 meeting. And we just needed 10 minute break. Thank you. Ready to go. Thanks so much. Okay. Good morning, everyone. We are starting just a few minutes later than we anticipated. Before we get started officially, I need to take a roll call because we are using a virtual Good morning, Commissioner Brian. Good morning. I'm here. Good morning, Commissioner Hill. Good morning. I'm here. Good morning, Commissioner Skinner. Good morning. I'm here. And good morning, Commissioner Maynard. Good morning. I'm here. Okay, and we'll get started. Again, my apologies for just starting a few minutes late. We just had our agenda setting meeting with our entire team. And we have had quite a bit of work to accomplish in that meeting. And we just needed a couple minutes to regroup. So thank you for your patience. I am calling to order today. This meeting of the Massachusetts Gaming Commission. It is Wednesday, December 14. And it's public meeting number 411. Before I turn to our general council, I'd like to make a few introductory remarks. And for those of you who have attended prior meetings of the Gaming Commission, where we've been evaluating sports wagering applications, this key statements will sound very familiar. And I thank you for your patience. But it's important for me to reiterate them, because today we do have a different applicant. And we also have different stakeholders. We're reminded that the MGC's licensees will be held to the highest standards of compliance, including an obligation to maintain their integrity on an ongoing basis. As we have said in the past, the award of a gaming license in the common law is a peerless privilege. And our laws require gaming licensees to be held to those highest standards. The MGC mission commits us to creating a fair, transparent and participatory process that engenders the confidence of the public and participants. By law, that process is to maximize the benefit to the commonwealth. But critically, it must minimize potential or realized negative or unintended consequences. Again, and I wish to thank my fellow commissioners for your commitment to that mission and for your thoughtfulness and diligence today over the course of our last week and over the next several weeks as we evaluate these applications. I feel very fortunate to serve with you, particularly as we work tirelessly to implement this new law, the public's interest in the forethought. Our last several months and the months ahead have been demanding and will continue to be demanding on our MGC team, a team I've described and I know my fellow commissioners join me in describing it as a team of excellence. We're grateful for the contribution each of you are making, sacrifices that you are enduring, and those contributions you make individually and as collaborating colleagues. We thank you for your dedication as public servants and commitment to the MGC mission. With that, let me give a brief overview of today's agenda. First, you'll hear from our general counsel, Todd Grossman, who will review the statutory and regulatory framework that will guide us as we evaluate the applications. Then American Wagering Inc., doing business as Caesar's Entertainment, will present its application for a category three license, Heathered to Encore Boston Heart. After that presentation will likely take a short break. And then we'll hear from GLI, the IEB and RSM, relative to the technology, suitability, and finance components of the application. And that will lead us to a section by section analysis of the application during which the applicant will answer our questions. Staff members in our legal team, in addition to GLI, IEB and RSM will be available to answer questions as well. To ensure that we have ample time to reflect, finalize any personal notes, memorizing our impressions and follow up with any unanswered question, we may break for five minutes or so at the conclusion of each section or a series of the sections. And then after any further questions, for purpose of review of the application, I'll seek from the group comments in a sense as to whether we have a consensus regarding the quality of the applicant's response to that section. Did the applicant not meet expectations relative to the standard of review outlined by General Counsel Grossly? Or did the applicant meet our expectations or did they exceed our expectations? And also at any time during this public meeting, the commission may determine that an executive session is required for us to fully review and evaluate certain information in the application as set forth in the agenda. And should we vote to go into an executive session at this time that would be anticipated that we would return to this public forum. After our review of the application, we will consider whether we wish to proceed with our determination process fully or in part, or defer that decision entirely to another day. That's our process. And with that, I turn to General Counsel Grossly. Good morning, Todd. Good morning, Madam Chair. Thank you. Good morning, commissioners and to all who are joining us here today, certainly prepared to walk through my remarks. Before I do so, I just wanted to make sure that that would be helpful. I know I went through them yesterday and they were related to American wagering as well since they were on the agenda. And I know some of them were here. So would it be helpful to go through them once again, or just rely on the record from yesterday? Okay, I'll go through them again. That's not a problem. So we're here to, of course, evaluate the application received for a category three tethered sports wagering license submitted by American wagering Inc, which as you referenced, Madam Chair is affiliated with Caesar's Entertainment Inc. Prior to commencing the review, it may be useful to set the stage by walking through the legal provisions and principles that will inform the commission's decision making. So with that, I'll highlight a few provisions of the Massachusetts Sports Wagering Act, which has been enacted as chapter 23 and of the general laws. And then we'll take a look at a number of sections of the commission's recently adopted regulations. So with that, allow me to begin with chapter 23 and and the first place to look at is section 63, which says that the commission may issue a category three license to any entity that offers sports wagering through a mobile application or other digital platform that meets the requirements of this chapter and the rules and regulations of the commission provided, however, that the commission shall issue no more than seven category three licenses that are not connected to a category one or category two license. In this present matter involving American wagering, the applicant is connected to a category one licensee specifically when mass LLC, which was of course awarded its category one license last week. We've used the term tethered to describe that connection. So what this means is that the seven license limit does not apply to this type of licensure that the commission will be evaluating today. Before we look at the commission's regulations that govern the licensing process for a category three applicant, let's take a look at what a category three sports wagering operator license is. And that term is defined in chapter 23 and section three to mean a license issued by the commission that permits the operation of sports wagering from mobile application and other digital platforms approved by the commission. Just to place the present application in context, it's important to recall that the category one license holder when mass LLC is permitted to conduct sports wagering operations, but not more than two individually branded mobile applications or other digital platforms approved by the commission, provided that those mobile applications are qualified for an issue to category three license. So the applicant before the commission today seeks to operate one of those two digital platforms that go along with wins category one license. Now we will take a look at the commission's rules and regulations that have to be met by the applicant in order to be issued a license. The best place to begin here is with 205 CMR 218, which as you know is section that sets out the application requirements, standards and procedures. The process itself has of course already begun and administrative sufficiency review was performed upon the submission of the suitability portions of the application. And then the commission convened a public meeting earlier in the week in order to receive public feedback on the tethered category three applications. Momentarily, we'll walk through the factors and standards the commission has set out for the award of a license. But prior to doing so, there are a few other provisions and principles that are important to keep in mind. First, the regulations provide that the commission shall analyze the factors consideration set out in the regs, but need not do so in any particular order, or give any individual factor any particular weight. And in fact, it can assign a factor no weight at all if it's deemed appropriate to do so. Next, you'll recall that the regulations provide that the commission may require or permit the applicant to provide additional information or documents as the commission deems appropriate in its review of the application. So if you're review evaluating the information provided in an application relative to a particular factor, and you determine that the factor that further information is required, you may direct the applicant to provide it. Similarly, if during the course of the commission's evaluation, the applicant observes that there is additional information that was not provided that may be of use to the commission, it may request an opportunity to provide it. It's further noteworthy that the present review is being conducted as part of a regular public meeting under the open meeting law and not in an adjudicatory proceeding. That means a number of things, including that the deliberations here must take place in public, and that if necessary, the executive session provisions of Chapter 30A may be utilized. As it pertains to the instant matter, Section 21A7 of Chapter 30A allows the commission to move into executive session to comply with or act under the authority of any general law. In the present situation, there is a general law that gives the commission authority to move into executive session. Specifically, Section 6i of Chapter 23N provides that applications for operator licenses shall be public records under Section 10 of Chapter 66. Provided, however, that trade secrets competitively sensitive or other proprietary information provided in the course of an application for an operator license under this chapter, the disclosure of which would place the applicant at a competitive disadvantage may be withheld from disclosure under the public records law. So in sum, if there is any specific information that the commission would like to discuss, but that the applicant identifies as falling within that provision that I just referenced, and the commission agrees, it may move into executive session to discuss that specific information. While the statutory provision in Chapter 23N relates to the public records line, not the open meeting law, to require that the subject information be discussed publicly would nullify the whole purpose of the provision which was designed to protect such information against. Accordingly, application of the executive session provision I referenced is appropriate in this situation. And finally, before moving into the factors themselves, it's also important to recall that any finding the commission makes must be supported by substantial evidence. This term is defined as such evidence as a reasonable mind might accept as adequate to support a conclusion. So when making a determination as to whether there is support in the application to find that a specific factor has been satisfied, or has not been satisfied, the commission will have to ensure that there is substantial evidence in the record to support the conclusion. The one exception to this rule in an area in which there is a heightened standard that applies relates to the review of an applicant's suitability. By the terms of Section 215 of the regulations, any durable finding of suitability must be supported by clear and convincing evidence, not just substantial evidence, which is a slightly lower standard. Our jurisprudence tells us that clear and convincing proof exists. When the evidence induces in the mind of the fact finder, which in this case is the commission, a reasonable belief that the facts asserted are highly probably true, that the probability that they are true or exist is substantially greater than the probability that they are false or do not exist. For evidence to be clear and convincing, it must be sufficient to convey a high degree of probability that the proposition to be proved is true, and it must be strong and positive and full clear and decisive. So those are the two standards of review, if you will, that are in play during this evaluation. Now let me lay out the factors included in Section 218. And one way you may choose to walk through the evaluation that will follow when we get to that part of the proceeding would be to take the application factor by factor and begin to draw conclusions as the quality of the information supporting each one. You'll recall that the commission included sub factors under each of these factors as well. So prior to engaging in final deliberations relative to the applicant, it may be helpful to outline each of these sub factors, though I will not do that right now. The factors are included in the Section 218.06 subsection five of the regulations. Each factor falls under the umbrella standard that the commission included in the regulation, which directs that in determining whether to award a sports wagering operator license, the commission will evaluate the application to determine whether a license award would benefit the Commonwealth. So that's the main standard that will have to be met in order to award a license. In reaching that conclusion, though, the commission provided that it will consider the following factors. And you'll recall, of course, that the application itself was designed to solicit information within each of these categories. Number one, the applicant's experience and expertise related to sports wagering. Number two, the economic impact and other benefits to the Commonwealth that the applicant is awarded a license. Number three, the applicant's proposed measures related to responsible gaming. Number four, a description of the applicant's willingness to foster racial ethnic and gender diversity, equity and inclusion. Number five, the technology that the applicant intends to use in its operation. Number six, the suitability of the applicant and its qualifiers, and we'll come back to this one momentarily. And number seven, any other appropriate factor that the commission in its discretion deems appropriate. So those are the factors that we will review. You'll recall that there are a few additional factors that the commission included in the regulations relative to category three evaluations. However, those considerations are specific to untethered applicants, not the tethered sort before you today. So I'd also just like to at this time, circle back to the suitability factor for a moment. As you know, the commission has adopted section 215 of the regulations to govern suitability determination. And it included provisions allowing for two types of a suitability finding. The first is a durable findings of suitability, which is the so called final suitability determination. The second is a preliminary finding of suitability. You may choose to award a durable finding of suitability if you conclude that the applicant and each of its qualifiers has demonstrated its suitability by clear and convincing proof after having undergone a probity investigation. Alternatively, you may award a preliminary finding of suitability to an applicant that has satisfied section 15.012 based upon a certification submitted by the applicant and an investigatory report submitted by the IEB. If you find an applicant to be preliminarily suitable, that makes them eligible to request the temporary license under the process described in section 219 of the regulations. The entity would not receive a full license at that juncture. The process here is designed to allow the customary full background investigation and supplemental suitability determination to be conducted by the IEB and the commission respectively. So those are the factors that the commission must consider in order to make a licensing decision. As you work your way through the evaluation, though, it may become clear that a condition of licensure will be appropriate in a particular area. For example, you may find that information relative to a particular factor is lacking. In that event, it does not mean that the applicant cannot be awarded a license. It may simply mean that an area may require to be supplemented with an appropriate condition. License conditions are described in section 220 of the regulations. You'll recall that there are a number of automatic conditions, like an obligation to obtain an operation certificate prior to commencing operations, and that an operator must comply with chapter 23N and all commission regulations. But there is also a provision that allows the commission to impose any other conditions that it determines appropriate to secure the objectives of chapter 23N and 205CMR. Once the commission has made its way through all of the enumerated factors, but before any final decision is made as to whether to award a license or a temporary license, the commission should shore up what those final conditions will be in the event that the commission is inclined to award the license. Once that is done, the commission may decide whether it will award the category three license outright, determine that the applicant is eligible to request a temporary license while a complete suitability assessment is performed, or it can deny the application for failure to meet the requirement of the regs or for having violated section 60 or 9 of chapter 23N. To be clear, receipt of a category three license in the fashion the commission is reviewing today, whether temporary or full does not permit for the untethered mobile operation, just for the untethered operations as one of the two category one mobile or digital operations. After the decision is made, a written decision will be prepared and issued commemorating the commission's decision. Pardon me, my home phone is ringing, which never happens, but I'm sorry for that. I don't know who's calling me. I don't even want to take it. I don't even know my home phone number, so I don't know who's calling me, but I'm sorry about that. Hold on. Okay. So the the award of the temporary license, again, does not mean that agreeing that the operator has a green light to commence operations. It simply means that they're eligible to work towards the award of an operation certificate, which is a prerequisite to conducting sports major in operation. That process is described in section 251 of the regulations and requires submission and approval of such things as the internal controls, including the house rules and compliance with any conditions that may be imposed as we just discussed. So with that, Madam Chair and commissioners, I'll pause and turn matters back over to you, Madam Chair, and happy to take any questions. Question is all set. Okay. So to our applicant, I know that you've exercised a lot of patience and as General Counsel goes from a little to you, you probably heard much of what was already set forth today yesterday because when you were waiting in the wings and so for your time, we are grateful that you've exercised patience. We're going to start though now with American Warring Inks presentation and we perhaps the demonstration of the technology that's proposed. I will be referring and commissioners, I think we can be comfortable given the application to either saying AWI or Caesars. The application refers to them. Is that fair to the applicant? Yes. Hello. My name is Jeff Hendricks, Assistant General Counsel for this entertainment. Pleasure to be in front of you. That's all very fair. My note that we might also refer to the business of Caesar Sportsbook or Caesar all of which would refer to the applicant. Okay. Thank you. So thank you again for your patience and now we're looking forward to your presentation. My pleasure. We're going to place the presentation up on the screen here. Thank you very much, Lisa. Chair, commissioners, before I begin, can you see the presentation in front of you? We can. It's not completely, but if you want to get, it depends on how you want to present. It's good. It's good. All right, great. Well, then we will most likely use this format. We might expand it as we move forward. By way of introduction, I just introduced myself. As I noted, I'm Assistant General Counsel for Caesar's entertainment. I'm in charge of our regulatory and compliance functions. With me today, I have a number of colleagues who I'm going to introduce and describe the sections that they're going to present in our application requesting approval for a temporary category three license for American Wagering Inc. doing this Caesar Sportsbook. Before I get into the introductions, I do want to note at the very front, we very much appreciate the opportunity to be in front of you today. I know there's been a lot of work and a very short amount of time to get us here. So thank you to the staff. Thank you to commissioners for reviewing our materials. And as we present, we intend to address each of the elements that Mr. Grossman described pertaining to our application for finding a suitability. If you have questions about any of those materials as we go, we will be happy to answer them during the presentation or at the end, we endeavor to hit all of the high points of our application. But if there's anything that would require some additional information, we're happy to discuss at your convenience. If we'll go to this next slide. As I noted before, we have designed this presentation to address each of the core elements of finding a suitability. With me today, my colleague Eric Hessian, our president of Caesar Sports and online gaming, will provide information pertaining to several sections. Most predominantly, our applicants experience an expertise related to sports wagering. Additionally, my colleague Ken Fuchs will provide additional information on our advertising and operational plans. My colleague Heather Rapp, our senior vice president of corporate social responsibility, will give some insight into our willingness to foster racial, ethnic and gender diversity, equity and inclusion. And then my colleague Floyd Baroga, our vice president of product compliance and Nick Arcuri, our technology product leader, will lead a product demonstration to show you how the platform works and describe some of the regulatory components related to our KYC geolocation and ITL certifications. So with that, I'd like to introduce my colleague Eric Hessian to begin walking us through our applicants experience and expertise related to sports wagering. Thanks, Jeff. Good morning, Madam Chair and Commission members. As Jeff mentioned, I'm Eric Hessian and I serve as the president of our digital operations, which includes the online sports book. I'll take a few slides and go through our general background as to how our company got to where we are and how our experience has been growing over the number of years that the product's been in the market. But please feel free to stop me at any time if you have additional questions or anything that you'd like to have more information on. So we operate as American Wagering, which is a city area of the public company, Caesar's Entertainment. I know in your remarks earlier we go back and forth between them, but we're essentially a division within the company. We have the largest footprint of any sports betting company in North America with sports betting operations and 27 different jurisdictions. We offer retail sports betting in over 180 sports books across 22 of these jurisdictions and mobile sports betting in 19 of the jurisdictions. We own the majority of our core sports betting technology platform and control the development of the few parts that we don't fully own. Our newest and most advanced platform is referred to as Liberty internally and we use that in nearly all of the jurisdictions in which we operate and that's the version of the platform that we plan to use in Massachusetts. So it will be our most current and updated and advanced product that we'll be planning to roll out. We have over 1,750 employees in our sports and online division and included in that are a number of dedicated teams in areas such as technology, marketing, trading and risk management, customer service, compliance, financial reporting and responsible gaming among others. In terms of general background, American wagering was operated as a subsidiary of William Hill PLC which was a public company traded in the UK for approximately 10 years. We acquired William Hill and closed on the transaction in April of 21 and subsequently divested all of William Hill's international operations. William Hill had been developing their own technology platform which we then accelerated the development and invested in to roll it out across the United States. Just 100 days after the acquisition on August 2, 2021 we launched a nationwide upgrade and rebranded the William Hill app in eight states to become the Caesars Sports Book app. It provided a highly elevated experience for customers and incorporated the Caesars Rewards program. Since the acquisition we've significantly increased our investment in technology, customer service, payments and other areas that are important for our customers. We plan to continue to invest at an elevated level for the foreseeable future and in addition we've earmarked resources so that we're able to launch our product in new states as they come available such as Massachusetts. From a platform perspective we plan to offer the platform in coordination with Encore Boston Harbor as you mentioned earlier. We have a strong working relationship with that company and we've partnered on similar arrangements in other states and we don't have any concerns with working with them. We also intend to limit participation in sports events based on the regulations that you set forth. Our systems have the capability to restrict any markets that aren't permissible and to do custom offerings based on the regulations. Currently we do that in other states where there are some state specific requirements or limitations and it's managed out of our trading team here in Las Vegas and they're able to manage that across all the different states in which we operate. So I'll pause there and see if there are any questions before we move on to the next section. I think that we've been typically holding all of our questions till later in the day so thank you. Okay, sure. Yeah, that's fine. Then I will charge ahead here then. So in terms of the economic impact and other benefits to the commonwealth starting out as I noted we're a subsidiary of Caesars Entertainment. If you looked at our last quarterly report from the third quarter we had roughly one billion dollars of cash and two