Slots quiet as Macau observes 3 minutes of silence

By Abigail Goldman

Thursday, May 22, 2008 | 2 a.m.

For three minutes, Macau stood still. They held their dice, their chips and maybe their breath. They bowed their heads and stood in solemn rows. They clasped their hands, looked at their feet, and didn’t say a word. Not one word. For 180 seconds, all bets were off.

This is a casino memorial.

Casino staff and guests at the Macau branches of the Wynn and MGM Grand observed three minutes of silence Monday to mourn victims of the Sichuan earthquake. The silence began at 2:28 p.m., the time the earthquake occurred one week earlier.

The same silence swept China, and the casinos were following its lead, Steve Wynn said.

“It was stunning,” he said. “Everybody just froze.”

(Wynn wasn’t in Macau, but he got a report. His company also donated 10 million Hong Kong dollars, just less than $1.3 million U.S., to earthquake victims. Chinese officials reportedly expect the final death toll to exceed 50,000.)

Many of his Macau casino employees are from China or have relatives there, Wynn said. Macau, like Hong Kong, is a special administrative region within the People’s Republic of China — a peninsula and a pair of islands that have their own government leaders, their own judicial systems, their own currencies, while relying on China for diplomacy and defense. It was a liaison for the Chinese government in Macau that got the word to casino officials, Wynn said.

The three minutes of silence were the beginning of three days of mourning in mainland China. Throughout the country, amusement parks closed, nightclubs shuttered, movie theaters went dark and flags flew at half-staff.

Asked whether his casino would consider shutting down for three days in Macau, Wynn said he wasn’t handling those decisions. MGM Grand public relations manager Lytton Ao said the casino is postponing all scheduled activities, promotional events and media gatherings, but did not say gaming would be halted.

It would be difficult for a 24/7 resort operation such as MGM Grand’s to suspend all business for three consecutive days, Ao said via e-mail from Macau, which is 16 hours ahead of West Coast time.

To prepare for the three minutes of silence, casino employees broadcast announcements and posted signs, Ao said. When the time came, “guests and visitors solemnly bowed their heads and joined the silence to express their compassion,” he wrote.

So how much did that compassion cost?

A gauche question, yes, but one that begs. So here it is: Between 1 million and 2 million U.S. dollars. This is according to Jonathan Galaviz of strategy consulting company Globalysis, which specializes in global tourism and casino gaming.

Galaviz stresses it’s a rough estimate he arrived at after crunching numbers for all Macau’s casinos combined for “gross gaming revenue” — all bets made minus all bets paid.

Ao doesn’t want to know.

“Honestly, it is not in our interest to speak about our loss under such circumstances, if you would try to imagine how much must have been lost in (the earthquake) in three minutes,” he wrote.