposite of what manufacturers and Wall Street investors look for since they have a major impact on vendor financials.
And keep a special eye on the Top New Games list. It ranks recently launched titles that are still thin on install counts because they’ve only been in the field a month or three. Small sample sizes, sure, but it’s the closest thing the industry has to an early read on what’s about to break out.
Here’s the honest truth from someone who’s sat across the table from plenty of slot reps: nobody believes a vendor pitch anymore unless the Eilers’ numbers back it up. And the manufacturers know it. That’s why you’ll hear their favorite Eilers’ stat cited before they’ve even finished shaking your hand.
Other sources, even if Eilers gets top billing
ReelMetrics has been running since 2014, covering 116 casinos and roughly 225,000 games. It is a smaller footprint than Eilers, but it also collects player-tier profiles, which Eilers doesn’t. This is extremely useful if you’re trying to figure out how a game performs between your high-value players versus medium value and your broader base. If you are a ReelMetrics subscriber, they also rank how your property is doing compared to the national database.
QCI Metrics just launched last month, and its pitch is speed: live data from the moment you open the report, looking back 30 or 90 days. That’s a four-to-eight-week head start on everybody else. It’s young but growing with 100,000 machines now from just a handful of QCI’s 400 customers. But that kind of immediacy is going to be hard to ignore once their sample size grows. Like ReelMetrics, QCI also shows how your casino’s KPIs compare to the survey, but instantly up-to-date on demand.
But for G2E 2026, Eilers is the main one to watch. Read it, or one of the others, and you’ll actually understand the pitch instead of just nodding along to it.
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