Bally’s Shareholder Offers To Buy 79% Stake At $2B Valuation

Resorts Casino Hotel Atlantic City

The very first brick-and-mortar casino to open in Atlantic City is still very much alive and kicking today. Having served AC gamblers for more than 40 years, Resorts has been increasingly successful in adapting to the new, online landscape in the state. After the launch of online gaming in New Jersey, it agreed to partnerships with several prominent, established operators. On its online casino license it currently hosts:

• Resorts Casino – Launch 2/27/15
• Mohegan Sun Casino – Launch 7/23/15
• PokerStars Casino – Launch 3/21/16
• DraftKings Casino – Launch 12/17/18

On top of housing its online casino, Resorts is also home to the poker platform for PokerStars NJ, the biggest name in the game. Resorts also purchased a sports betting license where it houses sites like FOX Bet and DraftKings Sportsbook.

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Is Bally Casino Legit?

Yes, Bally Casino is totally legitimate. The operator is held accountable to meet standards that ensure that payment is safe and secure, games always maintain integrity, and the site functions at a high level.

Bally’s Casino

With almost 2000 rooms, Bally’s Atlantic City is one of the largest hotel and casino resorts located in the New Jersey area and is currently owned by Caesars Entertainment. The resort was built by Bally Manufacturing after the company demolished the Marlborough-Blenheim Hotel and opened in 1979 as Bally’s Park Place.

The first casino at Bally’s was opened in the adjacent Dennis Hotel building – but the total gaming space was expanded in 1997 with the addition of the Wild Wild West Casino at Bally’s.

As a result, the total size of casino floor exceeds 225,000 square feet with over 5000 slot machines and numerous traditional casino games such as Keno, roulette, baccarat or blackjack.

Bally’s Atlantic City used to have an additional lounge-casino located in the Claridge Tower, but the tower has been sold in 2013 to be reopened as a separate hotel. All in all, the resort has been renovated four times in 1983, 1994, 2005 and 2009, which shouldn’t be all that surprising if you consider the fact that both Claridge Tower and Dennis Tower are over 80 years old.

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Although you won’t find this at every online casino in New Jersey, it’s still a fantastic way to invite your friends and get paid for it at the same time.

Every time you refer a friend to the online casino, you’ll receive an additional bonus. However, the friend you refer needs to register and make a minimum deposit before you receive your bonus. Basically, that is the only condition to the refer-a-friend bonus, regardless of the online casino.

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What casino sites are legal in New Jersey?

New Jersey residents have almost two dozen online casinos to choose from that are licensed to operate by the NJDGE:

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2. Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy

Bally Technologies’ most popular movie-themed video slot is Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy based on the original 2004 Will Farrell film. Like the film, the slot pokes fun at the 1970s Action News format using a standard 3-row, 5-reel, and 25-payline format.

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Bally Gaming on Mobile

As soon as it entered the gaming industry, Bally started taking the casino floors by storm. It even introduced its own version of slot machines. Initially, they provided the same games over and over again, which led them to try something new, at which point they started basing the slot machines on television shows, movies, bands, and other themes. Once the company had taken over casinos, they slowly shifted to the online sphere and started providing games on mobile platforms.

Currently, Bally Technologies happens to be one of the most trusted mobile technology providers in the entire industry. There are quite a lot of people who make use of the gambling apps and websites that the company has created for variety of the casinos all over the world. Every week, there are thousands of people downloading these apps. Two types of gaming solutions are created by the company, which includes internal facing apps used by employees and external facing apps used by patrons.

The apps for patrons give casino owners the opportunity to attract new players and enhance their visit to your online casino. The app will include popular games at the casino, previews, restaurant and room bookings, surveys, feedbacks, interactive maps, menus, and bonus offers. These features are designed to attract more players. The employee app helps executive teams and staff become more efficient and provide instant access to critical functionality and information.

Bally Technologies has been proven to be an extremely reliable partner in the world of mobile gaming. It provides gaming apps for iPad, iPhone, Android, Android tablet, Blackberry and most other mobile devices.

The Company is Focused on the Casino Industry

Bally Technologies started off on casino floors, and has always been very focused on the industry. It started acquiring companies such as MindPlay, Casino Marketplace ,and even Advanced Casino Systems Corporations. With its aim to take over the casino industry, the company rapidly started expanding the slot accounting market. Bally quite recently, opened its new European sales hub, in the city of Amsterdam. Along with this, there are two development and research centers located in India, in the cities of Bangalore and Chennai.

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Bally Technologies has been making slot machines since the 1930s. The company once held a 90% market share and still makes some of the most popular slots at brick and mortar casinos and online casinos all across the US, including right here in Michigan.