billion dollars of availability on revolver so totaling approximately three billion dollars worth of available liquidity. From a sports book and online business perspective earlier in the year as our technology advanced we were able to reduce our nationwide spending and we shifted our focus really to Caesars promotional spend and it allowed us to fine tune our investment levels and focus more on high value customers. We're also able to offer the Caesars rewards loyalty program in a much more integrated way and what that's done is it's created additional customer value and it's improved our retention abilities. We plan to continue to refine our marketing and operational strategies to adapt to the market dynamics. From our history in the retail casino space we've established a protocol of testing control where we test certain actions and then evaluate them and continually refine our approach to marketing. It's been very effective on the retail casino side and we are employing the same approach on the online and digital side as well. In addition to the strong corporate balance sheet and cash position we're in a solid position to whether any downturns that we could see in revenues however we haven't seen any indications of that at this point and of course if you'd like additional information we can obviously answer it in the Q&A but we also provided links to our 10 Q&A and last quarter's earnings release. In terms of maximizing the revenues to the state we plan to use a variety of media sources to reinforce the quality of the Caesar's experience of brand, our commitment to responsible gaming, and to provide unique offers to the sports fans and betters. Our approach to forecasting and spending media is highly data-driven and optimized. As I mentioned we trial things, take the feedback, recalibrate and make modifications to further refine how we approach marketing. We'll leverage our experience from other states as well to successfully launch in Massachusetts, acquire the new customers, shift current sports betters from unlicensed competitors and sustain engagement over a period of time. Although we don't have a finalized marketing plan at this point we're in the process of putting that together. Our plans typically include TV radio and billboards and we use those to create awareness and provide education about our product. We often do direct response media where there's a call to action and that's typically from email, direct mail, affiliate programs where allowed and then we use the Caesar's database of customers that have established accounts with us on the retail side and that's also some social media and some search components of that. We plan to have some grassroots partnerships which are commonly in local bars venues and other events throughout the state to provide a local engagement and to drive further affinity with our brand. We have media and league partnerships as well and our marketing materials are regularly reviewed to ensure that we're treating everyone respectfully offering a healthy and responsible sports wagering experience. In terms of the surrounding states are effectively all legalized for sports wagering except for Vermont at this point and so we believe that the biggest opportunity is to convert customers that are currently using the illegal markets and get them to participate in the online legal sports betting market and so if you go to the next slide Lisa in terms of the legal market what we believe and what we've seen in other states is that you know people want to do the right thing and I believe and we believe that they want to convert to illegal offering as long as the product is competitive and it is close to the quality that you can get from the illegal books. We believe that our product the wagering experience that we've cultivated for the customers the customer service that we provide and very importantly the reputation and the regulatory structure that we're talking about today does exactly that. We offer a wide variety of options for people to bet including sports markets all around the world 24-7 there's something going on. We offer an in-play product that with very minimal downtime and suspension of markets so that customers can get the same experience for better than what they can get from an international legal operator. We offer a wide variety of count on funding options and the ability for customers to receive their withdrawn funds quickly which is very important to a customer feedback. We also offer attractive promotions and bonuses as a way to retain the customers after they sign up and we've integrated the Caesars loyalty program into our app so that customers earn Caesar's rewards which further enhances the retention capabilities of our product and finally we provide excellent customer service. We have live agents available via phone which is very unusual right now in our industry. We also have email chat and then we have kind of an automated. Did we lose? Did I lose? Okay, I thought it was me. We all lost him. We all lost him. It's very interesting even with the sidebar to see everybody's expression saying this is me. Let me call Eric right now and we can either have him redial in or we'll pick up his slides for him. Am I back on, Jeff? I'm back on and we have no problems with these kinds of technicalities. I laughed because we all had the same expression wondering if it was on our end. We can't see you. Oh, I can see him. I can't see him so maybe. He has to scroll down, commissioner Skinner, if he pops up on your sidebar. Yeah, now it's completely black. Maybe when he speaks again, it will come back. Eric, you, let's see if we can hear you certainly and I can see you, but you just finished with the excellent customer service statement. Okay, great. So yeah, one of the areas that we really focused on in the last year is our customer service program where we offer live, we do have a it's funny because nothing's changing and commissioner Skinner, did he never pop up visually for you? He never appeared visually. Okay, so I don't know if I can see everyone else, but I'm chairing commissioners. It appears he may be frozen visually. He's also black on my screen as well. The screen is completely dark. So I think he just needs to turn off his video and stop his video and re-enable his video in order to see him visually. If he's on a Wi-Fi connection, then he might just need to do audio. Would it be acceptable to the commissioners if we had Eric turn off his videos to limit the bandwidth? That might help on his end and then we could present those next two slides. Yes, I think we do like to see if it works visually and Katrina was just offering that, but otherwise we'll be fine with audio. Did you hear her recommendation, Jeff? It was, I think, I heard it correctly and correctly commissioners, but maybe he basically reboots and tries. No, not to reboot, Madam Chair, but to just turn off his video if he's on a Wi-Fi connection. The bandwidth maybe consuming both. Yeah, that's what Jeff was recommending, but that means we'd go without video altogether, correct? Of the individual, yes, but the presentation should still work. Hello, I'm back on. Can you roll here? There you are, Eric. Yes. So yeah, while I'm talking, I'll just have my screen off as you suggested. So I apologize for the Wi-Fi issues here. I believe I've finished the slide a few times. Were you able to hear it? No, you stopped at excellent customer service and we really haven't moved on. So that slide is still up. Okay, great. That was my final point was that we do provide and focus on customer service and make sure that we're available. We have phone live 20 hours a day and then live chat 24 hours a day. So customers are always able to get in touch with us should they be having a problem. And then from an employment perspective, we're predominantly located in Las Vegas. However, we do have operations in Jersey City, New Jersey. And as such, our base in Nevada in New Jersey is where most of our employees are located. We do have an option for a number of employees to work remotely where that's applicable. And so we have seven full time employees in Massachusetts currently. And depending on some of the local strategies that we deploy, we may end up with with more employees doing local activations. So I'll pause there. And I guess turn it turn it back over to Jeff, I believe. Thank you, Eric. And thank you commissioners. I'm going to begin a discussion of our proposed measures relating to responsible gaming, our commitment to responsible gaming and our advertising plans. Now I apologize. I'm getting over one of the many bugs that's out there right now. So I have to mute during this presentation to apologize. So I want to begin with noting that responsible gaming is a core part of our culture here at Cedars. Our long standing position is that we want customers to be playing with us for one reason. And that's to have fun. We also sponsor various public awareness education and other campaigns regarding problem and under each game. Within this section, I'm going to walk through a number of elements of our responsible gaming program. We're going to discuss the responsible gaming program that will apply specifically to the product that will be available in Massachusetts. We'll talk about some of the features within the product that will allow guests to self select various responsible gaming options. I'll also discuss Cedars corporate responsible gaming program, which will also apply to all of our advertising and marketing within the Commonwealth. And then we will get into discussion of the principles that we apply to our marketing programs in general and various sponsorship agreements that the company participates in. Following that, I'm going to turn things over to Ken Fuchs, our Chief Operating Officer of Cedars Digital to give us some insight on what those promotions will look like and advertisers will look like specifically if we're able to launch in the Commonwealth. One element that we think is unique to our responsible gaming platform and that will be available to customers in Massachusetts is the availability of our responsible gaming ambassadors. Cedars has a long standing tradition of taking certain team members and giving them additional training to interact with customers to provide information regarding responsible gaming issues, have conversations that might be more difficult to have in a broader context and give it additional and specific information to our customers about how they can address responsible gaming issues. When Eric described the integration of our two companies earlier and one of our major objectives following that integration was to train new team members as responsible gaming ambassadors that are able to interact with our sports betting customers and provide that unique service to customers across the country and that will be available if you're able to launch in the Commonwealth. Also, as I noted, there are various responsible gaming tools in the application to provide resources to customers informing them of the risks of problem gaming and tools that are available to them if they want to limit their experiences in certain ways. I'm not going to spend too much time at this exact juncture because during our product demonstration we'll show you exactly how those features work within the application and walk you through each of those tools that are all available to our customers. I also want to note at the outset the Caesar Sports Book will be a full and unequivocal partner with all of the agencies working in Commonwealth to support responsible gaming, whether that is the commission or any other agencies that provide support to customers within Massachusetts. Additionally, Caesar's has memberships with many councils that provide problem gambling support across the country and we're proud to support the National Council on Problem Gambling and the International Center for Responsible Gaming amongst many other organizations. When we look at our demonstrated commitment as a company, I hope you'll see the Caesar's really stands alone with the amount and breadth of commitment that we've made to responsible gaming. The list in front of you describes various responsible gaming milestones that the company has accomplished over its long history and we're eager to continue to add to this list. Within our application, we've taken several steps to ensure that we can prevent wagering by prohibited persons including underage persons and problem gamblers. One of the predominant ways in which we do that is ensuring that only individuals over the age of 21 are able to access to create an account. So as we look at ensuring that the right sort of customers use our product, again as you'll see in the product demonstration, only individuals over the age of 21 can create an account and all of those individuals have to go through several controls including reviewed by a third party KYC provider before an account can be created. So as we look at our marketing efforts and our customer engagement efforts, all of which is driven under the corporate principle that only individuals over the age of 21 can use our product. Additionally, and while this presentation is predominantly focused on our mobile offering in our retail environments, we also take numerous steps to ensure that only individuals over the age of 21 are able to use our retail sportsbook services as well, including carding anyone who looks under the age of 30 and providing substantial and repeated training to our team members on the importance of only allowing individuals over the age of 21 to use our products. Within our application, we submitted two different policy documents for your review. The first is a document that will be specific to this sportsbook application within Massachusetts. And within that document, you'll see numerous controls that describe a lot of what we've spoken about here, the sorts of self-exclusion options that will be available to our customers. The steps that we'll take to make sure that anyone who is identified as self-excluded is prohibited and banned from using our platform. And then all of our cool off and other tools available in the platform. Additionally, we provide information to our customers explaining how they can reach out to a third party. They have questions about responsible gaming, if they're seeking treatment, or if they want to speak to someone independent of the company to obtain additional information about approaches to safer gaming. So that's the first document. The second document that you see is Caesar's overarching responsible gaming program. And this document applies to the entire enterprise, as not just specific to our sportsbook platform. And again, ensures that we offer a number of tools to our patrons to provide a safe responsible gaming environment. So within our program, we ensure that if any patron wishes to restrict any of our company's services, they can sign up for self-exclusion. They can do that through the application. They can also reach out through any of our properties or reach out to the corporate office and request a limited or lifetime self-exclusion. And if they choose to elect that option, then that exclusion would prohibit them from using Caesar services across the portfolio at our Brick and Mortar properties and within our mobile platforms as well. Additionally, we train all of our team members to be on the lookout to affirmatively identify signs that might indicate to our team members that a customer is dealing with a responsible gaming issue. If a team member does identify such information, we have a mechanism in place where they can refer that information to what we call a responsible gaming committee. That committee will review the patron's comments, information relating to the patron's play, and make various recommendations that can range from reaching out to the patron through a responsible gaming ambassador, provide them information on resources that are available to them locally, resources that are available to the company, or in some cases, the company can choose to self-exclude or choose to exclude an individual rather based on the company's discretion if we think that that individual is not using our products appropriately. And then lastly, as we noted, this policy applies to all of our businesses and would support the responsible gaming policy that is specific to Massachusetts. Should we be able to receive a license? Within our responsible gaming program, we also adhere to a document that we refer to as the marketing and advertising code, which I might call the MAC or the code. And this code is very similar to other documents you may have seen in the space, like an AGA code of conduct. Our MAC is specific to Caesars and really is kind of the guiding principle for how we look at our relationships when it comes to marketing and our relationships with other companies. So when following the MAC, Caesars Sportsbook first ensured that our initial launch campaign included a responsible gaming advertisement, the initial one used actually the Manning family, the primary ambassadors for our company, the reminded users of the responsible gaming tools available within our application and reminded our customers to always use our products responsibly. Additionally, we adhere to all of these following principles. We do not promote gambling at any event where the majority of the audience is reasonably expected to be below the legal age to gamble in a certain jurisdiction. Our advertising does not depict, encourage, or condone excessive or irresponsible activities. We never imply that gambling is a right of passage for young adults, nor do we imply that gambling or gaming is acceptable alternative to or means of satisfying work or family commitments. All of our advertisements and all of the advertisements that will be displayed within the Commonwealth include a toll-free help line for popular gamblers and their families. All of our materials, regardless of a sponsorship agreement or a marketing approach are focused solely on reaching individuals over the age of 21, including partnerships with third parties like major sporting programs. When we look at our partnerships in a certain location like a like a stadium in our arena, we also ensure that the marketing materials are confined specifically to those locations that the average age of an attendee will be well in excess of the legal age to wager in that jurisdiction. And then lastly, as we mentioned earlier, we have a zero tolerance policy for directing marketing materials towards anyone under the age of 21. And further, we have a zero tolerance policy for ever allowing anyone under the age of 21 to use our products. So we have applied all of these sorts of responsible gaming controls and marketing and advertising commitments as we looked at all of our sponsorships and third party relationships. So I'm about to turn this over to Ken as he's going to walk through the advertising plans for the Commonwealth. I know we mentioned the questions might come at the end, but I would certainly be welcome to answer any questions about responsible gaming before we proceed. With that, Ken, please take it away. Good morning, chairwoman, commissioners. I'm Ken Fuchs. I'm the COO of Caesar's Digital and I appreciate the opportunity to talk to you today about Caesar's license. You know, from an advertising standpoint, Jeff touched, of course, on responsible gaming as a core pillar. We really feel that our advertising is a representation of the Caesar's mission in our brand. And ultimately, our DNA is centered on hospitality. It's fun. It's aspirational. It's about trust. And it's, of all things, customer-centric. And so the narrative of our advertising since our rebrand last year has tried to envelope that those qualities in our creative. It's less about giant checks. It's more about the story around sports betting and why it's additive to the sports experience for the sports fan. As we think about our advertising, we really center on three different components to it. The first, as Eric mentioned, is we've really shifted and learned a lot as we've launched in the last year and a half or so, launched or migrated about 10 different states and jurisdictions. And we've honed our strategy with every single one. As we've done it, we've recognized that as we've built a national brand that local activation often provides the best return and the highest quality customers you get to know the local markets. So we spend a lot of time understanding the local market. As Caesars, we have customers including many, many customers in Massachusetts already. And so we leverage our knowledge of the local market and our local customer. And we've provided in the application examples potential media breakouts by channel in terms of how we might think about Massachusetts market activation across a variety of methodologies. We also are very data-driven. We establish KPIs up front that we are trying to hit in terms of brand awareness, number of new customers, which we might refer to as first-time depositors, revenue and market share targets. And then we model our media spend based on our targets and the quality of the execution. We build targeted marketing journeys thinking about the funnel of conversion of people into our product and then retention over time, which is getting them exposed to our product understanding what Caesars offers in the space. And then providing promotions and opportunities for them to sign up and incentives to sign up as well. We continually assess the quality of the marketing and the results. And then on a daily, weekly, monthly basis, we refine as we go so that we're always out front of what we see. Then lastly, education is a major component via responsible gaming education about the product itself. We want to make sure that people understand what the product is and we want to be very clear and concise about what we offer. An anchor around around our advertising and marketing is Caesars Awards. Caesars Awards is a connective tissue for any customer of Caesars, regardless of what vertical, regardless of what location you're in, regardless of what digital product you're in, you can be a Caesars Awards customer, enjoy the benefits of a best in class, the best in class rewards program in our space. We have over 65 million members worldwide and for us, we really view Caesars Awards as a component that provides the enticement for customers to be loyal to Caesars and provide them a great experience beyond just a sports betting experience. It's part of a wider environment with tickets, restaurants, experiences, and other types of rewards. For Caesars Awards, it really has several components it has personalized offers and with every bet you make, you also you also achieve reward credits that you can turn in to use for various promotions or for those experiences. It also has a tiering system as you can see here on the slide with six different tiers with progressing benefits for every single tier that include personalized offers, birthday bets, hotel discounts, and other things as you elevate your tiers. Caesars Awards also has a number of partners which allows it to have truly the broadest array of potential value for the customer including with the NFL, cruise lines, Hursts, Windham, Vivid Seats, and others. So it's not just about Caesars experience, it's an ecosystem for customers to truly leverage a reward system that provides benefits across both Caesars and its partners. It also has an app in the App Store. The app has 173,000 ratings and has an average rating of 4.8 stars. So we very much integrate this throughout our experience and we're very proud of the program. And then lastly, part of our marketing effort is not just about media, it's about leveraging our partnerships and high touch opportunities out in the local markets. So as Eric touched on, we have a field marketing team which consists of both local vendors that are licensed as well as employees that can activate a variety of different types of experiences for customers to both learn about the Caesars Sports Book to sign up and to recognize our loyal customers. We often work with partners around those in other states. Those can be sports teams, they can be movie feeders, they can be suites at games, it can be bars and taverns, it could be other types of fan-based gatherings. But we're very well established in terms of running these events, running them under type regulations, training the staff appropriately around responsible gaming and around our products. And it's a great way to educate the fan around sports betting because it can be a complex journey to sign up. And it is a new industry and we think it's very important to have that concierge type service with people that are well trained as ambassadors to be able to talk to customers, explain the app, take them through the sign up process as they might need help or have questions. And of course, answer questions about sports betting and the vernacular of something that can sometimes see feel complex. See, we also have partnerships. I mentioned the NFL. We also partner with CBS Sports and ESPN. We have integrations with both of them across a variety of their media properties both digital and on air. We power all of the odds that you hear on ESPN and on their site and we're integrated into products like their websites, their articles, fantasy sports and other parts where you can click and sign up or you can click into markets to bet from their various properties and states where we are regulated in sports betting as they go. These are some examples of the creative and promotions that we offer. We offer a variety of different types of sign up and retention offers. For example, we might in previous iterations we might say first bet on us up to $1,500. So if you lose your first bet you get another chance at it. It might be after your first bet you might get $100 bet credit or you might get rewards points of a certain sort. But we also are shifting and focusing quite a bit on retention. We want to make sure that the people who have invested their time and their money and their experience in us have a great experience on an ongoing basis. And a lot of our promotions are geared towards introducing new products as well as introducing people to different parts of the application. We typically have two different types of reinvestment strategies. One is open to the public where everybody can access a certain type of promotion and it might be based on a certain game or a certain product type. We also have segmented and personalized promotions based on the type of player you are which is really tailored to you as an individual sports better with us as Caesars. We've made a big effort over the last year to become more and more data-oriented and more tailored around those types of promotions so that we're offering the right type of promotions to the right customer at the right time. Sometimes we also offer contests as well. So it's not just about bonuses and promotions but we have a lot of experiences through our partners. So we offer contests and ways to access to Caesars universe beyond just the sports betting promotions. And with that I'll, unless there are questions I'll turn it over to Heather Rapp who's our SVP of Corporate Social Responsibility. I'm not seeing Heather but I only see a portion. Let's just see. I'm looking now. I see Heather as I scroll. Heather, do you want to see if we can hear you? Sounds like. Can you