Summary

In this episode, Nick and Dan catch up with Lucien Wijsman, owner of the Casino Operations Summit, which takes place from April 21 through 23 in Thessaloniki, Greece. Learn about the event's history and why it is increasingly regarded as Europe’s preeminent industry event. Also, get an overview of the challenges currently facing Europe’s casino operators and a preview of this year’s themes—land-based and online coexistence, the re-segmentation of traditional player personas, and transparent communication with players. Also in this episode, 2025 player behavior trends. Notes - For more info on the Casino Operations Summit, see https://casinooperationssummit.net - Correction: Macau annual casino revenues (gaming + non-gaming) in 2025 were ~$35B vs Las Vegas at ~$32B, including all Strip & off-Strip locations. Slot revenue during the same period was roughly ~$11B in Las Vegas and ~$1.7B in Macau.

Transcript

Nick Hogan:

Morning, Dan. How are things in Vegas this morning?

Dan Cherry:

Wonderful, Nick. Good morning. Good to see you.

Nick Hogan:

Likewise. Okay, Dan. So just continuing our coverage of the prediction markets, some big news there. On the 17th of March, Arizona’s Attorney General filed criminal charges against Kalshi, 20 counts of illegal gambling, including operating an unlicensed sportsbook within the state and for facilitating election wagering, which is explicitly prohibited under Arizona law. So the interesting thing here is that Kalshi was somehow tipped off to the filing and on the 12th of March, attempted to head it off by filing for a temporary restraining order in federal court, arguing that Arizona has no jurisdiction, of course, as they’re federally regulated by the CFTC. The federal judge denied their request and agreed to rule further on the matter during a hearing scheduled on April 3rd.

So legal analysts project that the judge is going to adhere to a legal doctrine known as the younger abstention, that was new for me, which holds that federal courts generally should not interfere with ongoing criminal cases at the state level. So Dan, I don’t know about you. I was encouraged to see this. Have you picked up any related stories or anything since we last spoke?

Dan Cherry:

Well, just here locally in Nevada, it’s personal because Kalshi actually went dark a few days ago for-

Nick Hogan:

How long [inaudible 00:01:38]

Dan Cherry:

… officially for 14 days.

Nick Hogan:

Okay.

Dan Cherry:

The latest ruling by the state court, I think advanced of a first week of May hearing or ruling. So that’s another big development here, but it’s heating up for sure.

Nick Hogan:

Yeah. Crazy, crazy stuff. So I think we’ve covered it a lot, so I think we can move on. But yeah, I just thought we’d throw that one out there as it’s for sure a big development moving from the civil domain into criminal now. Okay. This month’s listener question. Before I hit it, let me say we love to tackle any questions anybody listening may have. So if you have questions about what we’re presenting or something you’d like us to present, please drop us an email at reelcast@reelmetrics.com. Again, that’s R-E-E-L-C-A-S-T at reelmetrics.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 comes from a casino operator in the American Midwest who says, “Hi, guys. I really like it when you tell listeners about the trends real metrics seized in player behavior. Now that 2025 is behind us, did you see anything noteworthy last year that you could share with us?”

So many thanks to the listener for that. My apologies for being a bit data light over the past several episodes. You can blame prediction markets, I guess. So I dove in and looked at a few things. Before I get started, let’s just briefly cover how we look at this. So at ReelMetrics, we segment play across three tiers pan-industrially. So that’s A players, B players, and C players. The As generally comprise about 5% of the total player population and generate around 40% of all slot revenues. This varies on a venue by venue basis, but I’m giving you the industry numbers here. Then we have our Bs around 15% of players producing half of all revenue, followed by the Cs, which comprises around 80% of players and 10% of revenue.

So if you want a deeper explanation of how we segment, just go to cdcgaming.com/reelmetrics and read the notes on page two of any real hot index that you pick up there. Okay. So there are a number of metrics that we watch pretty closely. These are things like all the averages for number of trips, number of titles per trip, session duration, session wager, average wager, trip wager, loyalty program, retention rates. These are some of the big ones that we really hit. Needless to say, we also are quite focused on each segment’s top titles, cabinets, and market baskets.

So Dan, as you know, back in 2022, ReelMetrics published our findings on premium product and cannibalization, that whole thing. And after that, we saw a huge influx of premium product onto North American slot floors. So we look back 10 years, premium floor share was kind of three to 5% range. And these days when we look across our network, it’s over 16% nationwide. So we’ve seen quite a jump there.

And when operators first start this demand balancing, as we call it, they see huge increases in that A segment productivity. And in many cases, we actually see ADT doubling and things of this nature. So with a good amount of that A segment demand balancing in the rearview mirror now, the 2025 story was really about stabilization of that demand. So these players have really ascended to new plateaus where we see the metrics are largely settling. We see growth in the kind of five to 7% range across most metrics. So it’s healthy, but it’s nothing bonkers that we see with those first efforts go through in demand balancing.

The real story last year was in the B segment where we saw pan-industrially the same thing that we see at individual venues following those demand balancing efforts. And that upper strata of B players start moving into wilder, more expensive product and really intensifying that play. And a lot of them actually going up into the A segment in return for this. And economics, this is known as induced demand is the principle where increments and supply levels of certain goods just increase overall demand levels. And we saw a lot of that in 2025.

So in the B segment, we saw a premium play was up by like 6% for the year, but that translated to an average increase in