Dead Canary

About Dead Canary

The Commission’s intervention followed hot on the heels of the £600,000 regulatory settlement with QuinnBet, announced eight days earlier.

Its findings contained an all-too-familiar combination of ineffective systems, delayed interventions and inadequate source-of-funds controls. One customer placed approximately 4,800 bets in one day and 7,000 the next without being flagged. Another, whose payslips showed monthly earnings of about £2,000, deposited and lost £9,000 in four days.

“What is striking here is the level of activity that apparently failed to trigger effective intervention,” Williams says. “These were obvious indicators requiring further scrutiny, and it is difficult to understand why they did not result in more effective intervention.”

About Dead Canary

Cleopatra’s Barge opened in September 1970 in what is now the Nobu Hotel tower, replacing the earlier Nero’s Nook lounge. The 180-seat lounge featured as its centerpiece a “floating” stage designed as a replica of the vessel aboard which the Egyptian queen is said to have bewitched Mark Antony.

The pleasure craft, installed in a shallow lagoon, featured a gold-painted, topless figurehead that extended far into the public walkway. Guests quickly turned rubbing the statue’s golden breasts for luck into a classic Vegas tradition; staff regularly repainted the most-touched areas.

Vital Vegas ranked the display No. 4 on his 2014 list of “10 Things You Can Rub for Good Luck in Las Vegas Without Getting Arrested,” a list that featured three other Caesars Palace entries: the hand of the Caesars statue (No. 1); Joe Louis’s boxing gloves (No. 8); and the toe of Michelangelo’s David replica (No. 9).

The barge itself never actually floated, by the way. That was just a myth. It sat on a fixed platform that created a mild rocking motion. That piece of Vegas engineering, like the statue’s original perch, is now history.

How to play Dead Canary

“There’s this huge, proven revenue opportunity, but it’s also about continuity of the brand that exists across the whole platform and the whole offering,” Wilson adds.

Even the most flexible technology cannot do all the work itself. Wilson is blunt about what happens when an operator treats an integration as the end of the job.

“If I just give you one of our games or our jackpot engine and you just plug it in and leave it there to collect dust, you will come back and tell me in three months’ time it’s not working,” he says. “And I will say to you, ‘How have you invested in the product?’”