When Michigan’s first online casinos go live, Bally slots are sure to be a big part of the online gambling experience, just like they are all across the country.

Read on to find out about the most popular Bally slots, and where you can play these games for free or real money at Michigan online casinos. This guide also covers a little about Bally Technologies’ rich history as a slot manufacturer here in the United States.

Bally Live Dealer Games

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, there are also no Bally live dealer games to choose from. This seems like a conscious decision taken by the company so it can concentrate on slots, which it also creates for its brick-and-mortar casinos. If you’re looking to try your hand at some live table games, have a look at our best live online casinos article.

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Just make sure that if you’re looking to play a specific game or type of game, the online casino you’re considering has it. In other words, define the games you want to play first, then check to see which online casinos have those games and go from there.

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Borgata Hotel Casino & Spa, an Atlantic City casino property, operates the Borgata Online Casino.

What Are the 15 Best Bally Slots to Play Online in 2022?

June 12, 2020

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• Golden Nugget Casino Online review
• Betway Sportsbook review
• Stardust Casino review
• FanDuel Sportsbook review
• FanDuel Casino review
• BetRivers Online Casino review (formerly SugarHouse)

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Online casinos and poker sites are legal in New Jersey, as long as they’re offered by operators that hold a license from the New Jersey Division of Gaming Enforcement (DGE). The DGE also regulates all games.

How do you open a legal online casino in New Jersey? Here’s how it works:

• Primary licenses to operate legal online gambling websites in NJ are limited to Atlantic City casinos.
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• Sports betting works differently, as both Atlantic City casinos and New Jersey racetracks can operate online sportsbooks. Each is limited to operating a maximum of three brands online.

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Soo Kim turned around the fortunes of the Bally’s brand, landing an iconic property in Las Vegas, and will soon be bringing the first casino to Chicago. His next big gamble? Television.

Twelve floors above Fifth Avenue, inside a corner office in the old General Motors Building in Manhattan, Soo Kim is showing off his vintage Ballyhoo pinball machine. It’s the first one made by what would become the storied American company Bally’s, which started in Chicago in the 1930s with punchboard games and pinball, eventually becoming a slot machine powerhouse before going through multiple bankruptcies.

“It’s a predecessor to casinos’ games—there’s no paddle, so it’s really a game of luck,” says Kim, the founder of the New York hedge fund Standard General and the chairman of Bally’s, which owns 16 casinos across 11 states and will soon build Chicago’s first Las Vegas-style casino resort. “People want their fortune revealed to them. It's like, ‘Am I lucky today, or am I unlucky?’”

The 47-year-old Kim has been on quite a roll lately. Born in Seoul, South Korea, and raised in Bayside, Queens, where he learned English by watching TV, Kim now controls a growing gambling empire that he built slowly and deliberately by targeting companies struggling under debt or already in bankruptcy. Kim founded Standard General, which has $1.5 billion in assets under management, in 2007 and has focused on regulated industries such as casinos, cannabis, tobacco and television. Kim, whose firm claims a 7% average annual return over the past 15 years, describes himself as an “opportunistic investor”—although most people on Wall Street would tend to describe him as a vulture capitalist.

“We jump into situations that other people don’t like, have a bad balance sheet or a run of bad management, and we try to find value in the babies that were thrown out with the bathwater,” says Kim. “Regulated businesses are almost easier to bring back because they have good demand characteristics, and the license is an asset.”

Most investors run away from government-regulated industries, but Kim sees great value in vices such as gambling but also in other industries that labor under a thicket of federal rules, such as cable television. “Almost everything is regulated to some extent,” says Kim. “We embrace that because we can ultimately use the rules to our advantage. You can compete in any sport—you just need to know the rules.”

“I hate to even use the word ‘sin’—sin industries,” Kim says. “These are things Americans want to do. And if they’re not allowed to do it, it’s just going to be underground.”

A casino, for example, can be run into the ground, as Donald Trump’s properties in Atlantic City were over the course of decades of mismanagement, but they are often salvageable. In Trump’s case, entrepreneurs such as Tilman Fertitta, billionaire owner of the Houston Rockets, bought the Trump Marina in Atlantic City and parlayed it into the $140 million (2021 annual revenue) Golden Nugget. “You can make a lot of bad decisions,” Kim says, “but that asset remains.”

Standard General is also the largest shareholder in Turning Point Brands, which owns the American licensing rights to Zig-Zag, the iconic 120-year-old rolling paper company. Turning Point Brands also owns discount chewing tobacco brand Stoker’s and has made investments in a couple of cannabis brands. (The investments are in CBD and non-plant-touching companies as marijuana is federally illegal.)

