Highlands Resort Malaysia – the original Gentings

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For those who enjoy the old-fashioned allure of a bricks and mortar casino, the name Genting will be immediately familiar. The Malaysia-based company operates around 40 different casinos in the UK alone – more than any other company. When gaming fans visit a Genting casino, they know exactly what to expect. And the quick and easy membership process means that joining one casino means the gamer has joined them all.

 

Some might argue that while the uniformity of the service offering might represent a great business model, it does mean that the experience can become a little routine. In other words, when you’ve visited one, you’ve visited them all. That’s true to an extent. However, what many people fail to realize is that the Genting model started from one man making his impossible dream a reality. Let’s take a look at the remarkable story of Highlands Resort Malaysia.

 

A man with a dream

 

In 1964, industrialist and entrepreneur Lim Goh Tong was on a business trip in Malaysia’s Cameron Highlands. He was immediately taken with the fresh, mountain air and decided that his home city of Kuala Lumpur needed something similar. Only he wanted to create more than just a hotel. He envisaged a casino resort the like of which Malaysia had never seen.

 

Now today, large scale developments are commonplace. Likewise, casinos are popping up in both the physical and virtual worlds every day, and we can visit one in a major city or play live table games in cyberspace whenever we like. Despite all this, Lim Goh Tong’s idea still sounds ambitious. Now consider the context of 1960s Malaysia. There wasn’t a casino in the entire country, and as for a mountain – well, the closest one to Kuala Lumpur was around 200KM away, covered in dense forest and completely devoid of basic essentials like a water or electricity supply.

 

The dream becomes a reality

 

These, however, were simply obstacles that had to be negotiated, and that is exactly what the Genting pioneer did. Over six years, he cleared around 10,000 acres of forest, and created an entire infrastructure of roads and utilities to make his dream of a mountain resort into a reality. In 1971, the Malaysian Government granted Genting Resort the country’s first casino license. 38 years later, they have yet to issue a second one, so Genting remains a unique destination on the Malaysia tourist trail.

 

Despite its monopoly when it comes to Malaysia’s land-based gambling market, the resort has not stood still. While the Genting name has spread across the globe, Lim Goh Tong’s mountain getaway has moved with the times, too. Today, visitors can arrive in style by cable car, and when they get there, there’s plenty to do, even for those who are not keen gamblers. Resorts World Genting, as it is now known, has become a family destination, offering shops, fine dining and even supervised children’s entertainment. That’s ideal for parents who need something for the youngsters to do in safety while they check out the adult playground inside!

History of Roulette & Interesting Facts

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The invention of roulette is credited to seventeenth-century French mathematician Blaise Pascal, who happened upon the idea when investigating not games of chance, but perpetual motion. Modern roulette is similar, in many ways, to two contemporary gambling games of the day, known as ‘Roly Poly’ and ‘Even/Odd’. Of course time waits for no man, and nowadays you’re as likely to hear of someone inputting a promotional code genting, or having a big roulette win online, as you are in an offline bricks and mortar environment.

A recognisably modern roulette wheel – albeit with both a single and double zero – became popular in casinos throughout France and Monaco in the late eighteenth century. In the middle of the nineteenth century, the roulette wheel was overhauled by two French brothers, Louis and Francois Blanc, who removed the double zero pocket and, in so doing, created the modern French, or European, roulette table. Following the February Revolution in France in 1848, roulette was exported to the United States by French émigrés, but the European version was not well received by American administrators, who reintroduced the double zero pocket to create what henceforth became known as American roulette.

Did You Know?

‘Roulette’ is a diminutive meaning a small wheel, from the French word ‘rouelle’, meaning a wheel.

The first man to ‘break the bank’ at the Casino de Monte-Carlo or, in other words, to win more than the 100,000 francs set aside to cover liabilities on each roulette table, was a Yorkshireman named Joseph Jagger. In 1873, Jagger took advantage of a biased roulette wheel to win 2,000,000 francs, or the equivalent of £7.5 million by modern standards.

So-called ‘triple zero’ roulette – which, as the name suggests, features triple, double and single zero pockets – was first introduced, as ‘Sands Roulette’, at The Venetian, Las Vegas in 2016 and is, nowadays, offered by numerous casinos on the Las Vegas Strip.

Single zero roulette offers a house edge of 2.7%, double zero roulette offers a house edge of 5.26% and triple zero roulette offers a house edge of 7.69%. Even in the single zero version, a bet placed on, say, red or black, or odd or even, which pays even money, does not have a 50% chance of winning; the presence of the green single zero pocket reduces the chance of winning any such bet to 48.64%.