The man in the white turtleneck slides a pile of five chips forward on the burgundy baccarat table and leans in intently as the dealer snaps out a fresh round of cards. It's not the player's night, however. He bets again and loses, and the chips, each of them worth 10,000 Hong Kong dollars, are briskly swept away by the dealer. Disgusted, the silent gambler stands and strides out of the casino's VIP room, leaving his drink unfinished on the table.
“That man lost 800,000 [about $135,000] tonight,” the VIP room's pit boss confides, his soft voice betraying neither glee nor sympathy.
There's little to celebrate: Although 800,000 Hong Kong dollars is a nice haul for the private casino, the overall picture is increasingly ominous for those who make a living off the gambling industry in this former Portuguese colony, which for the past decade has been the booming Sin City of East Asia, the only place in China where gambling is legal.
The unfortunate gambler was the only player at his table tonight, and there is no one in line to take his place. Nearby tables and private rooms in what would ordinarily be one of the highest-rolling casinos on the planet – it takes a deposit of one million Hong Kong dollars to get a seat at the card tables here – are either empty or surrounded by only a few players winning and losing small fortunes in the first hours of a Thursday morning.
“I walked around the casinos last night until 5 a.m. It was so quiet – there was almost nobody there,” José Coutinho, a member of Macau's legislature, said in an interview this week.
Mr. Coutinho said that while Macau was initially protected from the global economic meltdown because it has no stock market and only a small financial sector, it was hit hard as soon as the crisis struck mainland China. “Anything that affects mainland China indirectly affects Macau. The existence of the gaming industry is almost totally dependent on the gamblers that come from [the rest of China]. If mainland China gets a flu, Macau needs surgery.”
Almost nothing is known about the gamblers who come to the fabled VIP rooms of Macau, not even their names. The pit boss claims to know only two things for sure: Most of the players come from north and central China (the vast majority speak Mandarin, rather than the Cantonese that is predominant in Macau) and there are fewer of them than at any other time in the 17 years he has been in the casino business.
While the bets are placed in Hong Kong dollars, the VIP rooms are named after the cities and provinces of China where the gamblers come from. There's a Guangzhou room, named after the once-booming industrial province that lies directly to the west of tiny Macau, and a Tianjin room, named for the port district east of Beijing. Rooms like these are where Asian notables such as the son of North Korean leader Kim Jong-il are known to spend their time and money, but the Shanghai room sits empty as Wednesday night turns to Thursday morning, and anguished shouts can be heard from an unlucky player in the Hunan room.
“Two years ago, turnover on a table was nine million [Hong Kong dollars] a day. Now, 500,000 is a good day,” the pit boss says, speaking on the condition that neither he nor the casino he works at be named. “People say that business is now very difficult. A lot of factories in mainland China have collapsed. Some of the people who used to come here even went bankrupt, so they don't have any spare money to come to Macau and gamble.”
A slowdown in the VIP rooms – which account for two-thirds of all casino revenues in the city – translates into a crisis in Macau, which draws upward of 70 per cent of its taxes from the gambling industry. After a decade of astonishing growth following Macau's unification with China in 1999, some analysts are predicting that its economy could shrink by as much as 15 per cent over the next 12 months.
