Stephen Alan Wynn - Chairman and Chief Executive Officer
Management
And, for example, last June we held 32% on a couple hundred million dollars. This year, our casino is behaving normally at over $21 million, but we made $60 odd million last year. We have these – we get the benefit of these tremendous big players. But when you have one of these giant months where you win all the money, the next year it always looks a little funny. In the end it all evens out, but we see these volatility fluctuations. But, our base business tends to be pretty steady. And Shaun, I guess that's the best way to explain it. We had more Chinese play last year than we did this year, and I mean a place like our own, we can make $60 million in a month in this hotel or $70 million. We can also make $25 million, and as I say, it evens out at the end. But when you look at it, short term, as we do every six or eight hours a day, I do at least, I'm in the casino every day and on the phone with my people. We've readjusted our floor on the Fourth of July and interestingly enough, many of the games in Las Vegas have become marginally profitable. Years ago down at Binion's, they started at the crap table of giving ten times odds. If you bet $100 on the line, you could bet $1,000 on the free odds behind the line if you bet the pass line. I'm getting a little technical. But in the old days in dice, whatever you bet on the line you could bet the same amount behind the line, and that was a hold percentage of a little under 1%. Then they started giving double odds compared to the amount of money you bet on the pass line, and that lowered the house percentage to 0.57%. Then there became a pattern on the strip of what's called the three, four, five. Depending on what numbers you were betting on the crap table to come up before number seven came up, you could get three times odds, four times odds, or five times odds. There are pairs of numbers on a dice table. Four and ten have two to one odds, five and nine have a different set of odds, and six to eight or six to five. Well, depending on what number you were trying to get, you could get three, four, or five times odds. That became a house advantage of 0.37%. With three dealers and a box man and a half of a floor man for every table, craps is not a really profitable game at that level. So I changed the casino. In effect, I raised the price, and I went to double odds only except for extremely high play with $1,000 minimum bet. I also rearranged the floor in the casino to put our specialty games that are very popular with the public that have a higher margin and I put them in the 100% location and I moved my games with less of a margin to secondary locations. Those changes have worked out favorably to us in the past three weeks, and that kind of re-examination – our slot floor has been redone. We win more money with less games now. These are some of the reasons why we make more money than anybody else in Las Vegas. Now some of the operators will copy us. We're not allowed to talk to one another because of obvious legal implications of price-fixing, but we don't really care what the other guys do. We run our own business the way we see we should, and we're not in business to offer games that don't make money, and I don't mind saying that publicly. So, we've done quite a bit of work in tightening up the way the casino works, and I know our competitors are on the call and they probably – everybody knows that the minute you make a change like that in Las Vegas, it goes around town like a wildfire. But those are some of the things we're doing and it touches every aspect. We're constantly re-examining everything we do here. We sit in my office and discuss the most fundamental aspects of this industry every single week, and we take nothing. We are not so much concerned of what has been or what is as we are concerned about what might be, and that's a principle truth of our company, whether it's in China or in Las Vegas or Boston or wherever. Next question?