guys hear me? No we can. Yes. I apologize. I've had some technical difficulties this morning and have I had to reboot a few times. Good morning Madam Chairman, commissioners and staff. As Ken mentioned my name is Heather Rapp and I'm the Senior Vice President of Corporate Social Responsibility. As part of my role I oversee all things CSR and ESG related for Caesars Entertainment. At Caesars our Corporate Social Responsibility philosophy is built around our people, planet play framework. And today I'll be sharing more on our work within the people pillar. As you can see below our focus on people centers on supporting the well-being of our team members, guests and local communities. Beginning with community engagement. Our community engagement efforts stretch across civic engagement, strategic philanthropy and team member volunteering. And we strive to be an integral part of the communities where we are privileged to serve. Caesars supports vulnerable and underserved populations through education programs, tools and platforms and facilitating equitable opportunities to participate in economic life. If we move into diversity, equity and inclusion the way that we look at DEI is across five pillars of commitment. Team members, guests, communities, suppliers and advocacy. And we strive to embed DEI into everything that we do. I wanted to take a moment to highlight two of these pillars for you here today starting with our responsible procurement practices. Caesars Sportsbook and Caesars Entertainment we participate in our DEI initiatives and overall and specific goals pertaining to minority-owned, women-owned and veteran-owned business enterprises. We strive to lead fair, equitable and inclusive procurement practices and processes that apply key principles such as welcoming fair competition, supporting diverse female veteran-owned businesses and obtaining relevant certifications and helping support them and growing their businesses overall. While Caesars Sportsbook is primarily managed out of the centralized services function in Nevada and New Jersey, it will be applied the responsible procurement policies to vendors in the Commonwealth wherever possible. Moving into our team member practices I'm very pleased to share our efforts to embrace diversity and create an inclusive environment that celebrates our team members as individuals. We've set very aggressive targets to achieve 50% female leadership and 50% people of color leadership by 2025. As of our performance in 2021 we reported 46% women in mid-level leadership roles, 32% women in senior leadership roles and 43% people of color in leadership roles. Our work to achieve these goals is woven through all facets of the organization beginning with talent acquisition and recruitment to talent development once team members are within the organization and throughout our day-to-day operations in all of our properties. While we do have one additional slide prepared with information on the work within our play pillar which focuses primarily on responsible gaming I believe Jeff covered that at length within his presentation earlier. I with that I know you said you're holding questions until the end so I will happily pass that on to Floyd Baroga to speak on our technology. Thanks Heather. Can everyone hear me? So good morning Madam Chair and commissioners thank you for having me. I'm Floyd Baroga Vice President of Product Compliance. It's good seeing everyone today and today I'll be highlighting our Liberty Digital Platform. I'm just walking the commission through the technical requirements and regulations that our platform meets or exceeds and also outline the architecture as far as how does the architecture meet the technical standards and the evaluation of the product say through GLI or the regulatory test labs. Also to note the system has the ability for daily financial reporting and to meet any responsible gaming and self-exclusion requirements has required by our current jurisdictions as well as the requirements that Massachusetts will plan to incorporate. So there's really two aspects of this system or in what we call the Liberty Digital Platform covering our website and our mobile apps. So the first aspect is operational support the back office if you will. Our player account management system incorporates a number of tools as far as marketing, email tools, customer service and payment processing. And also we have 27 support through our IT data centers. We will incorporate if licensed data centers within the state of Massachusetts to cover the wire act. Also have 24 seven development operation support. So engineering support available at any time. And also we incorporate a stringent change management policy that identifies any changes any modifications to the system for auditability of the MGC. And then later in the presentation Nicarcury will provide a user experience demo. Our digital platform provides three different verticals an iOS application an Android app and the website as well. And just to note you know the Liberty Platform has been live in New Jersey since 2019 but Caesar's Digital or Caesar Sports Works also operates our legacy platform in number of jurisdictions. So we can leverage that experience across the board along with you know the having the product fitted out by a number of regulatory markets. At least the next slide please. As far as the Caesar's technology advantage goes Caesar's utilizes the latest and greatest technology tools to allow for to allow for modular updates to the system whether it's incorporating new states such as Massachusetts or if the industry incorporates new security enhancements our team can go through and incorporate those updates into the system as well as testing and provide support for data retention. Also the betting engine and if you can go back also the the betting engine and all of our experience within you know US and previously Europe as far as offering pricing odds that experience as far as our traders go that is also incorporated within our system. Next slide Lisa. And then here are some screenshots of our mobile application iOS and our website so it provides a similar look and feel across the board so that the user whether they go within Massachusetts or say New York New Jersey and some of our other markets you'll have that same look and feel and allow that familiarity with all the players. And right now I'm going to hand it off to Nick or Kerry our product lead he's going to provide a demo of our mobile application in New York walking us through the various features of the of the mobile app and the system. Hi everyone. Thank you madam chairwoman and commissioners for allowing us to present happy to be here. I'm going to share my screen please let me know if you can see should be a mobile iOS this works one second. All right. I'm going to have to restart. I'll be right back. Sorry. It's giving me a hard time sharing my phone. Give me one second. I'll be right back apologies. There we go. I'm here. Okay. Can you see okay great. All right. Sorry about that. So what you're looking at right now we are in a logged out state. So I'm not logged in at the moment. I'm in the state of New York at the moment and I'll show you a couple of features before I log in. I'll also go through a registration process. So you guys can see the journey for a brand new user and see some of our controls around legal age KYC etc. So just taking you guys giving you a familiarity of the app at the very top we have the welcome information which tells you you know you're here it's the home of usage rewards you have information around which games and and leagues that we have here. This is all customizable by our editorial team. We like to obviously put NFL and World Cup at the top of that list because they're the most popular sports and leagues. Further down you have some of those promotions that can took us through and we also have a promotions page down at the bottom like you can see the promos and then you have our basic events sports and all the different markets that we offer right within the home page. So as I'm scrolling down here you know you can see all of the NBA games that we have some college basketball and then finally the NHL these are kind of our featured markets that use allow users to find the most popular events quickly but they can always go into any sport or league to find more information of what they're looking for. So I'm going to first go in and log in and the next thing I'll show you guys are some of the responsible gaming controls and then we'll do some bedding to actually trigger some of those so we can see them in action. So when I click the top right it looks like a profile picture I'm actually going to use face ID to log in because New York has that set up. I can show you the other way to log in as well but you'll see a quick face ID show up give me a check and now I'm logged in. It does say Michael this is a test account registered with the state of New York fully whitelisted to allow for this. This is not real money it's all test money but as you can see the very top has changed it says hi Michael it shows my gold membership for Caesar's rewards and on the right top right corner you can see my balance of 10,600 and a dollar and a one cent along with my 10,100 reward credits. I can also go into my profile MT and it's going to show me a little bit more information. So again cash balance and bonus balance I don't have a bonus balance right now but if I did have a bonus balance it would show there there's a difference between a cash balance and a bonus balance. Cash balance cannot be withdrawn sorry cash balances can we be withdrawn and bonus balances cannot be withdrawn. You can see my Caesar's rewards information account preferences bonuses responsible gaming support and the ability to log out plus we have any information this is what New York controls we have our that with your head not over it to support hotline and any other information required by a particular state and jurisdiction we have that on every single homepage in our footer that way it's always available to a user no matter where they're navigating within the application. So I'm going to go into responsible gaming here I have a couple options within responsible gaming I have our gaming limits which are around time spent deposit amounts and spend for daily weekly and monthly I have our ability to cool off which does not it suspends your account for three to I mean three to 30 days it does not allow you to deposit or make bets it does allow you to withdraw in that state and then self exclusion this allows you to self exclude and and completely suspend your account for one two or three years depending on the state and jurisdiction we can adjust that setting no matter what the jurisdiction is asking for there and that also allows you in certain states to self exclude across all operators there so you're not tempted to go to another operator if you have a gambling issue that you're you're working on then you have your history of any changes so first going to go into gaming limits so you're going to see a few here so it's going to tell you about the information from the particular state and then we have three on this from New York we have deposit limit both daily sorry daily, weekly and monthly so I've had it set for a monthly limit of a thousand so I don't want to deposit more than a thousand if I try that it will block my deposit and that's obviously additive so it's not a one time deposit of a thousand if you deposit 500 one day and try 600 the next day obviously that's going to block you because you're going over your limitation for the month you have betting limits so we have a weekly betting limit of 500 a monthly of no limit and a daily of no limit I'm actually going to change this the daily here going to open that up it's going to give me a drop down some options certain jurisdictions we allow the user to actually type that in but most control usually drop down to allow for easy access for the user so I'm actually going to put a daily limit of 100 here and I have a daily time limit right now at four hours I'm going to try to reduce that to one hour and you'll see a kind of a different approach here when I hit apply the one hour reduction anytime you're reducing a limit it will not let you do that right away for that particular day or if you're trying to increase a limit on your spend it is going to delay you either a day week or a month for that to happen so you can't right away say oh I need to put more deposit more or spend more that day you have to take a full day week or month depending on which limit you're changing before you can actually adjust a limit in the I would say the more aggressive direction either less time you know we go less time spent on the site or more time spent on the site actually so I actually did the wrong thing so I want to go six increasing apologies yeah now when I hit apply here you'll get a kind of confirmation screen and key key thing you can see here my daily spend limit since I'm adding a spend limit there's no there's no issue with that that'll go right away $100 for the daily spend but since I increased my time limit it won't happen today it'll happen tomorrow and they'll say 12 15 2022 is when that will happen and today it'll be still four hours so I can hit confirm here and it tells you also at the daily time limit it will increase to six hours on 12 15 2022 so that tells you that you know you have four hours today but tomorrow in this case you can go up to six hours if I close that down I'm going to go into the history just to show those changes in your history that way you know what changes you made so the two changes I made you can see the daily spend limit is at 100 the daily time limit is at six hours and the due date is when that's due to take effect you can see that 12 15 at 11 35 a.m. Eastern which is the time it kind of turns over for us it's for yeah that's right and you can see a few other things I was testing I was testing on Monday you can see I made some changes on Monday and you can see all of those those changes there go right ahead question thank you my chair just a question if I wanted to reduce the time limit rather than increase it does that also not take effect until the following day it will take effect right now so if I'm saying hey I only want one hour now it will change to one hour and I'll confirm that and it's actually at one hour immediately because you're being more conservative with your time and we want that to take place right away and is that is it the same for the betting and spending limit so it'd be the opposite for betting and spending so if you want to if you want to sorry sorry if you want to reduce spending if you want to reduce spending or your deposit limit same thing it would take effect immediately so if I change my weekly limit from 300 to 500 you see there's no change there it's no no warning saying it's tomorrow or next week it's immediate 300 and that's now now my weekly limit is at 300 thank you okay I'll quickly show the cool off I'm not obviously going to go through cool off because I want to show a few more things here but you have the ability to cool off you'll see the number of days that we have options here this is customizable and it tells you everything you will not be able to bet deposit may changes but you will be able to withdraw during that that time of cool off the share of withdrawal and you have a withdrawal process is pretty instantaneous right depending on the way with we withdraw so if it is for a debit card it is instant some other methods you'll pay pals is very very quick but there are other methods that take a little bit longer ACH and others need approval and they may take up to you know 24 48 hours just depends on the provider and our approval because a lot of the times we do manual checks on most of our withdrawals we also run it through some automatic checks to make sure there's no fraud or other things going on and if there is it gets held up but we do have an instant withdraw around debit cards that that we've implemented in the last few months and I'll show you the few options the options that we have for deposit withdraw in a moment self-exclude just I will quickly go through this this is in New York so you have two options self-exclude just from Caesars or the entire state of New York we have different options for different states all customizable here but anything else on responsible gaming on this screen I'm going to trigger that hundred dollar limit that we just put in there so you guys can actually see it in action and what actually happens okay let's go and do that all right so I'm going to take a bet here that the world cup coming up at 2 p.m I think this is going to go into extra time so I'm going to take the draw you're going to see that information come up this is our quick bet area allows you to quickly make a single bet and at first I'm going to bet $50 which is under our limit so this bet is going to go through going to place that bet and it's going to give me a receipt oh I'm being reviewed by our trading team there we go it's approved so we have a success here it gives me my wager of $50 the total payout of $197 tells me exactly the bet I'm placing here it's telling me like processing my rewards and tier credits that's fine it'll it'll take may take up to 24 hours for that to appear so I can also go into my open bets and you can actually see that bet there so you have the draw I have a cash out price which allows me to take I bet $50 I can immediately take out $4750 if I want during the game if you know Morocco goes up and I want to take out some of my money or France goes up and I want to take out my money or it's a draw through 85 minutes and I want to take out my money I can do that and I have a price that instantaneously updates based on the state of the game and what's happening and then coordinated with the bet I've placed and now it is showing my you know 29 reward and 29 tier credits which I've earned from a rewards perspective for that bet and here's some other bets that I've placed in the past few days and you can also look at settled which are bets that were placed and have been settled so the game has ended and here's one that I've won on the Monday night football game with the Patriots winning that game and then here's a parlay that I lost you can see I won two legs but I lost that Atlanta Hawks leg it gives me that information and if I have like a void or here's one that I cashed out it tells you that right above in that little you can see the green box there tells you kind of the status of the bet we do a little you know more special thing on the on the win so when we if you want to share that to your friends you know you know it's Caesar's and you know helps promote the fun all right so now let's take an NBA game and I'm going to try to put over my hundred dollar limits I already have 50 today so on the pistons I'm going to take and try to put 60 on the pistons here and right away it tells me this bet would exceed your previously set gaming limits so that means I'm trying to go over a hundred dollar limit that I have today so if I want to place this bet it has to be $50 or less so I'm actually just going to place a dollar bet just to show you guys that it will go through and that dollar bet on the pistons has gone through because now I'm at $51 of my hundred dollar total spend for the day I do also want to show you guys quickly how to create a parlay it's very easy and simple so I'm going to bet again I really like that pistons game I want to actually add more bets so instead of clicking a wager amount I'm actually going to hit add more bets it's going to show me I have one straight add more bets to build that same game parlay which is SGP or I'm actually going to go in and do a three game parlay I want the hawks and I'm going to take the gold state warriors and you can see at the bottom of that screen it's telling me I have a three leg parlay and it gives me the price and if I open that I can see the three leg parlay I can put a bet in just on that three leg parlay or I can choose those games separately as singles and I can bet that all in one click or I can click one at a time so I'm just going to put a dollar bet on this parlay here you can see when I put a dollar in it tells me it pays out $6.96 and I'm just going to make place that bet there so I've placed that bet there it is instantaneous that bet is in there and now it's now also in my open bet let's see any other I'll show you some same game parlay information very quickly and then we'll get into some of the customer service some of the payments withdrawal process and then we'll finally do kind of registration at the end of a new of a new customer so if I actually click into one of these events I'm going to go into this Pistons Hornets game at the top I have these tabs here and one of the you know things that operators and our customers love the most is the same game parlay you know I'm a big Pistons fan I'm going to watch this so I want to I have a really good punch that a few things are going to happen in the game so I think the Pistons are actually going to cover this I think it's going to be over 226 points and I think let me see I think Mason Plumway is going to go under nine and a half so now I have a three legs same game parlay here and I'm going to be able to place that that and that's you know a three legs that are all kind of related to each other in the same game so I've placed that that that's a great feature that I think you know our customers love and we also love is as sports fans and then let's any other questions on betting before I go into some of the the other features and functionality that we'd like to touch on I can always go back if something comes to mind you didn't cover last night's game I didn't all right here we go I'm going into I'm going to go into deposit first and then I'll go into withdraw so really big call to actions here with for deposit and withdraw so if I click deposit you'll see a few different methods and these are methods that have been approved by this particular jurisdiction in New York if a jurisdiction says hey credit cards are not allowed like in New York you will not see a credit card option you can see online banking debit paypal a ch pay near me or our play plus prepaid card but if we have credit cards are allowed you'll see credit cards as another option we're working on apple pay then moe and a few other items that depending on the jurisdiction and approval we can mix and match of what is allowed and what's not allowed Richard do you want to ask you a question about secondary credit here or do you want to wait I'm going to put it on the spot I can ask it now if you want I mean I was going to circle back to it at the end it's the same question I had the other day which is and the answer we got yesterday for your application since you guys probably weren't watching the entirety of yesterday's hearing had to do with not only the statute of Massachusetts bars credit cards we're having another conversation about the one step remove use of credit cards and it's my understanding some jurisdictions do ban that as well that there's a mechanism to stop that and I'm assuming the answer is the same from you guys that if the statute and the regs in Massachusetts say no credit cards either directly or one step removed that there's a mechanism for you to make sure that that's not going to be a deposit method on your app correct so something like PayPal through a credit card we can you can turn off the credit card option within PayPal or we can't do that we can turn off PayPal in general and only have the direct non-credit card options that's good I can supplement that answer as well so Nick is right if credit cards are not permitted we turn it off in the primary instance then the secondary instance PayPal doesn't even accept credit cards at this point so it's a it's a non-issue everywhere actually and then poor things it doesn't accept credit cards you mean in this setting in for sports betting it does not of course that not their policy that counts and then for site line anything that is a credit card we reject immediately regardless whether it's primary or secondary we also work with the teams and our processors around regular audits as well to make sure they're they're applying their processes and protocols appropriately yeah so we have we have controls in place around around credit both direct and secondary as well so I also follow up questions in terms of the the failure that happened in Iowa I think it's some other places so but I can save that for the suitability and compliance discussion that would be great but for me that's really helpful on the PayPal I just am not familiar with all of these mechanisms like so if we were to adopt we by statute credit card is is prohibited so if we were to you know delve into the secondary credit card issue how many would be would there be any exclusions from just this New York list here we wouldn't so what would be excluded would be for our player plus card which is powered by site line at the bottom there we would only allowed debit cards to fund those as opposed to any credit cards cards to be prohibited but otherwise in this list and I just know it's not exhaustive but in that this list here there would be a range that could be made on the secondary credit it's nothing else would have a secondary credit card none of them have it okay excellent PayPal at some point may change its policy in which case we will take all required protocols to make sure we that nothing goes through my spouse wishes that applied to Christmas shopping so thank you very helpful Madam Chair may I have a follow-up question sure Ken I know the answer but I just want to hear it from you so if I choose to do an online banking and I have three or four accounts and I try and sneak in my credit card there is technology that will recognize that's a credit card and not a debit card correct we know based on the bin that it's a credit card and we will reject it excellent thank you so for me it was really helpful to see this visual Commissioner Hill that all of these could be still options for the patrons but just not through the credit you know okay correct thank you okay I'll click in I'm not going to actually deposit but I'll just show you kind of what this looks like here for debit card right I can add a new one the same normal you know controls that you would see on a any payment screen across the web and it allows you to kind of choose your amount at the bottom and and continue and give that information and then we save that information for you know ease of use the next time it's very you know familiar interface for anyone that's bought anything online and withdrawal this might get blocked because it's a test account yeah so it's blocked we have but you would have the same you would have different options or you know a reduced set of options for withdrawal sometimes we have deposit only options and then withdrawal options but it would look very similar to the last screen since this is a test account there's no way to draw that money because the money's not real okay want to quickly look at the Caesar's rewards so as mentioned earlier in the presentation this is one of our you know really great features that our customers love and provide not only you know rewards within within you know online or retail sports betting but also at hotels events and merchandising