Summary

In this episode, Nick and guest co-host, Lucien Wijsman, speak with P2E President & COO, Aaron Gomes. Hear about growing-up in a prominent gaming family, Aaron's path to his current role, the ins and outs of HHR, and P2E's history, philosophies, current portfolio, and upcoming projects, including the new Cedar Crossing Casino in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Also in this episode, listener questions and the new ReelHot Index.

Transcript

Nick Hogan:

Howdy everyone. Welcome to our second episode of our fourth season. As mentioned in last month’s episode, my trusty go host, Don Retzloff retired in January, and so I’ve lined up some guest hosts for the next few episodes. My co-host today is an operational consultant to some of the most powerful groups in gaming, founder of the Electronic Gaming Academy, founder, organizer and host, the Casino Operations Summit, fellow Leiden resident, and as I realized yesterday, the first ever guest on this podcast. I’m speaking of course, about Mr. Lucien Wijsman. Hello there, Lucien, how are things with you today?

Lucien Wijsman:

Hi, Nick. Yeah, we’re sharing beautiful weather today, aren’t we?

Nick Hogan:

Indeed.

Lucien Wijsman:

Which is rare in the beautiful city of Leiden.

Nick Hogan:

Yes, indeed. So Lucien, the big news, at least in the Real Metrics universe this month is that on the 14th of March, we launched a new real hot index, and here we took a very different approach than what the industry is accustomed to seeing in performance ranking in that the industrial rankings are broken out by player segment with game speed performance indexing and average bets quantified on a segment by segment basis. So for anybody who wants to check that out, just head over to the Real Metrics LinkedIn page where you’ll find a story covering the new real hot index and within the first paragraph of that story, link to the index itself. So now we received a fair bit of listener email about this, and we’ll hit that in a second, but as I’m always interested in what you have to say about industry developments Lucien, I’m curious to first collect some of your thoughts on this. Have you had a chance to look at it and just want to get your thoughts on it?

Lucien Wijsman:

Yeah, actually I did and it came to me through a somewhat unexpected source, but nevertheless, it is something that we’ve been talking about quite a bit. What I find when I go to casinos on a Saturday night, I see the biggest players on the floor standing behind small players on the most popular games on the floor, and we’ve been going back and forth on this. A player comes to a casino with a bundle of money in his wallet, you want to make sure that he has access to product. So the way that you are now looking at segments of players and basically making sure that you have the product that your top players want to play available for those players.

In my book, that’s probably the lowest hanging fruit on casino floors. It doesn’t go lower than that and I think the impact of making sure that you have the right amount of game titles for your top segment or top segments, there is a bit of an overlap between the two. Making sure that you have enough product available for these people in all the casinos that I know in Europe and Africa and Asia is going to significantly impact the bottom line of casinos.

Nick Hogan:

Yeah, great. Yeah, and we did get a lot of the same kind of feedback in what we’ve seen and then there was a few questions that were pretty interesting. I’ll jump into one of these. Before I address it, let me just first say that we’d love to tackle any questions that anybody listening may have. So if you have a question about what we’re presenting or something you’d like us to present, please drop us an email at reelcast@realmetrics.com. Again, that’s R-E-E-L-C-A-S-T at realmetrics.com. Our policy is to keep all questions anonymous, so please speak directly and don’t worry about us revealing your identity. That is not something we do. Okay, so this one comes from a rather big name in casino ops from one of the bigger American multi-site casino groups and it reads, “Hi guys, first, absolutely love the new index, especially the breakouts covering player share versus revenue share.

Internally, this helps me to emphasize two things that most of our slot capital should be directed toward the top players groupings and also that we need to reduce theme counts on a lot of slot floors. My question is about the ISR values. I understand that this measures the themes appeal to your A and B segments and that themes with higher ISR values should be installed in greater numbers. In terms of getting to the right number of units, are you mainly suggesting occupancy benchmarks? If so, what are those? Love what you’ve done here, keep up the great work. Okay, so this is a very insightful question and many thanks to the listener for that. So for anybody listening, the question is about a column in the index called ISR, which stands for intersegment resonance, and it measures that titles appeal to players within the A and B segments.

So the upper segments and the listener who submitted that question pretty much nailed it. So the titles with the high and very high ISR designations are titles that appeal very strongly to both A and B segment players, and as you’re dealing with height and demand levels, you’ll want to install these in larger numbers so that you can maximize the capture there, and in answer to your question, occupancy is indeed very important in terms of working toward the sweet spots in the saturation levels. Now, it tends to be pretty variable by property, but as a general guideline, you’ll want to target mean occupancy levels of 35 to 40% on the core product side and in the high-60s to mid-70s for premium. You do need however, to also keep an eye on the peak occupancy rates, which can change that calculus a bit. Now, it was a pretty specific question. I’m not sure I left a lot of room for follow up there, but anything