LAS VEGAS – Craps tables that illuminate winning wagers from beneath the felt. A sports book with self-serve beer taps and individual fan-caves with video game consoles. A full-service bar lined with video games instead of video poker.
The newest section of casino floor at the Linq Hotel & Casino is unlike anything the gaming industry has seen before, and it offers a glimpse into the future of gambling.
This corner of casino space at the intersection of the Linq Promenade and the Las Vegas Strip was designed to be a living laboratory, a place where property owner Caesars Entertainment could pilot new games, try new technologies, and experiment with ways to get younger visitors to Las Vegas excited about gambling.
Slot machine area at the Linq
After six months, the place is turning heads.
Christian Stewart, executive vice president of gaming and interactive entertainment for Caesars Entertainment, declined to go into specifics, but said the new casino has seen steady increases in traffic, handle, and interest since it was reborn from a more traditional casino space in the summer of 2019.
“We’re launching products here to see what works, to see what resonates, what drives revenue and then we’ll bring it to the rest of the Caesars enterprise,” he said, noting that Caesars operates more than 35 properties worldwide. Caesars is in the process of being acquired by Eldorado Resorts in a $17.3 billion deal.
“The product is definitely different—we’ve got eight hamburger stands here in Las Vegas so with this we wanted a hot dog stand. But our goals are simple: To increase a player’s length of stay on property and get players to come back. And we think we can accomplish both.”
Hotbed of innovation
Without question, the biggest draw in the new space also was the first piece to open last spring: The Book.
This is a complete redesign of the old TAG sportsbook, and a completely new approach to a sportsbook overall. Instead of a cavernous area with chairs facing communal screens, the new space sports 12 individual living room-style “caves,” each with a sectional couch, recliner, 98-inch television that can be split into multiple screens, two 49-inch televisions, an Xbox console, virtual reality glasses, end tables that double as wireless phone chargers, and more.
Each cave seats up to eight, and guests control their cave through a tablet that collects bets, controls audio, and comes preloaded with a bunch of additional multi-player interactive games.
The tablet also enables guests to order food from an on-site food truck, and bottle service.
Linq’ sports 12 individual living room-style “caves.”
Matthew Kenagy, senior director of strategic development and enterprise gaming at Caesars, said caves even feature live leaderboards so members of each group can see how their wagers are performing against those of their friends.
“We thought about how groups of friends might experience a sports book and tried to provide the technology to give them everything they could possibly want to make their time here memorable,” he said. “The whole idea is to use technology to make this space feel comfortable—to make The Book become a place people would want to come and spend an entire day.”
To that end, elsewhere in The Book guests can pay for RFID access to a wall of 24 self-service beer taps. At certain times of the day and week, there’s even an opportunity for guests to have a beer sommelier walk them through a tasting of different beers from the tap wall.
The Book isn’t all about these fan caves; there’s an entire section for old-school sports book customers, too. This area boasts the Strip’s highest-resolution LED video wall, sports bar games such as foosball and beer pong, as well as modern spins on vestiges such as ticket windows and a lightboard with odds, props, and futures.
Technology on display
Another highlight of the new casino: the Strip-side Re:Match bar, which boasts 27 touch screens with different games—all of which are free to play. Together these screens work with larger screens behind the bar to create virtual underwater scenery that changes almost constantly throughout the day.
Software on the screens enables patrons to go “fishing,” use fingers to disrupt the course of virtual creatures, or to engage in a multitude of other interactive games. Every hour or so, bar patrons also can compete against each other for a special bonus, such as a free drink or free food from the food truck across the room.
“The idea with the bar was to give people small prizes every now and again to bring back the sense of winning,” Kenagy explains. “Even if you’re losing at the tables, if you win a free drink you start feeling like you can beat the house.”
The technology behind the bar, the table games area, and The Book was the brainchild of McCann Systems, an audio/visual services company based in Charlotte, North Carolina.
Behind the scenes, all the technology operates off the same system, and everything is connected. If, for instance, a guest hits a jackpot on a slot machine, all the digital screens in the new casino display the video image of raining money—a push to spike excitement across the entire room.
Director of Marketing Matt Wilson said this approach presented some unique challenges.
“A casino never shuts down and the LINQ casino stayed open throughout the construction,” he said, “We had to be out of sight and out of mind while engineering some pretty difficult new construction, and do it all in such a way that kept the guest experience as seamless and ordinary as humanly possible.”
Linq bar area
Re:Match looks out on a host of newfangled table games—modern spins on roulette and craps that light up winning bets from beneath the felt. Some of these games are new products from Scientific Gaming. Others, like one of the craps games, are from Aruze and boast individual betting screens.
Across the room, there’s also communal gaming arena powered by Interblock where guests can play baccarat, roulette, craps and blackjack.
Even the artwork inside the new casino space is experimental; most of the screens throughout the casino are part of an interactive installation named Dataland and created by Los Angeles-based artist and lecturer Refik Anadol. While the three-dimensional LED installations look exclusively decorative, they reflect actual traffic and noise levels on the casino floor and change in real-time as guests walk through.
Changing times
Like any new idea, the new Linq casino has evolved gradually over the course of its first year.
When Caesars unveiled the space in the summer of 2019, in addition to gaming options it boasted a variety of non-gaming diversions including rent-by-the-hour virtual reality bays and an entirely separate room for eSports. There also were a series of three-dimensional hologram skill games—for $5 a contest, for instance, visitors could play Rock Paper Scissors against a computerized hand.
By the fall, however, Caesars had shuttered the eSports room and removed most of the non-gaming attractions to create space for newer slots and skill-based diversions from companies such as Gamblit Gaming and GameCo.
“The whole purpose of the new casino space was to for things to be trialed and tested, and to see how guests react,” said Chelsea Ryder, a company spokesperson. “We expected things to change.”
Considering the concept of the new LINQ casino, considering how much has changed since it launched, Stewart and Kenagy say the space will continue to be a bit of a testing ground and laboratory for the company overall.
Colloquially, the two refer to the space as the “casino of the future.”
#exclusive – Revised Linq Las Vegas casino mixes tradition with innovation. –@mattvillano, CDC Gaming Reports. https://t.co/fC1ItAlXDs @TheLINQ @CaesarsEnt #CDCgaming
— CDC Gaming Reports (@CDCNewswire) January 12, 2020
And it’s primed to stay that way. In the sports book, management will try out everything from new amenities to new technologies that enable gamblers to engage with each other in different ways. Caesars also is committed to rolling out new options on the casino floor, including new slot machines, new spins on traditional table games, and non-gaming titles that will attract a crowd.
Heck, the whole vibe will change completely over the next 12 months: since by the end of 2020, the Linq will open an ESPN-branded TV studio directly upstairs.
With all of this in mind, perhaps it’s best to consider the new casino a gamble onto itself. In a town that’s constantly devising new ways to reinvent itself, the future inside the Linq certainly will be interesting.
Freelance journalist Matt Villano can be reached at mjv@whalehead.com and on Twitter @mattvillano