you can see all that here so I can redeem it right away when we first start I have gold membership by 10,102 credits it's telling me how many credits I need for that that next level of tier and if I hit view tier benefits I can see exactly what I get with golds and platinum and diamonds diamond plus seven stars etc and then here you can see all the different options for redemption so you can book a hotel or go to an event like a Dell in or buy some merchandise from your favorite teams all through your reward credits or you can redeem it at the top you can see that 10,100 rewards actually applies to 101 dollars in bonus cash so you can redeem it direct to to use within you know the application if you're not planning a visit to one of our properties and want to use it for hotel or events or dining or whatever you might use it on property for us but it does give a very kind of broad and I said extensive kind of options for using those rewards when you do travel to one of our many properties across the US and information about earning credits and FAQ right there and as mentioned if you want to download the separate rewards app it's right there at the bottom with the link to the iOS app store because I'm on a iPhone here and if you're on Android it will take you to the Android that's the Google Play store on Android I'm going to go over to some customer service here and I'm going to click in the account on the top right and we have an entire support section so as Eric was talking through and unfortunately got connected disconnected a few times here are all our customer service options I'll take you through most of them so you can see so you have live chat contact us help your feedback which gives us feedback on the application or anything else betting 101 which is kind of like I'm brand new to betting give me some examples doc upload might be needed if you have if you failed know your customer and you might have to upload a document and you don't have it right at the moment you can get back to that that page and then close account which we in some in some states is necessary part of you have to actually close the account instead of either suspending or cooling off or or self-excluding there's also a close account option I'm going to show you the live chat quickly when I click in this it's going to take me over to you a live help page and this is going to first go to an automated chat bot which we hope can kind of help your problem and get you an instant answer but if not you could then go to a a live person for chat so I can go in here and say hey I'm located in New York I'm going to auto fill my information here can hit submit now it's telling me Betty is listening greetings emperor what information can I help you with so maybe I want to ask about responsible gaming so if I click that and hey how do I set my limits I can click limits you can click here to learn more and that'll take us back to the responsible gaming page that you that I showed earlier or you can say hey I want to go into my spend limits and then it tells you exactly how to do that go to account and gaming limits and then you can set your maximum spend limit for a daily week later monthly do you need help with anything else and if I wanted I could type like account and hit send and it'll give me a few options related to account and this is all automated chat bot this gets I think it's about 60% of our users that use the live chat get their answer you know get their question answered immediately with the chat bot without you know using a live agent on phone or chat and that allows our live agents to spend time with our customers with the more complex questions and inquiries and can do a better job in giving them that customer service and through the chat bot if you can't get your answer you can always get a representative and we'll go through to the live chat person who can actually give you more information or you can give us a call a quickly go back into the app Madam chair can I ask you very quick question I know we save them to the end but I think this is quick sure during your presentation I think I heard you say that your phone or to contact someone live is only 20 hours a day whereas the chat was 24 hours a day so this is an issue that this commission cares deeply about that if someone's having an issue getting paid or something pops up that you're able to contact somebody immediately so did I hear you correctly if I did what are the hours of operation for a live person Commissioner this is Eric question again you did hear us correctly we're getting very little volume on the call side and so we shut it down between 1 a.m. and 5 a.m. Pacific time and then the chat bot is or not the chat bot chat ride agents are 24 7 I would say that we are one of the only if not the only operator offering voice at this time I don't think that's true I think that's right no there our applicant yesterday offers 24 7 and it's a U.S. based group yeah I apologize I said one of the few there are only a few offering a voice right now oh thank you thank you so can I ask sorry Commissioner Earl no I said thank you for the clarification so I have a follow-up to that which is the the metrics that would have you shut it down from 1 a.m. to 5 p.m. Pacific standard time do those line up with a drop in usage on say the east coast I mean it wears your support so that it's you're using that time as opposed to what might be a drop in usage on say eastern standard yeah those those were pacific times so it would be what is that four to eight eastern and there is yeah there's just there's very little wagering activity going on and low contacts in addition our old tech platform from a retail standpoint goes down for two hours so there's no volume coming in during that period it's certainly something that we continually look at and review because as I mentioned it is very important to have top customer service and we make sure that you know we're answering the phones very quickly and that we're answering texts very quickly and it could certainly change based on you know as more and more states legalized and as the volume grows so can I ask Eric if I can there are going to be a mechanism that allows for it's not just say if somebody's account has been hacked which was in the paper from you know some other operators and people had difficulty getting a hold of anybody to try to rectify a close the account the the close the account function on the app is there a way that somebody immediately suspends activity even if they can't get a live body because the phones are down yeah you can you can close the account at any time was that your question could you have run not particularly no if someone's hacked your account would you have any issues trying to get into your app and closing your account through the app so you need to get a live body right so even even if you are logged out if you don't have your login say in a you know in one of those those cases where your your account has been taken over and maybe they've changed the password on you you still have access to the live chat functionality through your app even if you're not logged in and that will if you know if it does happen five a.m eastern time you will have a live chat option with an agent and I believe you know that would be an escalation I don't know if Eric and Ken but if it's if the live chat's not available it's an AI chat right it's available 24 seven the live chat with an agent but just not on the phone to speak to the person right is that it is that the what shuts that's yes that's the difference it's always available only important clarification I'm so you're saying a live person is always available through the app but not necessarily to voice to for yes yeah there's not an AI chat there's a body on the other end of the chat that's really well that's really helpful to understand and also on you know one of the concerns we well I have and I imagine my public commissioner shares also if someone's in distress they have a live person to reach so in that you'd have some kind of process to address that person yes that's correct there's always a live person available as Nick mentioned the first step to screening a lot of the inbounds that are very simple is through the chat pot but there's always 24 seven live chat and then there is a period of four hours where we don't have live voice but otherwise it's live voice yeah it may be said said differently so if it's seven a.m in Massachusetts and a user is a account issue that's potential lockout or any other issue they could reach a live individual through the chat function during that time a live individual is available thank you commissioners are you all set on this thank you help them sure clicking on contact us contact us you'll see this information here our customer support is seven days a week quickest is live chat here's email for New York and our phone number there so immediately you can get the user to where they need to contact us that information there done here help is kind of your help pages your FAQs you'll see this loading up and you know you can type in a support or choose a topic this is kind of self-help a lot of people find this very valuable they don't want to talk to anyone they just want to find the answer quickly so they can use this and if you have problems with the self-help you can see that chat bot in the in the bottom right where you can click and get right into that to that that agent or the AI bot to solve your answer solve your problem we have feedback which is basically we can give feedback on the app it's less about your account it's less about you but you could say hey there's you know it's the app is refreshing or I like something that's happening here you know this is specific feedback around either the page you're on or generic feedback so that helps helps us as the developers and the technology team kind of know if we're doing something right or wrong and can make improvements and we we actually have a channel that we get those immediately so I actually can see in my slack right here in my laptop but I have I think about 10 or 15 feedbacks that have come back in the last 24 hours that I'm going to take a look at all right anything else on on support okay great lastly I am going to go and log out here and I'm going to go and switch states so I hit this question mark at the top and so at the very top you can see New York Sportsbook I have information here again that you know this is in the logged out state you can see the live chat contact us that's there you're not logged in you still have that access if I hit change the location at the very top I'm changing out of New York because I already have account registered there I'm going to try Maryland and it's going to switch over you can see at the top switch to the Maryland Sportsbook and I'm going to click here now here's our normal sign-in but if I don't have an account it says don't have an account register now underneath that sign-in button and click on that and it's going to take us into our registration flow so I'm going to go through this flow with my real information and then we're going to see if it's going to KYC I'm going to try to fail it once or twice and then give my real information and hopefully it will pass through so email address I'm going to provide my home email address promo code I don't have one at the moment so I'm just going to skip that and hit next now it's going to ask me for a password I'm just going to put in see it tells me that it's green if I you know I need more characters or I need a you know a different number it's going to tell me that information very quickly to know that my password is good enough and then I can hide it and then phone number phone number there it says you're almost there right okay and this is we put this here because this is where we're asking a little bit more deeper information personally and you know some people that sign up for online accounts they never expect to give this information so we kind of give you this this warning here to say hey you know we need to make sure we confirm your identity and verify your over 21 and we won't share these details with anyone so please go ahead and confirm your identity this helps people feel more comfortable with the process and understand why we're asking for the last four digits so your social security your date of birth and things like that that sometimes most accounts online don't need for your normal kind of shopping experience or any other account creation so once I hit confirm identity I'm going here put my information in date of birth so I will give a bogus date of birth obviously not only maybe three months old I'll put in my information here home address is going to be this is going to do a look up so it's actually going to look up a proper address this helps with the KYC process so you're not typing an address and you have kind of a mismatch just gets an exact address and really helps there so if I agree to terms and service and hit submit what's going to happen right now it's not going to let me go forward because you know three months old in this in this scenario it's actually going to repop the birth date picker for me and you can actually see behind it says you know please update your birth date so you're something correct so I'm going to go in here guys are going to all know my birthday not September 20 actually you know what I'm going to do a mismatch birthday which is over 21 and then we're going to see what happens then and I'm going to change my birthday to the real one and you'll see it go through so we're verifying that we couldn't verify because my birthday I gave the wrong one so I'm going to go here and put my real birthday in and hit submit there is so KYC passed luckily I have you know good know your customer my account's verified it shows me my season rewards and you know a really nice kind of confetti hey you're in gives you deposit now option sometimes there's a sign-up bonus attached depending on how I come in and that would appear in that blank space there or I can explore odds which would take me right into the sports book now since I'm in the Maryland sports book I'm actually located in New Jersey you will see that red bar at the top says we cannot verify your location so I can hit view details you know first it's going to say hey you know allow precise information allow precise location that way they can geolocate you if that's not the case I already have it on but I'm going to show you guys now that I can't make a bet or I can't deposit because of this now I'm just put it in my bed slip here um and it's also telling me at the bottom please allow precise location because I can't not only do I not have money in my account so it's not a place bet button it's deposit because I have zero dollars that's also telling me to allow that precise location if I view details I can allow it here it's not going to do much but so I have precise location on because I'm not in the right state now it's going to recheck me and it's saying you know you're still having a problem here and to you can you can call us you can figure that if you're actually in the state and you're still not you know getting that location check properly working you know you can you can reach out to us and there's a couple steps in that process so I won't be able to bet here but you saw the registration process you can you can see you know we have errors in there it's pretty simple to change them and then you can see that with my mismatch information even being above 21 it's not letting me through and when I actually put my real information I did get a KYC check and if I travel to Baltimore later today I'll be able to deposit and bet on this if I was a real customer obviously I'm not going to deposit because that causes a lot of problems for our compliance team to say hey a real person is deposited and a real employee is deposited and they shouldn't I'm actually going to tell them to delete these accounts out because they're they're not tested not real accounts later on but as long as I don't deposit there's no major compliance issues and I might just add one point to next demonstration so I named this example Nick signed up for an account in Maryland if Nick was a member of the self-excluded list offered in Maryland he would not have been able to sign up for this account so we during that KYC we would check the Maryland excluded list and how to prevent him from signing up for an account those same controls will both of course be in place in Massachusetts as well okay and that's what I had on my list but if you guys have any other questions I'm happy to run through any other pages or show you anything else within the application commissioners anything else that you'd like from Nick I think we can take that down then please okay thank you so much I appreciate it thank you okay and and Jeff does that conclude your presentation or do you have more we have more we'll go to present our our deck again we have a couple more items that we want to cover compliance matters and then we will resolve our presentation thank you thanks Nick for the great presentation there so yeah it was excellent thank you agreed so the the mobile platform that Nick provided as well as our back office that identifies critical components for gaming you know that system is live in 19 different jurisdictions and you know Caesar's not only incorporates a digital platform but our retail platform with shared components that is also live in 22 jurisdictions so incorporating this platform you know would allow the MGC to incorporate a platform that's been vetted out across you know multiple markets the systems compliant with all the GLI standards covering eye gaming kiosk sports wagering as well as a IT audit and also since the system is live in Pennsylvania Maryland New Jersey Nevada Illinois Ontario Mississippi Nevada has our legacy platform but our platform itself also complies with those unique requirements so it literally is covering you know the vast majority of any technical requirement in the sports waging this industry as well as the federal requirements such as you know the federal wire act and all the features regarding our gene self-exclusion and as far as the evaluation right there's a number of third parties and regulatory test labs that evaluate the product as well so GLI of course New Jersey Ontario West Virginia and Nevada as reviewed certain aspects of the system and you know we received approvals in all those those markets and as well as geolocation testing so prior to going live in Massachusetts you know we would have the mobile app the website evaluated for geolocation within the borders and you know the surrounding borders because massachusetts is the area is close to a number of states and there's a dense population the system has ability to identify whether a player is say they're they're sports waging and on the train and they go into Connecticut there are checks and balances within the system that identify if that person's on a train and they pass into the state of Connecticut as soon as they attempt the wager the geolocation check will block them from placing that attempt with a massachusetts account. I'm excited so please so just you know as far as our regulatory approvals go it's been approved by lotteries tribal commissions and other gaming commissions and control boards as you can see here whether it's in a number of states where we incorporate our retail brick and mortar platform and our mobile and a website as well as some of the other markets where we only have retail sports wagering and you know such as a market like Kansas or New York where we have just the digital platform and then just to close out as far as the features go you know like our system encompasses all the features that allow for a great customer experience all the features that are identified within the regulatory realm and also we incorporate third party systems such as geocompy which allows us to review and audit anything related to geolocation across every single market those 19 jurisdictions as well as that product is also offered to our competitors so it's not only vetted out against a Caesar sportsbook but it's also an offering that is incorporated across the industry. Here's another look at our wagering catalog so on the right is our website and on the left is our iOS platform so it has that same look and feel and also there is you know with a number of operating platforms there's a dark mode so you know you can have that that different look and feel and to highlight some of our cybersecurity and operational audits we do contract bulletproof to conduct assessments against July 33 and our operational audits so within July 33 there is vulnerability and penetration tests so that third party evaluates any access point to the system whether it's you know customer facing users facing or it's the network for our servers and you know access to our data center also there is a review of the information security management systems those policies so say if we have an update in for a policy in Arizona and there's a security enhancement we would incorporate that security enhancement across all markets so that you know we raise the bar across the board so that our IT policies would be you know migrated to a state such as Massachusetts and with that I'd like to pass it off to to Ken Fuchs. Thanks everyone. Thanks Floyd it's Ken I'm back just very quickly I wanted to touch on Nick walked through the registration process and you know that system for us is obviously a critical component to onboarding and protection of both customer and business in most of our jurisdictions for know your customer we work with Lexus Nexus there is two jurisdictions well one one current one pending where we work with geo comply where we pass the information to them and they do all the proper validation including age social security number date of birth last name as exact matches as well as fuzzy matches around address and first name to ensure that the person signing up is a person that is intended to be signed up should there be any issue in terms of the information that has passed back for the customer we do have a secondary waterfall in the app where they can provide a selfie picture as well as a valid identification such as a driver's license that can then be matched in certain jurisdictions most of our jurisdictions that is powered by a partner called on Fido and that provides a secondary opportunity for the customer to be validated as a valid customer we we also have a final check which is manual with our customer support team where a customer can provide additional documentation such as tax utility financial banking information to verify that they are who they say they are so we have multiple checks Lexus Nexus is obviously a a world-class company but we also have other companies we work with that are are well validated in this space around KYC and as Nick walked through we've made a lot of efforts to improve our registration flows to make it as simple and communicate very clearly with the customers they go through that sign-up process and well obviously we touched on payments of wallets you know we know from our research that this is one of the most critical components it's the ease to get money in and out for customers we've we've spent a lot of time improving both the options we have but also the team itself we've grown the team substantially over the last year and a half and we add 24-7 capabilities and and and oversight with people so that anybody who wants a withdrawal processed can do so 24 hours a day we process almost all withdrawals within an hour or two on our side and then depending on the method that you've chosen to withdraw that governs when the dollars would hit your bank account so we talked about real-time debit card withdrawals that's the fastest it's it's fairly instantaneous once we approve and then the other ones are really dependent on the institution so online banking typically takes a few days for the bank the process paypal is is fairly immediate and so on and so forth we're working through a lot of our our designs you can see here these are designs that will launch you in q1 we want to be very transparent with the customer around the timing for when they can expect their funds based on on the the choice they've made in terms of withdrawal and also be clear obviously on the deposit side the various options they have and their ability to toggle between different options and lastly from an operational standpoint i wanted to touch on our trading team we showed the betting catalog and nick touched on on some of the bet off and and other components of trading you know it starts with people this is a 160 170 person team that we've been building out we're very proud to own this function i think it's a critical function to have in-house because it is the beating heart of what we do so it's a team that works 24-7 with operations mostly out of las vegas and we have we're organized by sport leadership so that we have subject matter expertise across various sports and a very clear kind of career tracking so that we have strong experts and experience at the top and a lot of training in fact in the last year we built a trading academy specifically for onboarding and trading there is you know quite a bit of change that happens around around trading in terms of how we approach matches we handle almost 200 000 different events a year with millions of different markets we take hundreds of millions of bets coming in every year the team really does two things it does odds making and risk management so they are managing what i would call our book of liabilities understanding all the bets coming in where we sit in terms of those bets around a variety of different markets they're pricing actively pricing they're managing all of our data integrations with our partners they're making limited adjustments they're managing our futures markets so will the red sox win the world series next year we keep those markets live up until almost up until the event itself so they're constantly changing in terms of their odds they're working with our our analytics team around the models we use around pricing and we do a lot of integrity monitoring in a partnership with us integrity as well and then they're also managing all wager acceptance so much of this is seamless and automated it's extremely fast as you saw with nick making a bet there are bets that might exceed a limit a published limit or and it's not a published limit but exceed a set limit those are sent for special approval by a trader that that is all recorded so we know who does what in terms of the auditing around those decisions and we obviously want to make sure that the customer has funds in their wallet and then it's a bet that that we want to take thank you that's all i have for this part of the presentation i believe i'm turning it back to jeff hendrix thank you ken we just have a few more slides before we get to our summation i wanted to note that we have also over the past several years since acquiring our digital business grown an anti-money laundering team in-house to scale with that business we're very proud of that team pardon me so our in-house team provides all applicable federal AML requirements that will be ready to do so in massachusetts those will include CTRs KYC reporting and SAR reporting that team applies industry best practices and follows an integrated enterprise-wide