Generally speaking, high-rollers could afford to squander the vast sums they push across the baccarat table in casino plaques, the employee said. It’s on the main floor that most of the social damage wrought by Crown is done, one former employee told the Guardian.

Club EGMs average $73,250 per annum and hotels $129,000 per annum. “Pokies at Crown make about $185,000 each per annum, well above the revenue of clubs and pubs,” he said. Livingstone, an associate professor at Monash University in Melbourne, said that based on data in Crown’s annual report, in a normal – non-Covid – year its 2,600 poker machines are the most lucrative in the state. Royal commissioner Ray Finkelstein at the opening of Victoria’s inquiry into Crown casino in Melbourne. “We know that large venues attract higher expenditure and higher rates of harm.” “This is because it’s open 24 hours per day almost every day of the year, because it is centrally located, and because it has a very large and busy main floor along with high-roller rooms, including high-roller rooms for people who use EGMs ,” he said. “Crown is very much a harm-production factory,” said one of the casino’s most consistent critics, gambling researcher Charles Livingstone. In the casino trade, it’s called “grind”.Īnd in Australia, a country that loves a punt, there’s plenty of it. It is the steady flow of more ordinary folk through the building that provides the casino with a predictable flow of cash. While high-rollers can be lucrative, blowing millions of dollars in a few days, the business is also highly volatile due to the narrow house margin on the game favoured by gamblers from Asia: baccarat. This means Finkelstein’s inquiry will descend from the upstairs suites where, in pre-Covid and pre-scandal times, high-rollers smoked at baccarat tables and junket operators plied their trade on the main gaming floor, an area as big as a football field crammed with poker machines and gaming tables. Instead, he said he planned to use the limited time he has available – he is supposed to provide a final report by August – to look into four other areas: whether money laundering is still taking place at the Melbourne casino, whether Crown is in breach of any laws or regulations, whether it has broken its contract with the state to run the casino and “most importantly, the manner in which it deals with gambling addiction”.

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