Genting gives hotel in upstate New York a high-end gambling makeover

Workers prepare slot machines for the opening of the Resorts World Casino Catskills in New York. - Bloomberg

IF A billionaire from Malaysia has his way, Asian tourists will soon be flocking to the Borscht Belt region in the Catskills Mountains that was once the summer home for generations of Jewish New Yorkers.

Empire Resorts Inc., controlled by Tan Sri Lim Kok Thay, chairman of Genting Bhd., on Feb. 8 will open Resorts World Catskills, a $1.2 billion casino, hotel and entertainment complex at the site of the old Concord Resort Hotel, the largest of the upstate New York resorts that helped launch the careers of Rodney Dangerfield, Jerry Lewis, Sid Caesar, Joan Rivers and other Jewish comedians.

In a bid to revive the upstate economy, New York awarded licenses in 2015 to Empire Resorts and two other casino operators for Las Vegas-style resorts. That gave Lim’s companies a new opening.

For the Genting group, which runs casinos from Singapore to England to the Bahamas, the Catskills project is the latest effort to gain a bigger foothold in the U.S. Genting operates a casino at New York City’s Aqueduct race track and Empire Resorts runs a small race track casino in the Catskills.

While Genting has much bigger ambitions, several of Lim’s other American projects have stalled because of local opposition and construction delays.

With the Catskills project, Genting is taking a big step toward overcoming those difficulties. Unlike the two race-track casinos, limited by the state to slots and other electronic games, the Empire resort will have a 100,000 square-foot casino with more than 150 game tables as well as 2,150 slot machines.