program we believe is on par with anything in the industry the last main section i want to touch on is the our review of the suitability of america wagering ink and our key qualifiers as applicants we hope that through this presentation and through any additional questions that we can answer for you in the next sessions that we have provided sufficient information demonstrating that we have been found suitable in multiple jurisdiction we possess all attributes of integrity honesty good character reputation that the business is financially stable operates with integrity provides substantial benefits to the commonwealth that we have grown our sports wagering operations in multiple jurisdiction and that we have provided all relevant information within our applications including that relating to ongoing litigation none of which would have any impact on our ability to offer high quality operations within the commonwealth so with that i just want to briefly summarize to state that we hope that we have addressed each of the key elements within the commission's consideration here today i also want to note that i appreciate all of my colleagues time on this you've heard us mention our colleague lisa several times on this call she's been managing this presentation she's our director of licensure we could not do this without her so i just want to express my appreciation for some of our remarks so with that we thank the commission very much for its time and we respectfully request uh in accordance with all relevant regulations and after evaluating our license application this presentation and any additional questions if the commission find american way during ink it's key persons in any affiliate companies suitable in accordance with relevant regulations and grant us a temporary license so with that we've included our presentation and i thank the commission and staff very much for its time church don leader thank you thank you to all the presenters very very helpful very clear commissioners we held our questions it is 12 30 and normally we take a short break um and then here from gli uh iab and in our sound i'm wondering if we take a lunch break come back here from our internal team and then go into our section by section analysis how's that sound i think it makes sense since we really started at nine this morning instead of 10 right right i know the presenters but well i suspect that they they may feel the same need to take a bit of a break after their their comprehensive presentation it was excellent so that's um uh plan to reconvene at one one p.m. and then we'll go more straight through without a sort of a second intermediate break thank you i don't respectfully aren't ma'am i may need that still madam chair but i do think it makes a sense to break for lunch now oh no i'm just saying we may take intermediate breaks during our our um our review before i had a break to that after the presentations by the three so we'll see yeah see how we go of course commissioner brian thank you so much um we'll reconvene it at one p.m. thank you thank you very much next day all set thank you i was getting some good technical support prista thank you missus i hope you have a nice break we'll do our um our check-in this is a reconvening of the mass choose this game commission um public meeting number four 11 because we're holding this on a virtual platform um i will take a little call commissioner brian hi i'm here thank you commissioner hill i am here good good afternoon good afternoon thank you um mr skinner you move thank you good afternoon i'm here and commissioner maynard good afternoon madam chair i'm here and thank you for the popcorn during the break going it has a little chocolate in it and i'm feeling like it's i feel like it's all over my face um so good um okay we'll get started we um ended with the presentation by the applicant thank you so much now we're going to turn to the presentations and analyses that are offered by first gli our own i eb and then rsm providing services for us on gli was the first to write and set gaming technical standards which are now considered to be the industry benchmark worldwide gli has continuously responded to the industry by innovating new standards and testing allowing regulators to build confidence that they are providing a safe responsible method of revenue generation for their stakeholders and preserving integrity and i will let you um gli introduce yourselves and we also have um our very own jibu gomes who is our chief information officer who is available for questions as well thank you good afternoon madam chair members of the commission it's going to be with you again kevin malale senior vice president of government relations and general counsel for gli um we we are familiar with the platform that has been presented to you here today having uh tested it for uh other jurisdictions with similar uh requirements uh as you have before you in massachusetts including gli 33 the technical standard that you have adopted um in addition to that experience and and confidence level the platform is capable of meeting uh your requirements there will be essentially three phases of testing one it will be tested and evaluated the the actual local deployment in massachusetts will be tested and evaluated against the technical standards and other regulatory requirements for online platforms and it will be certified and that certification will go to your lab in addition to that there will be extensive field testing that will validate the functionality and compliance of the geolocation solution the kyc the responsible gaming uh features the security and other related um technical requirements that need to be tested in the field and finally uh there will be a review of the ongoing operational internal control standards and their capabilities for compliance with all your operational risk control uh compliance requirements and so with that i will turn it over to joe buniveth who you have been quite familiar with over the past few days and he could go through the details of the testing plan for the platform thanks for having us madam chair and members of the commission uh my name is joseph buniveth director of client solutions for gli i'll give you a view of the submittal search certification and verification process regarding mobile applications of the digital platforms to be approved by the commission before gli could take submittals and mass chooses gaming commission must approve 205 cmr 138 238 247 and 248 which redrafted in consultation with your staff in and outside law firm after approval the operators will prepare to submit their code bases for the entire sports wagering systems that they intend to deploy in the commonwealth the submittal preparation includes the following if it is a platform we're familiar with a modification list from the last submission to one of more one or more us jurisdictions will be requested and reviewed to set the project and and reviewed to set the project plan for massachusetts considering any changes to the platform and all specific massachusetts rules and regulations if the product is new to our lab we will review the technology architecture documentation which is a complete comprehensive and technically accurate description explanation of all sports wagering systems this includes a description of hardware devices and virtual servers of a description of all server and client software modules including the software versions the layout of all network communications between various software and hardware mod modules and an explanation of all third-party integrated systems post the technical documentation review the critical files regarding compliance will be identified and documented then a complete project plan is put in place taking account the unique architecture and design of the platform in the specific rules that were approved by the commission the lab will run a supervised compilation of the source files the signature of those files and the combination steps and the signatures of the compiled code once complete the source code will be submitted for testing in a lockdown test environment gli review the player account management platform known as the pam for registration age and identification verification account controls payments reporting responsible gaming controls required disclosures and geolocation the geolocation testing commits into parts a field test to verify borders through sampling along the entire border while completing edge case technical tests the field tests will also cover any restricted areas as defined by the messages this gaming commission a subversive as the second part will include a subversive workaround detection that will commence in the lab including but not limited to VPN and proxy usage gpf spoofing code manipulation and man in the middle attacks gli will then verify the sportsbook in total if not tested previously for retail deployment or review the integration of the sportsbook into the pam for events markets point spreads bed excess acceptance and corresponding time spans and logging of those events we also verify the enforcement of all betting limits and run against all edge cases we'll verify the pre event and live data feeds post event bed settling the corresponding time sense and logging and reporting of those instances we'll then review the change management process and procedures after all the technical checkoffs are met certifications can be issued when gli verifies the changes made for massachusetts specific deployments including source code differential and change testing to the the latest review version and gli has evaluated the products has met all the massachusetts specific requirements after certifications are issued and mgc accepts them field verification will be conducted in conjunction with the mgc this procedure will be finalized in the upcoming weeks during that time the following will commence verification at the production server and verification of all critical file signatures reviews of all internal controls for procedures to operate the sportsbook we'll check technology for configurations such as proper setup of roles in user rate rate assignment and potentially interview key personnel to ensure they know and will follow procedures of the internal controls at this point when they have met the technical requirements for the operations of the sorry they will have met the technical requirements for the operations of a sportsbook in the commonwealth that's it Kevin and joe seven are you also are you trying to maybe you're trying to unmute there we go yeah and that concludes our presentation and we'll have to answer any questions you or the commissioners might have I should only hold questions until our review or any questions now okay I just have one basic overarching one which is given their presence in the market and your presence in the market is there anything that raises concerns at all for you in terms of technological capacity of their platform or their product um now I mean um talking about because there are so many locations I'm assuming you've crossed paths with the company and their technology in your work and so I'm assuming that there's nothing that you're raising in terms of the presentation to us the process that you're going to follow there's no reason to have any bells and whistles going on from that regard right now in every jurisdiction where they've launched we've been able to complete the testing on time and before this stated launch date of that particular jurisdiction thanks yeah thank you okay thank you uh Kevin and joe and and Matt thank you so much okay then um there are no further questions for right now anyway we'll move then to uh our IEB and I believe is it director lilios or is it hi chair it's myself it's um loretta uh I'll be doing the presentation today okay thank you it's nice to see you director lilios thank you so I'll jump right in and the IEB submitted a report regarding the preliminary suitability of this applicant uh american wagering ink or caesar sports book in connection with their application for the category three license to be tethered to the category one licensee on core boston harbour the IEB performed our review for preliminary suitability in accordance with the standards and criteria set forth in 205 cmr 215.01 subsection two a full investigation for durable suitability has not been performed at this time as a precursor to our review the licensing division in conjunction with the IEB performed a scoping review of the applicant under chapter 23 n section 5b and we identified one entity in five individuals to designate as qualifiers in conjunction in connection with the application and those qualifiers are listed on pages one and two of our report as explained in footnote three of our report we inadvertently omitted the parent the ultimate parent company caesar's entertainment ink from the list of qualifiers and that entity's application is forthcoming I'll have a few more things to say about that but for for right now please note that the company is working on an expedited basis to complete the parent company's bed despite the omission because caesar's entertainment is a public company investigators were able to rely upon sec information for this preliminary financial review and that is consistent with the process that was used for yesterday's applicant as well and also I wanted to note that the individual qualifiers associated with the ultimate parent company were identified and are part of this preliminary review so the licensing division has performed a review of the existing submission for deficiencies and there is some ongoing communication with the licensing division in the applicant but the applicant has been extremely cooperative and responsive and that is including preparing this additional submission for the ultimate parent company on an expedited fashion and there are no substantial deficiencies to report again other than the the ultimate parent company which was my error and and not the not the applicants so as I said we're performing we perform the review in connection with the in conjunction with the reg and that reg is reproduced on page three of the report we utilize the same team of investigators for all category three applicants we are using them and the team is comprised of contract investigators including former members of rgeu and contract investigators from the firm of rsm and their work of forces being performed in collaboration with the ieb and under the oversight of the ieb the review for preliminary suitability is summarized in the report and it includes a summary of cesar's licensing status these are sportsbook's licensing status as disclosed in its application a summary of their compliance history and other jurisdictions as disclosed in their application summary of their pending litigation over a hundred thousand is disclosed in the application i think there is was non reported where the applicant was listed as a defendant an open source review of the applicant and the individual qualifiers although pursuant to the reg this did not include the entity qualifier and those are summarized in the report and there are some me links to media articles also the team from rsm prepared a report on preliminary financial suitability that appears in exhibit one and that report summarizes the review of disclosed financial information and in this case again as i mentioned those disclosures are supplemented by the financial filings of the publicly traded parent company also rsm presented financial ratios and reviewed the forecasting submission submitted by the applicant in its general in the general application i did want to note two different areas of the report um orally for my presentation now the first is i wanted to bring your attention to page eight of the report and the applicant's self report of its withdrawal of its application in massachusetts in 2013 at that time cesar's entertainment corporation uh the predecessor ultimate parent company uh at that time and some of cesar's top executives were qualifiers in connection with an application for a gaming license in massachusetts and at that time the iv performed a full suitability investigation over the course of many months and identified four areas of investigative concern as self reported by the applicant here today the iv recommended in 2013 that the commission holds an adjudicatory hearing to determine suitability because of those um four uh areas of concern and cesar's withdrew its application before the hearing occurred so no determination on suitability was ever reached so that's an important point right they were never found suitable they were never found unsuitable uh in massachusetts now for purposes of this preliminary review for a different the 2013 investigation and i have spoken to uh executive director wells about this matter and of course she was the iv director uh at the time but i want to point out that the iv recognizes that 2013 was almost a full decade ago and the company has significantly evolved since that time they have evolved financially and uh financial concerns was one of the identified concerns in 2013 since that time they have reorganized following bankruptcy proceedings the company has also evolved in terms of its top leadership i know that the ceo and the general counsel at the time are no longer with the company and one of the areas of concern involved another identified individual who is also no longer with the company um if you do i know there are many areas that you're going to be discussing this afternoon you know if in the end you do decide to move this uh application forward with respect to this issue in the out the parent company application that we do not have my uh proposal is that you would consider moving it forward on the condition that the application is submitted and that iv is uh able to do its preliminary review of the parent company uh application um i did want to make another note about the self report from the applicant on its compliance history which appears i think on page nine eight um you're really uh seven seven through nine um they talk about a matter in virginia self-disclosed the massachusetts matter uh self-disclosed three uh recent fines self-disclosed and then a general statement on page nine uh about um you know the applicant receives various um actions disciplinary actions from time to time uh they are um routine often resolved through an administrative process uh so i wanted to state that i expect that the company uh will be uh responsive to the i e b's request for a more itemized and comprehensive accounting uh those requests uh do often come in the form of supplemental requests by the i e b once the licensing division transmits an administratively complete application um and i have you know absolutely no reason to believe that the company would not be more responsive um would not be fully responsive at that time that's just in the process that we're in now the i e b has not made its request for supplemental information yet so i did want to point that out um i know that we have members of our contractor team here in the meeting uh at this point i i uh rest on the report in the exhibit but of course we're uh available for any questions as i i know the applicant is available for questions i have a couple of comments um one of which is in in a general sense um what was flagged by um director lilios in terms of the the lack of explanation in terms of 2013 in the interactions with this commission at that time i personally want to be briefed on that as part of this i think we'd be remiss in not being briefed on that as we move forward we have a very limited review um but that's information within the confines of our walls and so i would like to get briefed on that um uh and i do also want to ask the questions that were put forth in terms of what was flagged pages seven eight nine some of it i don't know whether or not it can be done openly at the end of this presentation or whether it would have to go into executive session and in part that's due to the lack of detail that was provided by the applicant so um i'm flagging right now my frustration with the answer that was given in the application um in e3 f and that's recited again in page nine um the additional information upon request we did request it it was the application and so i'm a little frustrated with a lack of detail in that area um so in terms of whether we're figuring out executive sessions and planning the rest of this day um i would point out my desire to get more information in those areas and i'm chair i'd like to call sign everything commissional brian just stated so todd um this is i'm sure you may have anticipated that we might want to go into or consider our options for going into executive session as appropriate some of these this this discussion may be appropriate for public review but um i turn to you i suppose um director wells and um executive director wells former iab director wells and director billios might have some sense about this as well in respect to the first matter that commissioner brian wants more details on and then with respect to the just the general the general um responses on on compliance history yeah i'm i apologize i'm just trying to pull up uh find the parts of the application that commissioner brian that you were referencing so i could have a clear understanding could you it's just it was both in the um the suitability part and then what e three is that i was just i think it's in two different places one i think is e three four um the same paragraph is put in in response in a couple places in the application and i think the suitability report on page nine cites it in its entirety and references the answer to e three four so g three in particular that simple case i'm sorry could you say that again commissioner skinner i didn't hear what he said b three g g three okay i may just have a moment to look at those virtual alias um just for clarification the entity that was before the commission in 2013 was the caesar's entertainment team was a different entity it was um uh uh caesar's entertainment corporation i think that's a result of the reorganization uh you know it was renamed i could provide a little clarity on that if that would be thanks thanks jeff sure so the entity that was uh was an applicant in 2013 with caesar's entertainment corporation that entity is now a holding company of the ultimate publicly traded parent so that former the c ec is how i refer to it is now caesar's holding's ink which is a subsidiary company of caesar's entertainment ink uh go back a few years ago eldorado resorts ink acquired c ec eldorado resorts ink through that acquisition move c ec is a subsidiary of eldorado resorts ink and eldorado resorts ink changed its name to caesar's entertainment ink so caesar's entertainment or cei now the ultimate publicly traded parent was not involved in those 2013 applications in any sense uh and certainly we'll be happy to discuss this in any form which you'd like our intention in identifying those was to note that while cei william hill us and america wagering ink were not in any way associated with the company that applied in 2013 uh the ultimate parent cei did acquire that entity in 2020 and we wanted spiritual transparency to disclose that to make sure the commission was aware of that relationship even though the applicants are front of you today were not in front of you in 2013 thank you for that so maybe jeff two you might i don't want to put you on the spot but i think the question right now is um it would kind of be helpful in terms of continuity of the meeting to maybe address these issues now rather than later and i'm wondering if it's um if you have a sense as to what of whether any of the addressing the issues that were generally addressing the application um whether there's any confidentiality issues that you would flag across as we look back at that case in 2013 and if so um would you have an argument for councillor grossman about why it fits into our limited scheme for going into a sector session yeah sure i'd be happy to offer my thoughts on that i believe there's some technical elements of the virginia matter that was disclosed in those comments that we would request confidentiality regarding however i'd be happy to discuss both of them uh at a high level and if there is an area of significant detail that we would request confidentiality i would be happy to cut identify that during these discussions and perhaps request executive session if that would be appropriate and can we speak to nevada dc the others the other three that are listed on page nine can you do the same thing high level or does that need to go into executive session um i believe that we could discuss nevada matter we could certainly discuss uh quite thoroughly um some of the details surrounding the dc and terakie matters we would request uh discussing executive session obviously will provide full detailed transparency and all of them so i would defer to your directions to how you would like us to proceed i mean should we start with high level on what is in your comfort level publicly discussable for lack of a better term and then focus on what's left in terms of going into greater detail and executive session um and you know commissioner director welles you're and putting you in a spot here's former director of ivy but whether your participation provides any insight into 2013 at this time if we were to go past what's going to be a high level discussion right now and i obviously didn't ask that before so i don't want to put you on the spot and not be prepared to have that level of conversation that might be necessary i have not reviewed the report and that was more than nine years ago i have a high level understanding of um what happened at that time um i'm also aware of certain things that have changed at the company since that happened um so um i could give a high level but um for if the commission looks wants any specific detail probably just refer to the report itself which i think has been provided but it is very long it has not been provided okay that's one of the things i i do want to look at it just i feel like to do due diligence i need to at least put on it it may have been accessible but it wasn't provided in conjunction with our review and as you know there's a few thousand pages in front of us so um probably nobody thought to say let's add another report so um why don't we try to see if questions um and um responses satisfied needs on this matter let's stick to maybe just the massachusetts one right now for clarity and then move on to the the other matters okay commission brian you want to go ahead yep sure uh would it be helpful if i provided further context on the matter that we disclosed and uh yeah so i think that makes no sense for you mr hendrix to start off in terms of what you feel like you disclose publicly uh absolutely so um in our application we identified it with two matters relating to um withdrawals of licenses applicable to affiliated companies within our portfolio um the first matter i'll address is the withdrawal licenses associated with a project from a now subsidiary company of seizures entertainment Inc uh that applied for licensure massachusetts in 2013 so as i mentioned earlier um the ultimate parent parent was not the current ultimate parent company cei now was not affiliated with any of those entities that made the application in 2013 at the time of the application cei