Steady As They Blow, Millions: Gaming Whales Back In Macau Waters


In the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, which devastated Macau, the whales are finally back playing the tables at the world’s biggest gambling hub.

Gross Gaming Revenue (GGR) for the first six days of October–known as Golden Week–in the former Portuguese, now China, enclave was registered at 6.5 billion Macanese pataca (£619.9m/US$810m), up 30 percent year-on-year.

And according to the Macau Gaming Inspection and Coordination Bureau, using data gathered by Citigroup, overall GGR is currently running at 130-140 percent of pre-pandemic levels.

Visitor levels are also up on 2019, pre-Covid-19, numbers and gambling per capita spend has surged by some 25 percent.

Notorious

Although Macau’s once-notorious junket rooms have been reined-in for some time, and several money laundering scams busted–as previously reported in iGamingFuture–, the Big Hitters, the so-called “whales” of the gambling world, players who are happy to wager the equivalent of £10,000-£40,000 on a hand of cards, are back in force.

These days, according to contemporary gaming nomenclature, VIP in Macau refers to punters playing baccarat, who in turn are classified as either “premium mass” or “grind mass” — depending on the size of their average bet.

During just one day of Golden Week, observers monitored 62 punters betting a minimum of HK$100,000 (£9,850/US$12,868) on a play — double the number during the whole of last year’s Golden Week, a special Chinese national holiday that honours Mao Zedong’s declaration of Independence in 1949.

Macau Casinos Enjoyed Record Action
“The amount of premium mass wager we observed in our National Day Golden Week table survey is record-breaking,” a spokesperson at the Macau Gaming Bureau told this reporter.

“The [number] of premium mass players and whales we ran into were also record highs.”

Most of Macau’s top casinos–among them the Galaxy, Wynn Palace, The Sands Palace–enjoyed bumper action.

Mainland China’s mid-term economic outlook may be problematic, despite a recent mega stimulus package, which according to some date released this week boosted the combined wealth of 54 Chinese billionaires by some US$130 billion (£76.52bn).

But there can be no doubt that the whales are back and swimming in the warm waters of Macau.

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