But Kim’s biggest bet yet is in another bingeable pastime—television. Standard General is in the process of buying Virginia-based Tegna, one of the country’s largest broadcast television companies, with 64 stations across 51 markets, including the True Crime Network and WUSA9, the ABC affiliate in Washington, D.C. Standard General will pay $275 million while New York-based private equity giant Apollo will contribute $925 million; $8.2 billion will be debt financing.

Despite bringing less money to the deal, Standard will get majority voting control of the publicly traded firm. Apollo had initially wanted to buy Tegna, but there were antitrust concerns as Apollo owns competitor Cox Media Group. Kim knows he’s punching above his weight class when it comes to the Tegna deal. “In some ways, this is the minnow swallowing the whale,” he says.

Kim’s outsize ambitions first became evident in 2011, when he targeted Twin River Casino, a privately held company in Lincoln, Rhode Island, that operated a slot parlor and a shuttered greyhound racetrack. Twin River had been hit by political and criminal scandals and spiraled into bankruptcy court with $590 million in debt. In other words, it was a perfect target for a shrewd vulture. Standard General started buying up shares in the over-the-counter distressed equity market while it was still a private company and within five years Kim’s firm was the largest shareholder. Once in control, Kim began rolling up other regional casinos in Delaware, Mississippi and Colorado.

Monopoly Money: Kim bought Bally's casino in Atlantic City—located at Boardwalk and Park Place—for $25 million.

Eight years later, Twin River went public by acquiring Delaware-based casino Dover Downs for $116 million in stock and cash. In 2020, the company bought the struggling Bally’s hotel and casino in Atlantic City, which had lost nearly $100 million that year, from Caesars and New York-based real estate investment trust Vici Properties for a paltry $25 million. If that number sounds like Monopoly money—especially since Bally’s is located at the intersection of Boardwalk and Park Place—consider that the property was struggling financially and regulators were forcing Caesars to sell some of its assets before being acquired by Reno-based gaming company Eldorado for $17.3 billion.

Kim has since increased his bet: In April, Standard General set its sights on Las Vegas when it agreed to buy the operations of the Tropicana casino for $150 million, plus $10.5 million in rent a year for the land, from Pennsylvania-based Gaming and Leisure Properties, Inc. (GPLI). (Kim will eventually change the name to Bally’s, and Caesars will change the name of the existing Bally’s in Vegas to its Horseshoe brand.)

In May, Kim had a big win in America’s heartland. Chicago’s mayor, Lori Lightfoot, selected Bally’s to build a $1.7 billion casino and entertainment center at the site of the Tribune Publishing printing plant—beating out hometown billionaire Neil Bluhm and gaming juggernaut Hard Rock International. Bally’s is financing about $600 million of the project with proceeds from the $1 billion sale of its Rhode Island casinos to GLPI, which Bally’s is leasing back, and the rest will be raised through debt. “Our ambitions are to be global,” says Kim. “Chicago is a great statement to that: Chicago has more tourists than Vegas.”

Despite his collection of assets, Kim doesn’t believe his empire is built on vice. “I hate to even use the word ‘sin’—sin industries; I don't think that’s the right way to look at it,” he says. “Whether it’s cannabis, to a lesser degree nicotine, or gambling, these are things Americans want to do. And if they're not allowed to do it, they're still going to do it, it’s just going to be underground.”

If you spend enough time with Kim, who favors the classic hedge fund uniform of a blue oxford under a fleece vest, he starts to sound like a chill Gordon Gekko. Having learned investing at Bankers Trust and Och-Ziff, he soon realized he could drive profits for a longer period if he wasn’t as ruthless.

“It’s not just [about] raw, unadulterated capitalism—I kill, kill, kill, [and] eat what I kill,” says Kim, whom Forbes estimates to be worth nearly $120 million. “In the end, the longest, greediest thing you can do is to be intentional about your actions and be mindful. You get a better outcome.”

You're Out: Kim will likely tear down the famed Tropicana in Las Vegas to build a new casino complex—possibly with a baseball stadium.

One of the reasons Mayor Lightfoot selected Bally’s to build and manage Chicago’s first casino is that Kim signed a peace agreement with the labor unions—a tactic he has also employed in Atlantic City. None of the other applicants agreed to one. “Bally’s had the total package,” says Deputy Mayor Samir Mayekar.

Colin Mansfield, an analyst from Fitch Ratings, says Bally’s strategy of buying its way to a national footprint is part of the classic gambling empire playbook. “Caesars, previously Harrah’s, grew through acquisition,” says Mansfield, “the same could be said about MGM Resorts and more recently, Eldorado.” Bally’s is a “formidable competitor,” Mansfield adds.