acquired those entities in our various holding companies in 2020 through the stelrata resort banks acquisition of seizures entertainment corporation um when looking at that question we wanted to ensure that we provided full transparency uh even if those matters did not directly relate to those applicants in front of you today so i could certainly say that each of the two applicants american wagering inc and william hill u.s uh they're currently in front of you were not associated with cec or any of its subsidiaries in 2013 uh nor was uh seizures entertainment Inc which will be an applicant in front of you very shortly um so in doing so what we want to do is provide enough information to the staff to reference the awesome report of the issue in 2013 uh and communicate that we are aware of this matter and while we do not think it impacts the suitability of the entities in front of you today nor the key persons in front of you today none of whom were also associated with cec or any of its subsidiaries uh pharmacist ron bruh wasn't there one qual individual qualifier who's on the list today that was also on the list in 2013 i apologize i misspoke so i believe uh our president of our digital business mr hessian uh was with cec at the time uh in a very different role than he is in so it's an excellent point to not mean to exclude him i so i'm referring to the qualifiers i'm referring to uh the senior management team of caesars entertainment Inc our ceo ceo present chief operating officer cfo and i apologize if i omitted any of the qualifiers associated with caesars entertainment Inc all of those individuals at caesars entertainment Inc were associated with elderwater resorts Inc and that's how they moved into their current leadership roles of the company um so yes to summarize we wanted to identify that matter for the commission the commission's staff um though from our perspective and uh those matters do not actually directly relate to any of the applicants running today just an interesting disclosure we want to make sure that we could put that to you and answer any questions you might have um and then just briefly i would note um if helpful we would be happy to talk through why we believe the four items cited as concerns at cec are no longer applicable to cei um lilios uh referenced i believe two of those matters distinctly earlier um i don't know if that would be helpful to the commissioner or not but as stated in our general presentation we believe that all of the entities in front of you today are suitable under the relevant massachusetts provisions i mean i'm i would want more detail i mean i i appreciate the high level and the the level you stopped at obviously because that's where you feel comfortable but i can say that it's something i'm going to want to talk about in more depth so i guess that for the executive session uh option counsel grossman if you could go over those options and see if um if that's something that could be we could avail ourselves of absolutely so well we're discussing the massachusetts matter from 2013 the nevada matter from uh september 2022 uh the dc matter from 2022 and the charakey matter from 2022 is is that accurate for starters i believe he said he can talk about and correct me if i'm wrong mr hennick's that you could talk to some extent publicly right now about nevada um and virginia the latter three for the most part um the the dc and the tribal would absolutely be executive that's correct commissioner we could speak to uh the virginia of matter at a very high level the nevada fine in more detail and then we would request request uh executive session to discuss some of the details of the last two disciplinary actions linked to dc and we're tribal regulators well certainly of course um to the extent that uh this information is competitively sensitive um because it doesn't feel like it's a try a trade secret or proprietary so if it's competitively sensitive um it would replace the applicant at a competitive disadvantage if we talked about it publicly um then we could go into executive session um unless there's some personal information associated with this but otherwise it would need to fit into that category that would be my apology that would be my attention mr grossman and if certainly if anything that i communicate within that session uh does not fit within the exception in the commissioners use i'd be happy to then restate it publicly and so the only question i have in that regard is whether anything in connection with 2013 may go into privacy interests of individuals who aren't in front of us today yeah i think we should assume that right i can't i imagine it i have a hard time imagining that it doesn't apply right so because there is one individual qualifier um that could be part of the discussion chelsea grossman i do think we'd have both yeah i think it's certainly um on its face would would seem to qualify um and we could start as mr hendrix mentioned and if it starts to veer into territory where it seems clear that it should be discussed publicly then we can stop the discussion and move into a public session uh but as we've done a number of times as long as we are very meticulous about the content of the conversation this seems to fall within uh the parameters the only uh catch with the 2013 matter is to ensure that we're not going into executive session to discuss anything that the commission has already discussed publicly in 2013 so we just need to be careful about that i'm sure before release publicly director wells at the time or was it more the fact of the end recommendation was released trying to remember because this is no i know my recollection is my recollection is the i'm not sure if we i mean we ended up um because the caesars matter they were just one qualifier with part of a larger application the whole suffix downs yeah and i don't remember if that information was taken out of the report when it was public because the commission never deliberated on it it was never discussed in public the issues were never hashed out so i know that did not happen um but i don't know as if the report section remained in and was part of the packet when the suitability was done on the company because i think some of the some of the issues they they questioned uh Suffolk Downs on was the due diligence on uh partnering with caesars i mean i know there's a globe article from october 30th 2013 that talks about some of what came out um and it said suffix asked caesars to withdraw on october 18th on october 18th um that during the background check a certain information came up and then they do have a paragraph that publicly states raising red flags about a licensing deal with gansivert hotel group and new york boutique hotel company whose name caesars wanted to use in a reefered las vegas hotel principle of which have been linked um to russian mobsters and that says according to a report from the commission's enforcement arm which would tend to indicate some portion of it was released publicly at the time maybe not all of it though yeah well i mean i think everyone knew what the issues were publicly that was not confidential in any way the gansivert matter well that that's just it i was i was in a different agency i want to make clear that there are some people on this team and some members of the applicant that were part of this but many of us were not right so we don't have any information on this in terms of background so we want to be really cautious about um us making any assumptions if it was in the public forum then it could be it should be discussed in this public forum if we're not able to confirm that then i think it makes sense that we avail ourselves of its proper you know according to our council to avail ourselves of the executive session to clear this matter up um and then you know um just on for me and commissioners if i could offer i believe a redacted port uh a redacted version of the report from 2013 is publicly available i'm i'm certain of that um so if the redacted version is sufficient to have this discussion i guess i suggest that we could refer to that version um as the basis of the public discussion obviously your that's your product that seems fair um but do but we haven't seen it yet i also don't know if the commission i mean i think what is clear is that there's portions of Nevada that in Virginia you could talk publicly about right now and that we would at a certain point have to go in on those at least could i just i like to i'd like to at least address this this issue because you know this was just we were just quoting a 2013 globe article with you know some reference that none of us know about right um none of us have that um available i mean the other four of us i doubt um maybe you did um but i think now that's been stated and we need to be able to decide what weight we're going to attribute to this 2013 matter and what we want to do um moving forward so i'd like to not put it aside because i really have a sort of on a plan our day so commissioners um Commissioner O'Brien why don't you suggest what you think would need to happen for going forward and then we'll go to each other commissioner sure i mean i think in terms of moving forward right now if we go in if we start with the public discussion of Nevada and Virginia when we get to the point where it has to go into executive session if by then no one's been able to get the redacted version to know what was actually publicly available we go into executive session on so much as we know needs to be discussed on those matters um okay that keeps it moving anyway well we're trying to figure out the parameters of what was out there beyond what i just said which was quoted publicly right right which i right and and hopefully actually so um um so that that could keep us moving Karen if you could track that down please i'm sorry it sounds like the applicant may be able to also see i mean if mr. Hedrick's you're aware that it's publicly available a redacted version or you know somehow Karen whoever she asks this is you know whether it's the applicant but if we can get the redacted version then we'll know what's in the public form and not commissioners how does that feel to you commissioner skinner commissioner hill that sounds fine with me commissioner maynard i see you nodding at commissioner hill oh and the thumbs up commissioner maynard that works okay so that i just wondering mr. henders do you have that readily available um it might take me a few minutes to grab it but i you know if we went to a brief uh break i could find it otherwise you just have to look in my face as i search my direct lilios do you have it available by chance i don't have the redacted version i have the full version i don't think it's not about our legal team mr. grossman you were there weren't you i was there i don't remember whether there was a redacted version or not to be this is matt toller with gaming labs um miss wells i just recently sent you an email checking to see if that is the report that's in question um if that helps everybody move forward um not certain what the protocol is here but uh wasn't that's very helpful i'll see if garen will contact it i may not be and matt if it's not the right document we really give you a thumbs up for trying here thank you no and i'll be glad to post that link in the chat here if we found it is i found it um directly a little found it um i'm hosting um so uh i can you can send it to mr. hendrix and then send it to the commissioners i also have the redacted report available so whatever you're readily available after all there we go and thank you to matt it's nice to having the the tech expert handy here for us um all right so now we'll move to the nevada and um virginia the virginia matter is that the first one mr. garen absolutely if you'll allow me i'll start with the virginia matter i think it's a quite a simpler explanation and then that a matter obviously happy to double back uh the the virginia item that was disclosed uh pertain to a withdrawal license uh in that state um the withdrawal uh was initiated based on the either pending or almost immediately then after completed acquisition of what was william hill by caesar's entertainment uh so as mr. hashin mentioned this company has grown through mergers and acquisitions uh including our caesar's acquisition of our sports business so we were completing an acquisition while both caesar's and one of its subsidiaries was pursuing brick and mortar license in virginia uh simultaneously william hill was pursuing a mobile license in the same state uh based on the pending acquisition we spoke the regulars there and made a decision to withdraw one of those licenses and we soon combined those companies uh and that license was withdrawn uh without any findings of unsuitability or concerns relating to um the qualifications of either applicant it was more of a kind of technical withdrawal based on the number of licenses available in the statute and the pending or soon after acquisition of william hill by caesar's any questions for mr. herbrix on that okay next on the list so the next item on the list was a recently settled uh disciplinary action with the nevada game and control board and commission um that matter pertained to four different counts within the disciplinary action i'll speak to each of those counts in turn i would start by saying the fact pattern that led to this uh disciplinary action uh predominantly dates from before caesar's and hinks acquisition of the subsidiaries involved in this disciplinary action uh though obviously uh caesar's entertainment myself various members of the current leadership team of caesar's sportsbook worked very directly with the commission to resolve these matters um additionally i think it's really important information is that the system in place that resulted in some of these fines is different than the system that we would uh request for approval within massachusetts so today we've been speaking about our liberty platform uh we gave you a demo a demo of the liberty platform um all of the matters within this nevada disciplinary action uh relate to a platform that we call cbs cbs is a much older heritage platform that we are actively working to switch out within nevada we're working through the regulatory process to achieve necessary approvals to deploy liberty in nevada which will address many of the issues referred to in this count so as we talk through that just really want to make it clear completely different system a much older system without the level of sophistication of our liberty platform uh which is you know i think uh important information for this discussion so uh within that uh disciplinary action there were four counts that we settled to nevada game control ward um one pertained to um essentially duplicate wagers that were occurring within the sports wagering system of cbs again cbs our older platform that we are not going to deploy massachusetts and then we are working to substitute within nevada uh we identified that matter uh reported that to nevada game control ward and then actively worked to put in place a patch that would fix that issue uh additionally we reviewed the transactions that were impacted by this error and to the extent possible reimbursed guests for any losing wagers that were made as a result of this so uh our approach there was to try and ensure that a guest who won a wager based on this duplicate wagering issue still received the benefit of that winning wager any guest who lost a wager as a result of a duplicate we reimbursed for their loss um additionally there was a note that the system flaw that led to this wager was not timely identified um we have worked very very intensively with all of our teams to improve our training when it comes to identifying matters that require regulatory reporting uh and reporting those two our regulators in this instance uh we became aware of the issue through a customer complaint to the nevada game control board we kept them aware of everything we were doing to further investigate and resolve the matter uh and then we retrained our team members thereafter to more quickly report anything that would uh require some form of regulatory reporting um an additional account pertained to allegations of adequate customer service not being provided to nevada patrons during 2021 okay we settled this matter i think for context for the commissioners um fall of 2021 had a lot of different dynamics that are currently in place today so earlier in our presentation um eric and ken walked you through the robust customer service measures that we have put in place as cesar sportsbook um cesar's acquired william hill in the april of 2021 and we immediately began investing resources to improve our customer service function uh and address these sorts of items to include uh hiring substantially more staff introducing the chatbot function um using third party resources where allowable under various regulatory provisions and dramatically changing the scope of our investment within that area which all of which also relate to nevada gaming control board and then the last count in that matter related to uh failure to timely notify the game control board of a suspected theft at one of our retail sports locations within nevada um some context for that count is that the matter occurred at one of our smaller properties in nevada also dramatically different operating environment in nevada um large rural state we have a number of uh smaller retail sports book locations and it occurred at one of those smaller locations however in response again we retrained our team members on the appropriate procedures uh settled the matter with nevada gaming control board and continue to train and instill in our team members uh the requirements to report these sorts of matters in a timely fashion so i might pause there um i'd be happy to answer any more questions either in virginia or nevada matters thank you uh jeff thank you i have a question about that last count you described failure to timely notify and i didn't catch the rest of it can you repeat that yeah it was a failure to timely notify the nevada gaming control board of a suspected theft at a retail sports book location okay thank you and then um i got inadequate customer service in 2021 um duplicate wagers occurring into 2022 i believe and i didn't get the the fourth one um so it kind of relates to the duplicate wager issues that the duplicate wager issues not timely reported um and we were not able to identify the root cause of the flaw that led to the um duplicate wager issue though we did resolve the matter from a system protective and the flaw effectively allowed a patron to enter in one wager but it showed up in your system twice and deducted funds from the patron's account twice good question slightly different so uh the way it worked is that when the system the system was under a high stress or volume again different system uh that would not be in place in massachusetts then certain wagers in those high volume periods would be recorded twice so um you know henricks places a bet to for the chiefs to win against the broncos and uh we i do that on sunday morning uh very high volume time i placed $10 bet that $10 is struck twice if you know henricks intended to strike that bet once so what we did was we put a patch in place that limits bets within a certain amount of time to ensure that uh essentially a bet cannot be placed more quickly than a human could place it so we identified the specific time period by which those duplicate wagers were occurring and put a patch in place to ensure that no duplicate wagers could be issued within that timeframe and again anyone who made a winning bet as a result of uh those wagers kept the benefits of that winning bet we did not ask for free funds and any guests who lost a duplicate wager we credited it back they're uh they're lost later but patreon's accounts were deducted twice for one bet or yes okay thank you if i can did you stop in terms of the detail is suspected that because that's something you don't feel comfortable talking about in public um there are elements of that that i i could provide a little more detail on uh in private just relating to the controls we put in place and how we made security over those operations okay yeah i'd be interested in hearing a little bit more about that in the right setting i i apologize i've been kind of speaking for a minute was there another topic i should address i think that i'm hearing is we have the two outstanding of the general update on on on past clients but we now have that redacted report in front of us why don't give you a chance Jeff to um to review um loretta doesn't look like that you you you you sent us to page 219 as being the curtain is that right 219 230 i might be wrong 219 starts the bottom of 219 i think starts the discussion and it continues then the financial piece picks up on 265 so 219 there appear to be very few if any rejections that's yeah that's what i thought but um so um i thought that commissioners you probably should have a chance before um we uh we start discussing this again this is a report from that was prepared by the i e b right Karen and it was part of the application for um region a connection with region a and this report included includes information regarding ceasars entertainment but it's not exactly the same entity that's before us today is that right even the parent company has so much shifted that's right um and so i i guess i'm cautioning against a little bit being cautionary here because one none of us had a chance to digest it um but perhaps there is a desire to further delve into it perhaps we could ask i e b as you know if we got to the end of our analysis and any determination either condition or desire to get some kind of report back on really the relevance of this case of this matter to what we have in front of us today i think from my perspective you know i'm just trying to put it all into perspective i want i want to know i'm appreciative of the fact that it stops most and for that you know that was exactly the you know the the i think all of us would agree we are very pleased that happened but now i want to make sure we digest it correct so permission tell me what you would like to do um then chair if i could just clarify for the record just to make sure it's clear because this became relevant um in litigation the actual investigation was assigned to spectrum gaming so they actually did the draft report had a recommendation it was finalized by i e b but the spectrum gaming group was actually tasked with doing most of the investigation and they were the weed on it and did provide a recommendation uh that uh indicated their position on the on the suitability there was some dispute at a litigation down the road spectrum gaming itself indicated they did not recommend a finding of suitability and the i e b agreed with that okay so this is a report that was not adopted by i e b but rather by spectrum no it was it was initially drafted by i by spectrum as consultants for the i e b and then they worked in conjunction for the final report got it okay um but if i if i look at the last page of this document it's going to say mgc i e b right correct thank you okay um commissioners what would you like to do i for one would like the opportunity to actually one read the report or the relevant portions of it but then do you know confer with i e b as appropriate in terms of um you know their understanding of um the landscape as it is now at the applicant entity but then also you know i would like the opportunity to really just understand and assess the risk myself because right now i i know nothing other than what's been alluded to and referenced in this meeting so i i have one uh suggestion so i directed you to the part of the report that starts on page 2 19 so that's page 2 19 to 250 talks about three matters um there was a fourth matter the financial condition of the company that starts on page 265 i i would suggest that you've already had rsm look at the financial condition of the now parent company so if you're looking at relevance i i invite you to think about whether that is the least relevant uh of the four of the four matters if at all relevant i'm also just wondering given that this is not redacted could i e b kind just brief us right now quickly about these these items that um and and without going beyond does that make sense yeah i i i can try i mean certainly 10 years ago you know i was much well better versed uh in this i have uh reread the report uh in preparation for today but i i can i can i i would like the opportunity to actually read it myself um i'm in line with commissioner schindler that um i guess i was wondering at the end of the day and i realize you want to move things along madam chair no i think you might have misinterpreted i wanted if we could have my eb's briefing maybe as a background to our reading to help okay context into it i wasn't eliminating the opportunity to reject um mr hendrix though i want to turn to you if we get a little bit of a background from our i eb what's available pop was available publicly um it does that serve to help put things into context and then remind us of the of what was how it was the resolution and then we can pause and and and read um or decide to continue on today with the rest of the application and perhaps have some kind of a um of sol i think with respect to this matter uh we're we're happy to assist in whatever way benefits the commission so if that's a lot of time now answer questions after you've had a chance to review it um um you know pausing and moving into other questions uh whatever most benefits you will have to facilitate okay commissioners do you want to pause and read now sure okay um commissioner maynard yeah i um i i guess i would suggest that we take a few minutes break though i don't know if everyone wants to see me uh no we can't read i'm going to break yeah yeah watch each other read i i i don't want um i eb to be speaking in the background line my mouth's open reading something so that no we would break to read um so it's 211 can somebody offer 30 pages to 30 to 25 to 30 is that enough time to to 11 to 2 it's like 219 to the if you accept the recommendation around the financial piece sorry i need more than 15 minutes to the 30 minutes i'm going to understand you need in a minute in an hour is that too much i i we're going to have to kind of get that 20 minutes of an hour so that's how what we do in between something like um i can't you know i'm having i don't know if it's me commissioner skinner i'm having trouble hearing you i'm so sorry not to speak at the i think it's oh okay i keep on playing with my my speaker sorry maybe it's just that you close to my phone thank you ma'am chair may i recommend a half hour we come back at 245 i need a half an hour so i would appreciate you i i couldn't i'm had did everything i think i think brad suggested 30 minutes and commissioner skinner said she would take the 30 minutes if that works everybody okay thank you so sorry i'll figure out if it's me or something else thank you we'll break um to uh 245 thank you Karen Karen you're on i'm muting you you're good just give me a second okay good to go thank you missioners we all set down so this is a reconvening of that's just game commission meeting public meeting number 411 and we are returning to our agenda where we were um discussing point that our eb director raised that was also