Casino news relating to land based casinos is welcome

This month’s casino news does not focus for once on the online casino sector, but concerns significant potential changes in the ownership of our land based casinos. There have been reports all week of a potential £250 million bid for Gala Casinos by the Rank Group. Such a take-over would increase Ranks current estate of 35 sites to 57, enabling the group to claim to be the biggest casino group in Britain. That position is currently held by Genting UK with 46 gaming venues on its books. Gala, who also own Gala Bingo and Coral bookmakers have long been considered a potential break-up candidate by analysts, and it is thought that a bid for its casino division might well be welcomed. From Rank’s point of view, Ian Burke the Chairman and Chief Executive has long expressed the wish to expand their Grosvenor Casino estate, and this would be the first significant move in that direction. We have become used to news of online casinos expanding rapidly, but good news relating to land based casinos has been a rare occurrence recently, so a take-over on this scale would be a welcome boost to this sector of the casino business. Whilst we’re talking about news of land based casinos, we should mention the attempts by the American gambling giant Sheldon Adelson to build a Las Vegas style gambling complex in Spain, which would be designed to attract casino games gamblers from all over Europe. Unfortunately, his plans have not met with universal approval amongst Spanish politicians, in spite of the massive unemployment problems in Spain, and this enormous planned European investment by Las Vegas Sands may not proceed, at least in Spain. Las Vegas Sands is the biggest casino business in the world, and will undoubtedly expand into Europe and Asia at some time in  the near future, so we will monitor developments in this area of casino news.