The Tropicana, which is at the south end of the Las Vegas Strip and has a reputation for perpetually underperforming, will play a big role in the future of Bally’s. Kim says: “We believe that if you want to be a national gaming player, you have to have a presence in Vegas.”

Bally’s now owns the operations of the Tropicana, but the property and its 35-acre land parcel is owned by Gaming and Leisure Properties. GLPI’s chief executive, Peter Carlino, said in the company’s first-quarter earnings call that the Oakland A’s have “a very, very strong interest” in relocating to Vegas and building a baseball stadium on a portion of the Tropicana’s land. Kim expects the existing Tropicana—which was built in 1957 and was James Bond’s hotel of choice in Diamonds Are Forever—will be demolished and rebuilt as part of a plan to redevelop the entire property. Along with a newly built stadium for the NFL’s Raiders and an existing arena for the NHL’s Golden Knights, the prospect of baseball in Las Vegas is appealing to Kim and local leaders. As for luring the A’s to the city, Kim remains coy. “I think 35 acres is a lot of space,” he says with a laugh. “A baseball diamond takes approximately 9 acres.”

Kim sees himself like a corporate fireman. “We run into smoky buildings, and situations are opaque, and we’re trying to figure it out,” he says. “We’re trying to save property and lives, and sometimes a building falls on your head.”

Being the target of Kim’s deliberate, long-term strategy isn’t always pleasant. One person who had business dealings with him over the years was too afraid of retribution to give his name. “He’s aggressive, legally aggressive . . . and there’s no way to beat them,” says the executive. “They have the experience—every situation they’re in is a battle.” Another person who worked with Kim and Standard General says they look for leverage and “shake you down.”

Kim doesn’t dispute that his deals can get messy. Sitting behind his desk in New York, he explains that he sees himself as a “corporate fireman.” “We run into smoky buildings, and situations are opaque, and we're trying to figure it out,” he says. “We’re trying to save property and lives, and sometimes a building falls on your head.”

Two of his most notable failures are Radio Shack—which Standard General bought from bankruptcy in 2013 and it wound up back in reorganization two years later—and the hipster clothing brand American Apparel, founded by disgraced entrepreneur Dov Charney. Standard General lost more than $100 million in the Radio Shack deal while American Apparel was a more limited loss. (Charney was ousted; the company filed for bankruptcy twice and is now owned by Canadian clothier Gildan Activewear, Inc.)

Running parallel to all of these moves, Standard General is currently pursuing its biggest prize—the $9.3 billion deal to buy Tegna. In his efforts to acquire the media brand, which included two failed proxy battles and attacks on the current CEO, there is a clear glimpse of Kim’s aggressive tactics. While Standard General was staging a takeover last year, Kim wrote to Tegna shareholders: “The Tegna Board is marshaling misleading analyses and data in a desperate attempt to deflect responsibility and attention from Tegna’s persistent underperformance, strategic missteps and governance failures.” But in the end, Kim got the board to unanimously approve his bid and he already picked a new CEO.

The Tegna deal may be in motion, but federal regulators still have to approve it. Many don’t believe that Kim isn’t out for blood and profits, especially as Apollo, which owns Atlanta-based TV broadcaster Cox Media Group, is helping to finance the deal. The NewsGuild-CWA, the country’s largest labor union for journalists, even wrote a letter to President Joe Biden asking for him to block it. “This proposed transaction would kill journalism jobs, undermine local news and raise prices for American families,” the August 1 letter reads. (Full disclosure: The author is a member of the NewsGuild of New York.) In an email to staff, Deb McDermott, who will take over as Tegna CEO if the FCC approves the deal, wrote that Standard General has “no intention, and have never had the intention, of reducing news or news staff at Tegna stations.”

Kim’s vision for Tegna involves an “injection of innovation” into the TV broadcast world. “I don't think there's anything wrong with the content we're creating, nor the good work that our journalists are doing,” says Kim. “I just think that the way we're distributing it is all wrong.”

While Tegna will be his next gamble, back on the twelfth floor of the GM Building, Kim is admiring his Ballyhoo, which he bought on eBay for $600. He says convincing Caesars to sell him the Bally’s brand will likely “become one of the best decisions” he’s ever made.

“Many people say, ‘Well, you guys are essentially a bunch of cast-off casinos,’” he says. “And our response is, ‘Well, we have a crazy good management team that have been able to take these casinos other people left for dead and have turned them into nice little profit engines.”