disclosed in um the applicants uh application in response to our increase so um missioners have you all had a chance to review the portion relevant portion of the report thank you commissioner brian shall i have you leave any questions you have for i guess it would be for any member of the applicant oh i don't see check yeah let me say thank you yes thank you there's a lot of windows i appreciate the hand thank you there's no problem so i mean my takeaway from reading it and i know that there's been a substantial there's a bankruptcy there was a reorg you've got a lot of different players but obviously um the lack of sort of compliance is what jumps out at me when i read that section so if you could speak to um in a little bit more detail sort of your compliance structure at the current um for the current applicant yeah absolutely so um um i guess a briefly note by mentioning that almost all of the individuals noted in that report that were in a decision-making capacity are no longer or never were with seizures entertainment Inc so the individuals that uh negotiated the transact the potential transaction identified a significant investigative issue one or no longer with the company the uh compliance committee as a whole that reviewed that matter has been uh completely turned over we have a different compliance committee which i'll walk you through in just a moment um the uh senior legal team that was involved in those determinations also known with the company the former chief compliance officer and senior regulatory professionals and um what i believe was the chief legal officer at the time those individuals are not with the company any longer as well the second major investigative issue involved the review of a qualifier associated with former CEC that individuals are longer with the company and then in relation to item three which dealt with allegations of improper accommodations for a high-value player our company does not offer any such incentives or accommodations to high-value players currently nor will it in the future uh and additionally the senior management team that was responsible for those decisions is not affiliated with seizures entertainment Inc so just kind of add to lay the groundwork from a compliance committee structure um we have a compliance committee uh at seizures entertainment Inc uh there's comprised of several individuals our compliance committee chairman is an independent member a longtime uh Nevada gaming regulatory attorney mr bud hicks um additionally two independent members of our board of directors serve on our compliance committee uh mike bagrom was longtime experience in gaming uh racing matters and then frank farenkoff who is also the independent member of our permanent sits in our compliance committee uh frank is a legendary attorney in the gaming space helpful me jay and longtime um affiliation with various government relations programs additionally two of our senior executives serve on that committee our president chief operating officer and our chief administrative officer uh chief administrative officer and lastly our chief legal officer uh is an ex officio member of that same committee uh i serve as the compliance officer uh as designated by our amended restated gaming compliance plan uh in that role i report directly to the compliance committee for independence purposes for day-to-day purposes i report to our chief legal officer i would note that that plan is also distinct from the plan that was used during this matter referred to in 2013 um that plan has been in place at former elder auto resorts Inc and now Caesars entertainment Inc uh for the last you know roughly nine years uh we applied a amended version of that plan to the consolidated enterprise following elder auto's acquisition of Caesars so matters like this would now be reviewed by an entirely different senior management team and under a new gaming compliance plan with multiple levels of autonomy and independence within the process uh and i firmly believe that these sorts of matters would be treated differently uh where they'd be reviewed by the Caesars entertainment Inc compliance plan that was a lot so maybe i'll pause to say one of those sorts of items you were looking for is anything i can give you some more detail on can you tell me how um what are the terms of the people on the compliance committee um certainly so the members of the compliance committee that are uh members of the board of directors their terms would run commensurate with their terms on the board uh we have a different mechanism to be to appoint membership to the compliance committee that we do on the board uh but each year we review appointments to our various committees and then the board of directors makes those appointments those all of course have to comply with the gaming compliance plan um similarly the chairman is able to be you know elected on an ongoing basis um and then the individuals who are executive officers um they could be appointed or removed pursuant to the terms of the gaming compliance plan at any point so depending on what we want that constituency of the committee to look like that can be changed so long as of course the tenants of the plan we're here to and then i'm appointed and serve at the convenience of the committee so is there a separate nominating committee or is it the board that then like when you said we come up with recommendations to the board to the compliance committee is that a separate nominating committee or is what is that yeah a good question so uh it is virgin royal we there so the compliance committee has terms within the gaming compliance plan that define who and when it would be appointed to and then from a corporate governance perspective we do have a separate nominating governance committee that makes recommendations and plans okay great thank you other questions to mr skinner you're naming it commit your skinner i apologize i can't hear you very well you have to get really close i don't know what happens that's yeah he's trying to get ahead all right with a giant head yeah um attorney Hendricks there was mentioned earlier uh that mr hessian was involved in prior incidents from 2013 and i'm sorry if this is awkward for you mr hessian but what was that involvement before eric response i guess i just don't if i implied that i apologize i know he was listed as a qualifier in the prior process i did not mean to imply that he was involved in any decisions listed within these significant investigative issues okay no on any comments i might have made eric over to you okay thank you i'm sorry i misunderstood um i have the same questions similar questions rather uh that commissioner o brian had so i appreciate her asking them i hate to go backwards uh but i'm going to ask about the nevada settlement again and just if you could tell us what those terms are if you're able to do that publicly the uh the terms in what respect because you you you signed a settlement agreement right there's a settlement a stipulation for settlement in order yes and so just asking what the terms of that settlement absolutely so within the settlement uh and i'm all happy to send that as a supplement to our application immediately following this meeting um i believe we we presented on the record in front of the nevada game control board that described the various remediation efforts that we took under or took in relation to them uh and then settled to find i am doing this off the head so i top of my head so i apologize i don't believe that there are any ongoing conditions as a result of that settlement other than to of course adhere to the remediation that we described and i will confirm that for you and send you the actual settlement agreement and what was the fine i believe it was a hundred thousand dollars in total thank you because it was the reference uh to the globe article that was made earlier there's the um current applicants and the parent company and direct and end the ultra parent company have no um involved at all with and as the individuals that recited in the first investigative matter in that report kids win and gavin's any any of those names i no involvement whatsoever we do not not as a parent company nor in any of our subsidiary holding companies and as i understand it was a matter for that was involving a licensing agreement for a non gaming entity um that is correct though that that property has been completely redesigned with a totally different brand we have no association with individuals who uh negotiated the transaction or potential transaction nor the ultimate licensing partner so none of those uh individuals nor the agreement run to the current parent company today yeah thank you and um with respect to the last party mr carver again it's a matter public record it's no yes no involvement whatsoever with any of the entities that are key um the individuals are for qualifiers um this matter before us that's correct he has no affiliation with the company or involvement with any of these applicants no affiliation okay and there's no outstanding litigation uh relating to this matter relating to him now i have none that i'm aware of any other questions about those okay um so direct lilios because there was just that inadvertent um scoping issue that's um you're expecting that the applicant is i know that you're in discussions i think that the applicant to get the application in on the parent company and then um and you're expecting that over uh yes we are uh lisa from the company's uh licensing team has been very responsive and the latest information i had i think we're expecting it friday or monday okay um and i think that um i know that we've got a couple of matters that commissioner bryan and uh and others may wish to address but we need to go into executive session to do that should we wait till the conclusion of our review of the sections just in case we have another second session we might as well in case anything comes up with rsm or anything like that okay and i saw commissioner hill nodding up and down okay we're all good with that plan anything else further with respect to this matter oh okay we um we thank you and and kudos to all the commissioners for their speed reading we appreciate that um and so do we have any further questions then for director lilios on suitability at this point okay okay then uh thank you to the uh applicant and we'll turn then to rsm rsm has been giving uh the gaming commission uh some assistance and in interpreting the financial uh components of the uh of the application rsm us lp is one of the leading providers of audit tax and consulting services in the united states rsm has been working with gaming commission to provide insights and analyses to help the commission um i'll let each of them introduce themselves but i do want to be clear that rsm team was asked to join um this meeting and make a presentation really relevant to just certain aspects of the applications and that was sections b2 subsection d on the sports waging experience description of sports waging operation and that focus was on the applicants estimated market share within each jurisdiction then section c2 projected revenue rsm has been asked to provide insights into all aspects of the applicants projected revenue and g3 section g3 financial stability and integrity uh rsm uh did provide a report to i e b part of the suitability report that we just evaluated rsm has been asked to provide insights into all aspects of the applicants financial stability and integrity so it goes a little bit beyond the scope of suitability so thank you very much i see um perhaps it's teresa who's leaning in first good afternoon teresa teresa marlino nice to see you nice to see everybody here today uh rsm appreciates the opportunity to present to the commission and we understand the importance of the licensing process and the importance of these meetings we've accumulated diverse teams of professionals to present on the various topics as requested by the commission as noted by madam chair we were very focused in our scope to sections b particularly with a with an emphasis on market market share and wagering activity section c with a focus on projected revenue and focus g with a focus on the financial stability liquidity and scenario analysis that the applicants uh were asked to perform uh my name is teresa marlino and i'm a principal in our gaming and hospitality practice based here in las vegas um i've been in gaming for the last 20 plus years and as a firm we've served the gaming industry since the 1960s um as different presenters present throughout the presentation they'll briefly introduce themselves um please note that the information that rsm will be presenting on today was received on november 21st 2022 and the discussion prepared by rsm is based on our preliminary research today and is subject to change if new information becomes available uh questions posed to our team may require further research and if we are unable to respond to a question before the end of the meeting we will circulate a response to the commission as soon as soon as practical uh as instructed by the messachusetts gaming commission rsm conducted a preliminary review of each category three applicants market share and submission materials in tandem with other investigations with the process much of the information we reviewed is likely considered confidential by the applicants including the market share and projections we're happy to discuss these items in detail in an executive session and as as directed by the commission we will we are prepared to speak generally about the process of which each applicant shared the information within this public forum rsm's preliminary market study the jurisdictional rules and other nearby markets with what each of these are doing may impact any of the applicants estimates on market share and the sportsbook composition in a given state uh for example if massachusetts goes live it is probable that neighboring states will see a decrease in sports wagering activity as patrons stay at home to play rather than crossing straight lines to do so for reference something we did not note yesterday the new jersey market year to date september 2022 shrink by 7.3 percent which we we anticipate is in part due to new york legalizing and initiating sports wagering so we do anticipate that other states may see an impact by the increase of wagering in massachusetts rsm yesterday um spoke more broadly to the industry and various sportsbook sizes which we're happy to revisit again but for the sake of time we'll we'll move on but we spoke specifically to sportsbook um you know new jersey having for example 25 sports books uh while other states have two or three or even down to one which may um impact the market share estimates uh given the nature of the online sports wagering and the varying number of platforms in different jurisdictions it is difficult to predict the ultimate composition of the marketplace and even after conducting market extensive market research but we do anticipate that massachusetts will be a very lucrative market and each of the applicants and including the current applicant which will refer refer to throughout the presentations as cesar sportsbook or awi consistent with the rest of this hearing uh has has anticipated or appears to have anticipated uh the commission as noted here has received ieb's report addressing the suitability review by director lilios and which which we we spoke to at length and note that we rsm did provide a report to the commission of the applicant self-disclosed financial submission including the historical financial performance of sports wagering other jurisdictions liquidity and ability to fund um upstart costs and losses financial projections in massachusetts in the financial impact of compliance risks bankruptcies and other legal items uh we we understand that the the review of ieb's report was intentionally limited in scope and we're prepared to speak to this broadly here today but but do anticipate if necessary going into a executive session uh if any specifics are needed the applicant has built a us sportsbook business through the recent acquisition of the 2021 uh transaction with william hill plc as part of the application rsm was only provided financial information for the publicly traded parent company and the pre transaction william hill information which limits our ability to review you know the overall sports betting operations uh the applicant provided one year of financial projections for awi and making it difficult to understand assumptions and projected business trends over time we recognize significant uncertainties and starting operations in a greenfield market and want and the only five-year projection we were able to observe within the application was related to projected handle we utilized this five-year projected handle to try to understand market share estimates that were provided by the caesars sportsbook for the revenue projection section an executive session may be warranted as our discussion contains specifics on caesars estimated market share with with the acknowledgement that it was limited to the handle projections so we're definitely like going into a lot of rsm assumptions as we go into that section um and and so i'm going to utilize direction from last yesterday's meeting and go at a high level and then if you guys would like us to go into executive session on further details as appropriate we're happy to do so um madam chair is that an appropriate approach i think that's right okay so we we compared the projections at the limited projections as provided to market analyst doish bank uh and truest securities research report both of which were issued in and october 2022 um those estimates just for context roughly both of them roughly estimate the massachusetts market uh sports betting market to be between 300 and 350 million dollars um the market share estimates for massachusetts online sportsbook market uh were not shared by the applicant so um nor were those five-year revenue projections so we did note in section e2 e0 of the application that there's a graphic where the applicant showed their acquisition model and based upon our review of that uh it does seem to indicate that there's methodology and and thought behind market share so we don't want want to imply that that the applicant hasn't thought about it but they just didn't share how that graphical presentation of market acquisition translates into revenue projections in within the application specifically to repeat that section please yeah section graphic but i don't yeah it's section e2 e0 and and it's related to player acquisitions and they talk about market share and kind of their approach and so it does appear that they have uh some modeling in place to to think through and build that out and i think in their presentation earlier today they referenced that they haven't you know finalized their market plans but are actively working to develop a market approach that i would assume aligns with that graphic which i think is about page 576 unless my numbers come up different than everybody else's yeah unless we're doing the section by section so right right that's just in the overall pdm thank you uh i would also like to highlight for the commission that uh cesar sportsbook provided a market share percentage for the various various jurisdictions in b3 g01 uh it was noted as confidential but but i think a lot of the information and calculations they're estimating for market share are based upon public data but um as the application was noted as confidential i'm not going to to reference the specifics of their market share in those other markets uh and we can talk to the estimates in the executive summary of the estimates of handle and how we kind of back into their estimates of market share but generally speaking their market share estimates for the state of massachusetts are in the middle range of their of their um stated market share within the other jurisdictions so if you look at that table there in um b3 g01 uh and kind of look in the middle of that table it's it's generally in the middle of that table i would say kind of leaning towards the higher end and and we can speak to that more in executive session as requested but directionally you you can you should be able to see that and uh given given that the revenue projections were only provided for one year there's an unknown ramp up period um to terminal market size meaning we were unable to evaluate and provide the commission on kind of what those build out assumptions are what their planned growth is year over year with with the data provided uh the commission may may want to confirm cesar's assumptions on market share although um it does seem to be close to what they offer in other markets and and they may have some you know some some the the the the numbers they provided seem appear to have some context uh based upon their historical performance uh we'll also like to note that the planned relationship with on core boston harbour was not detailed in the application nor reviewed as part of our our application and we're unsure what the perception of that relationship would have on market share or marketing efforts or or lack there of or not having marketing efforts we've seen various jurisdictions handle that relationship differently uh as the commission is aware revenue is closely tied to whole percentage it's important to note that cesar's revenue projection uh are based on performance of their platform across the jurisdiction from november 2021 to october of 2022 which which appears reasonable to us um although conservative compared to newer sports wagering markets as as discussed throughout today uh this platform is is in many many jurisdictions and is a primary player within the nevada market which which trends towards a little bit lower whole percentage so the whole percentage is stated in their application uh do do seem in a line aligned with their current performance across multiple jurisdictions and is i would say conservative compared to newer markets where we'll we'll see sometimes the whole percentage creep up a bit based upon the sophistication level of players and whatnot and we could speak to more specific numbers in executive session if appropriate and then i'll turn to jeff to discuss a bit about liquidity and the overall financial stability review and then and then open for questions and discussion as to the appropriate or necessity of going into executive session thanks charisa uh good afternoon uh madame chair and commission uh jeff cats i'm a director at rsm and i lead our strategic finance and fpna group uh based in boston and spend uh you know the the bulk of my time doing financial analysis on on companies in the technology industries like it is apparent that uh cesar's entertainment the parent company is well capitalized as of its most recent quarterly sec filing and has touched on the opkins presentation this morning as of september 30th there was approximately three billion and available liquidity comprising of 944 million in cash on hand and 2.1 billion in availability under their revolving credit facility uh there are no major uh uh debt maturities in the next 12 months and then cesar's generated 704 million in cash flow from operations during the nine month period ending september 30th 2022 and cesar's has also reduced their total debt by two six 2.6 billion during the same period it is ultimately up to the applicant's parent on how to allocate its financial resources if faced with um losses in the future there is no guarantee the applicant will continue its sports wagering operations in massachusetts but it has the current financial resources to fund operations in the commonwealth if it's so desires now we'll remain on the line to answer any questions the commission may have about this presentation or our written submission if there are further specific questions in the contents for a report we're happy to discuss those in the executive session thank you thank you very much um i think you've probably heard um which happened to me so that we um intend to go through the application mind if we have any other issues that are more appropriate in the executive session are you available to hang on yes i'm available certainly and and we can make sure that others for the written submitted report are available as appropriate excellent thank you so commissioners that concludes our reports from our internal team members now we're going to start with a review and evaluation of the application section by section and a reminder that um at the conclusion of each review of each section i'll take our temperature and find whether or not we think that the applicant has met our expectations in terms of the um quality of of its response so ma'am chair are we doing the executive session now are we going to wait until we proceed through this i thought i may have misunderstood i thought that we might go through the application and find if we have anything else got it okay that would go into uh then we could do one executive session okay that's appropriate does that make sense should we continue on then commissioners i'll set okay so turning to section b questions for the applicant madam chair yes irisa touched on an important point for me and that is what the relationship the partnership the details of the partnership with uh win excuse me on core boston harbour are and so definitely not interested in the fine details but generally what the partnership entails and uh i don't know if that is reserved for executive session or not but hoping hoping someone can speak to that either now or then uh i'd propose that we could give you a very high level summary if that's efficient great and if not we'll provide additional context in the executive session um and as i say that i'm mentally suggesting that eric is going to uh actually provide that summary here in just a moment so um if that works we'll proceed that way sure it's uh relatively straightforward um as in partnership with win we're able to through your review here access uh their first skin or ability to use a second brand for the commonwealth and in exchange we're providing them with uh financial uh payments based on our performance in the state along with some minimum amount uh that we're paying per year and and also just to be thorough we have deals with them in other states where they operate on our licenses and have a similar arrangement where there are minimum uh payments that they make to us as well as uh performance-based uh payments well it's just gonna you might be on again no and now we heard nothing so there's something definitely going on sorry what if it's on you how's that that's good okay i'm gonna get to another location shortly um but i appreciate the answer to the question it really is just as simple as that you're it's you know just as straightforward as i guess the statute envisioned so thank you yeah it is we we have uh the obligations to provide you all with the uh responsive reporting that you're asking for through a contractual agreement with win but uh so it ensures that that we're complying with all of the reporting requirements and so forth but it's mainly a financial transaction with them but could i do a follow-up question to that commissioner skinner uh we've concentrated a bit on what we've purchased third-party affiliates and and how um you know particularly in the in the um the market advertising um landscape and i