Closing Remarks

First off, I want to thank EVERYBODY who took part in this conference: Speakers, Attendees, Exhibitors, Exhibitors’ Helpers, Reception Staff, Excalibur Sales Staff, Encore Global Audio Visual, and the many people who helped me build the conference since the idea first came into my head 18 months ago, especially Bennie Mancino, Brent Weiss and Nick Ippolito, whose support was undying and practically as fierce as my own support for the conference!

Special thanks go out to Paul Mollo and Hina Reed, the two great hosts whose energy and commitment to excellence went way beyond what was called for. They shuttled tirelessly back and forth between the two rooms of the conference, literally a hundred times, to make sure everything went smoothly.

In fact, on Wednesday afternoon, when things got a little bumpy due to my own miscalculations and my brain was already fried from accumulating problems, they actually saved a session!

I was occupied in the Table Games Track room helping to translate a presentation and had completely forgotten about a Game Protection panel that was taking place simultaneously in the GP Track room, when Hina came up to me and asked, “Isn’t there a session happening now in the GP room?” I said yes, and Hina told me there was no one there!...Holy shit! Boy did I screw up! It was ten minutes after that GP session was supposed to start!

Well, Hina and Paul snapped into action and chased everybody down who was involved in that session: the panel members, attendees and audiovisual techs, and got everyone into the room and the session ended up going off fine. Thank you Hina and Paul!

Lastly, I am proud of myself. The absolute main reason for doing this conference was simply to prove, mostly to myself, that I could actually do it. The odds were hugely against me. At the outset I had little idea what I was getting involved in and how complicated and aggravating things could get. In fact, I was so na?ve that when Brent Weiss asked me if I was going to have a table games exhibition and Best New Table Games competition, I said, “Of course,” even though the idea had never even occurred to me! I also ignored how important it would be to do a table games and game protection conference together until Bennie Mancino suggested it.

Then, of course, came the two Covid postponements, which forced me to go through everything all over again--twice!

But the worst of all, which came within inches of destroying the conference before it started, was overcoming a carefully orchestrated and collusive effort between my competitors and some very influential members of the Las Vegas gaming industry press and print publishers to derail my conference.

Not only was there never a single printed word by these journalists and publishers about my conference, the most powerful among them, whom you all know, actually commented on one of my LinkedIn posts advertising the conference, “Why not just go to the WGPC…it’s the better conference.”

To me, that is a violation of journalistic ethics. A true journalist does not berate one conference or anything else just because he doesn’t prefer it personally and supports a competing entity. Shame on him, and besides, I bet a lot of people who’ve been to the WGPC and my conference, may not agree with that publisher's statement. There was also a letter sent by the WGPC to its entire network, I imagine a few thousand people, berating me and accusing me of copying that conference, filled with exaggerations and outright lies.

Somehow, I survived that as well.

Then came the last-minute disasters! On the last business day before the conference, Friday, June 3rd, three presenters, including the GP keynote speaker Shaun Moore and the scheduled main participant in the GP workshop, Professor Jim Kilby, all canceled due to Covid 19.

Talk about having to scramble to repair the damage. I managed to patch these losses up as best I could, and got some help from Shaun’s VP, Mason Allen, who filled in for Shaun on the Artificial Intelligence Panel. And then Hardrock Tampa's Glenn Wilson without preparation gave a splendid presentation on marked-cards at the Game Protection Workshop. Thank you, Glenn.

And if that were not enough, on Sunday, Maurice Douda, the renowned French illusionist who put on his dazzling show “Le Tricheur” Tuesday night at the conference, had landed at O’hare airport in Chicago to catch his connection for Las Vegas. He needed to be in Vegas Monday morning for rehearsals, and of course didn’t make it, so his show went on without a single rehearsal, during which I also had to assist with translating under pressure because there was a language barrier between the Encore Global AV people and Maurice and his personal technician.

And then, believe this or not, a few hours before the show, I was informed that Maurice had incredibly forgotten to bring his key adapter cable and that a replacement could not be found, and therefore the show would not go on unless this seemingly but not actually simple problem could be solved!

And I immediately knew that if this show did not go on, after all the publicity I put into it, both myself and the conference would have been laughed out of the business!

It was the Encore Global techs who bailed me out this time. They emergency-called more than 20 Strip hotels and finally found one that had the 2-inch adapter. It happened to be the hotel next door, the Luxor, who provided it. A great stroke of luck that it was able to be transported to the hotel in just minutes…and only minutes before the show was to begin.

Wow!

So, there you have it. I had my share of problems, made my share of mistakes, but I did survive it. And, despite it all, it seems that the feedback from those who attended has been rather positive.

Thank you all! Richard Marcus

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