believe that i asked the question or maybe it was one of my fellow commissioners asked the question of uncle wasa harvard but i um i would assume that you would have those third-party affiliates and to the extent that um you engage in any contracts and they have content that you would assume control of that content um and and then ultimately uncle boston harvard also would have responsibility that you as a partner am i wrong no i think that was a good summary and i actually heard their response from yesterday and thought that it was a good response that win made in terms of the monitoring of the affiliates and the general relationship uh we have similar structures in the states that we offer operate and to the extent that they're allowed in uh massachusetts and get licensed etc we would plan to utilize them and if they're not available then we do an alternative approach but you would have um ultimate control over any content and i'm we're thinking of course a responsible gaming yes that that lines with you yes that's that's correct yep and that's correct no please go right ahead it's probably helped i was going to add that all of those affiliates would abide by our marketing advertising code our standards they would use our advertising guidelines and we would be responsible for the content with which they you know then distribute it in the market so the actual material would adhere to our marketing advertising guidelines and requirements and we would then of course take responsibility from that from a regulatory perspective right okay that's really helpful thank you okay um other questions under section b i'm just looking at my notes i think i got a few answered earlier i i would like to explore um your response in section b i think b3 um on um projected revenues and the issues that teresa brought up so if we could include that in our in um an executive session i think we can learn a little bit more about what you're estimating um other questions on b commissioner may be i'm sorry i assume my apologies no problem i have a features question what's a selfie sign up how does that work i can take that one commissioner if you don't mind ken pukes uh so a selfie sign up is a secondary kyc approach where and it's it's fairly common with most of the major operators where if you go through initial kyc and there's a flag for whatever reason perhaps you recently moved in your address doesn't match driver's license you can submit a photo of yourself from the phone and you can submit a a photo of the front and back of your driver's license and then the software will ensure that you are the person that the idea is valid and that you are the person on that identification and it's basically a secondary secondary means of kyc that's fairly common in in the industry and deployed across multiple states is that is that an in-house or is that is there's some vendor that does this it's a third party vendor there's a number of them that do it our vendor is on fido thank you so they would need to be licensed okay commissioner so the questions on this section with just the follow-up on that we'll get in the executive session that uh um do we have a consensus that it met expectations i would say they met expectations under section commissioner i see you're shaking head and christian skinner all set i'm all set um just with with the caveat that we will hear some additional information from rsm during executive session thank you so much so we'll move on to section c excuse me mr hendrix i think the cold is coming through the um the screen let's see these also are marked out as um confidential um so we'll tread carefully um see what everyone's comfortable with questions so just if i'm not if i'm reading this correctly and i'm not shocked by the answer but no anticipated jobs in the Commonwealth other than what exists already and as you described it i think i think that's generally correct uh as we're exploring whether we're going to do local activations and have some uh you know in-market uh employees to help uh you know facilitate sign-ups or to do those type of activities we don't know how many yet uh but it won't be more than a than a couple and then we do allow our tech team to work remotely and that's where the majority of the seven that we currently have are coming from right so the and if you don't want to talk about it publicly just put your hand up and stop me um but in terms of the brand ambassadors that you talk about later are those the potential jobs that you're talking about just now or is that something different yeah those those would be uh the potential jobs i have another question on that but we can save it to different sections okay thank you other questions like i'm sure oh sorry go ahead madam chair i wanted to point out that under the social impact statement because i think between commissioner skinner yourself and myself we've brought up the lottery every every um meeting there's an answer that says um as the mobile sports voyaging business is unrelated to the lottery business seizures does not anticipate its operations to affect the revenues generated by the master's estate lottery um that is well and good and and um maybe this is just a little background on on us being a slightly different jurisdiction and region but we anticipated and we've taken votes that any licensees would work with the lottery and speak to the lottery about specific issues that they have in regards to to whether it affects the lottery or not and so that's something that i would want to see i your answer left a little bit to be desired commissioner mayor i could speak to that we would be happy to collaborate with any of the state agencies obviously including the lottery so not intentional to not indicate that we would not collaborate we certainly will just indicating our initial analysis from an overall market perspective and we could certainly supplement that and obviously i'm i'm terrified here on the record that we will work with all applicable state agencies and to your credit you do say that you know you don't anticipate any acting any you know negatively but that you consider cross marketing strategies and increasing ticket sales and i think from my experience that that's music to the executive director of the lottery so that alone um it's just something i think that commissioner mayor suggests that they am i looking at the wrong place i'm scared that's that that's the question the answer is under the question thank you well that's what i would suggest you do great the cross marketing is really there's opportunities there to have conversation with them and they may come up with something but thank you for clarifying what i'm really worried about just now commissioner maynard was that i was reading somebody else's application for a moment because i've i've done that accidentally today not today but the other day i'm oops so yes it is including cross market and so what you're saying is the answer is the word as to the end of lottery okay good so some guidance there and i think the executive director would would love to hear from you folks on thanks commissioner maynard okay i have another question and it crosses over a little bit into responsible gaming but it's referenced by you guys and see which is this 18 wheeler that was my question yeah i mean i have a lot of questions for you guys coming up in terms of the the responsible gaming in the end of 21 and your your marketing and your affiliation relationships at the college level etc so i was on one hand amused in the other hand a little taken aback by where this might end up and what it's used for so i'd love to hear a little bit more about that but maybe we table that for the rg section well it was in this section and commissioner brian it's it's it's bare um i think it's i think it's interesting that it may have marketing and it may also have implications of course and be for market firms but i think you know you quite right suggest by their rg considerations involved i think my question was telling me more about the trucks itinerary where does it go um this is that helpful commissioner brian for the launching the discussion right now yeah okay that's fair so do you want me to handle this on jeff or yeah if you could explain it a little bit and we'll sure so you know as as you as referenced earlier one of the things we try to do is to activate locations in the states where we're operating and so that can be at a bar it can be you know at sporting events etc and the goal is kind of twofold one to highlight our our brand and get people to to see see the brand and and associate it with the sports sporting event and two to provide the ability to actually help folks in person sign up for the app get you know answer any questions that they have resolve any problems that they could have with the app if they're already customers and those types of things and so what this truck is is is a concept to try to improve our ability in in those areas and have the truck be essentially a showcase that opens up there's an inside area we have panels we have people that are staffed to help answer questions as customers might have about the app and we move it around to different locations most recently with the launch in maryland it's been at maryland we're doing a right now it's it's in a parking lot of a major grocery store chain that wanted to try out the association of that with one of their one of their products it was at our racino in Ohio for a number of weeks and we'll be moving it to Cleveland when we launch the product in Ohio and I'll pause there and and see and see if you have any questions I would say that the results haven't been great and so I'm not sure that we will end up having it around in Massachusetts in February and I might add to Eric's comments that we obviously look to place the activation events in areas that are going to predominantly be oriented individuals that are over the age of 21 and able to use the product so we also have controls around checking IDs before anyone is able to engage with the truck make sure that all of the users who are actually experiencing that pardon me uh the truck and you know the kind of whole event are individuals over the age of 21 so we are checking IDs and confirming these are the right sorts of folks that are engaging with us uh before we're you know offering that to the public can we show right it's kind of hard to bubble an 18-wheeler you know to make sure that only 20 went enough for seeing it but I appreciate the sentiment it's you know what you're saying but it'd be hard to maybe drive the 18-wheeler in a snowstorm in March here too so I need to add food to it I mean I think I think our food trucks get actually parked during the this the winter months I don't know how many around there but um I respect the answer to the clarifier that you're you know looking for those locations that are are predominantly and I think that probably was what Commissioner Briney might have had currently on your mind so thank you um I just had um one follow-up point that I made yesterday so you may have heard of that again there's an opportunity if you do end up using your branding ambassadors there's a couple it might be a little bit different than what was proposed yesterday but I do think to the extent that you make any inroads with partnerships and local establishments that you consider being really intentional about you know bringing your your partnerships and business to minority-owned establishments it's an opportunity there of course it's an opportunity for women-owned establishments and veteran-owned establishments I do know that you have a relationship with mass military support foundation so we appreciate that but to the extent that you do work to introduce your product and and recruit new players to the extent you can do that with some intentionality around minority-owned businesses that would be something that I certainly will address favorably for a long-term relationship in Massachusetts. Thank you chair and we absolutely will as we you know develop those relationships with local intentionality of those relationships with minority and diversity and women-owned businesses. Thank you thank you so with that I actually have I have one other thing I wanted to ask about and I'm probably stealing Commissioner Hill's thunder by asking this but you talk about your community enhancements etc at the local level and you talk about developing a relationship with the mass military support foundation can you be a little more specific when you say developing like what stage is it in what do you contemplate financial support like what are you thinking yeah so that's right we are contemplating financial support we're identifying the individuals who are leading that organization seeing where we can support their initiatives you know similarly we've been reaching out to agencies that work in responsible gaming areas to develop relationships to ensure that you know should we prepare their license we can smoothly facilitate all of the responsible gaming controls within the state so just given the timeframe of the application in the process we are early in those relationships but we are committed to developing strong community ties. Thanks and then Ms. Wrapp you unmuted I didn't know if you had something you wanted to say or now Jeff covered it I'm still having technical difficulties so I couldn't get off but he was able to speak but he covered it beautifully you you can repeat anything you want we're good with that that was spot on okay Michelle did you want to add to that um I was very impressed with what you've done and other jurisdictions and I didn't know if you wanted to enlighten the public of what some of the other community involvement you've had in other jurisdictions I would just say we've had a variety of community involvement across the countries and the jurisdictions in which we operate we also have involvement with organizations at a national level both with our philanthropic giving as well as with our seizures foundation so we partner with like I said a variety of organizations but we really look to seek partnerships that hit our strategic impact giving areas which include social equity and education climate change and food security responsible play and and mental health so a variety of organizations fall within those areas and we work to cultivate relationships with all of them both at a corporate level as well at a local property level excellent thank you thank you madam chair thank you you're all set right I thank you mr skinner all set okay then we'll move on to section oh I need to just take a temperature honestly thanks um do we have a consensus that the SAP has met its response expectations in this response I would say yes they have met expectations under section C thank you just maybe yes I would also say yes they've met with the same caveat we do need to hear from rsm on the financial piece and executive executive revenues yeah and and with the caveat that mr hindricks did say they are willing to work with the law and thank you for some reason commissioner maynard it presents a little bit differently awful text and so I just thought that was there be so thank you for clarifying um that that is the question all right then we have a consensus we'll move on to section D please any questions and again some degree of confidentiality so exercise yes mr skinner thank you so the diversity spend around minority and women business enterprises is commendable actually um what is missing in this paragraph d2 is and I don't have a page number I'm sorry I'm going with one of the earlier versions of the application but what's missing from from that data is veteran business enterprises and I know chair judge stein mentioned veterans and the organizations that you can link up with to sort of increase um your partnerships and spending in that area and so looking forward to seeing that I wonder if you had your minority in women uh business enterprise spending broken down we don't break down and report publicly um by each respective group we report as a whole so as you can see we have a total spend of diverse spend of 9.5 percent um of our total addressable spend but we don't report publicly by each respective group women minority and vendor that is something that we can look to provide and possibly discuss an executive session okay okay that yeah I'm interested in understanding why you don't report that information publicly um and then I noticed that you don't have or you haven't identified in the application goals for that spending and so are those not available do you just not have them because I'm wondering how your nine nine point five percent matches up to those internal goals sure our overall goal with our supplier diversity program is really just to source quality goods and services benefit the communities in which we operate and engage those small diverse and local businesses it doesn't have a metric tied to it we want to identify those businesses work to get them certified if they're not already and then support them in the markets in which we operate um and and help um you know move their business forward as well we don't have a specific metric tied to what the goal is we're always striving to increase our diverse spend both in the regulated markets and in the non-regulated markets so how do you measure success we look at our increase year over year to see where we're seeing improvement um and and like I said we're always striving to see an increase in that year over year spend and we do report as a whole um each year in our our corporate social responsibility report you also have reference to dbe that the disability violation okay all right yeah thank you my pleasure and just to go back to one of your uh comments commissioner I believe you also mentioned uh veteran owned businesses uh we absolutely do you know endeavor to work with veteran owned businesses uh my brother's a veteran owns a small business uh and we're passionate about this company so um is inadvertent if it was not specifically identified we will look to do business with veteran owned businesses where possible good to hear it thank you our just to speak to that our overall focus is women owned my own minority owned um disadvantaged disabled veteran and lgbtq owned and certified businesses and we partner with um local chambers of commerce and organizations that help support those businesses as well and certify them um within those organizations that's notable um heather so thank you that stood out to me I you know sounds like it's a worthwhile initiative for you and in terms of the effect that it has and that's increasing overall spend from year to year absolutely thank you any further questions on madam chair yes i wanted to commend the applicant on the data the data is there uh a significant portion of the data is there I did notice the year over year increase I'm not going to get into numbers um I did see the 2025 plan in d1 and I appreciate your answer on the record to which our skinner that you know you're not trying to set a ceiling you're trying to to work on they're not being as so I appreciate that this rapid and uh just wanted to commend on the record that the data is there I pleasure other questions in this area okay um I have one madam jam sorry or maybe it's a comment or a combo um I appreciate your commitments to increase your senior leadership roles for women and people of color and um what are your efforts and I know you you've given yourself quite some time uh to kill 2025 but any targeted efforts you'll be making um to increase your numbers there can you talk a little bit about what it is that you'll be what's your strategy absolutely um so it their strategy in a couple different areas starting with diversity recruitment um we have our job hostings as we think about uh using inclusive language in all of our job postings um we review those with a DEI lens before those are are published um we have our candidate outreach and partnerships um we include historically black colleges and universities in our outreach we partner with multiple DEI focused organizations that can help extend our reach and attract diverse candidates and support inclusion retention and development of those candidates we have an objective to ensure that we have a very diverse candidate slate sometimes that can be challenging depending on the market but it's our goal to ensure that we have at least one diverse candidate for every available position if that proves to be challenging may extend that timeline um if if possible um hiring managers undertake a conscious inclusion training um which provides um a diversity focused training um to help them really understand um DEI as a whole and how they can take that back not only to their hiring processes but their management training overall uh moving on to our talent development and training and development overall we host an emerging leaders summit which is a two-year program for high potential uh managers and directors um it includes a range of learning opportunities in person summits uh leadership panels with our senior management team uh e-learning modules we also work with uh McKinsey to um utilize their connected leaders academy which targets different ethnic and racial groups such as african-american hispanic or latino and asian team members of asian descent where it targets um high-level managers they have a program that they can work with uh with mckinsey as well as executive uh leaders and that's a four-month program we also have our um employee resource group or business resource groups ours are are called BAGS for business impact groups which brings together self-identifying like-minded team members and their allies um which really support each other and of those communities through dimensions of diversity equity and inclusion um something that we're very proud of um that has really kind of taken shape over the last couple years would be our compensation and our benefits as you think about uh offering benefits for a diverse population um we've also recently launched a last year our all in on education program um we have several others I could probably continue to to go on our disability inclusion program um we are getting ready to relaunch our veterans program um so we believe we have a very firm strategy built out to achieve those goals by 2025 that sounds like a good long comprehensive plan I I hope it yields the results you're looking for and if granted a license I look forward to hearing about your successes in that area thank you excellent any other so it is back to um section D what is how do we feel about that section in terms of our expectations I think it met expectations as to D Commissioner Skinner yes I agree in fact I would I would I would maybe say it exceeded expectations and we've been top graders I would agree with Commissioner Skinner um um our first exceeds I think Commissioner Hill I agree with Commissioner Skinner on that thought Commissioner Maynard I agree with Commissioner Skinner and Commissioner Hill and and it seems like you a mental chair yeah um I'm glad to hear and exceed um but it was a very very thoughtful response and and um to the applicants credit so thank you and Commissioner O'Brien thank you I think we've got a consensus there all right I think we'll have um there's one matter though you Commissioner Skinner you want to get a little clarification um on in in the executive session that I think did you note that I did but I think okay then just um we'll go throughout at the end yeah okay excellent thank you so much and we'll move right on to responsible gaming um if everybody's okay and that's in section B Commissioner O'Brien did you want to start I did so um this section was not like the other sections for me in terms of there were a couple of things that jumped out at me one is that there was no mention at all of Game Sense I don't believe in terms of working with Game Sense um which is a huge part of the responsible gaming program that we have in the Commonwealth and so I I I feel like what's in here isn't sufficient for me to be honest with you I'd like that to be specifically addressed a little bit more clearly um and if I missed this second part please let me know but it looks unlike the other ones that I've looked at so far it didn't look like Caesars was adhering and adopting the responsible marketing code for sports wagering under the AGA that you have your own internal code that you have had for quite some time but there is a there's a marked difference in omission and that code compared to this that pertains to sports wagering promoting on colleges and universities etc so if you could please address that because to me that was that was a troubling part of this application uh sure Commissioner O'Brien I'll I'll begin to uh address your comments and all the lights of my colleagues to speak as well uh in respect to Game Sense our attention was to note that we are going to adhere to all regulatory requirements applicable to responsible gaming we have zero concerns with with adhering to the Game Sense requirements and integrating that into our program um that should have been more specifically stated I apologize for that error uh we can for a moment tell you we will um comply with that in all respects uh and would be happy to supplement our materials uh to further reflect that if that would benefit the the commission um secondly to your question about the various codes of conducts that apply to the industry um I might offer some initial comments and ask some of my colleagues to join me um you are correct within our applications we reference our adherence to Caesars marketing and advertising code that has been a hallmark tenant of our responsible gaming plan uh four years and that is one of the you know kind of driving philosophies of our company it is distinct from the American Gaming Association uh and its code of conduct um I would note that what we aspire to do within that code I believe is here's the spirit of the AGA which is to represent our industry uh very well to do so in a way that um does not advertise gaming in a way that we incent problematic behaviors um and so we can kind of walk through those various tenants in a little more detail if that would be beneficial to you um so that's for we operate under the MAC versus the AGA code of conduct uh though I believe with the MAC and our company's responsible gaming plan we have all of the constituent elements to drive a not just kind of routine but industry leading responsible gaming program uh in respect to your comments about uh sponsorship agreements with third parties I'm going to write my colleague Eric in to give some insight into kind of how we reached those agreements that were referenced in the New York Times article um and then I might also kind of add some additional context about the controls we place when we were looking at that agreement and how we operate those agreements currently um so Eric can you kind of get a little insight into how those agreements were reached in your perspective sure thanks thanks chef um when we you know I mentioned earlier in the day we rebranded the app uh you know it's the Caesar Sportsbook back in 2001 and as part of that process we recognized we needed to you know basically alert people to the fact that we have a sportsbook app out there and as part of that we did deals with a number of strong brands that we thought associating our brand with their brand would heighten that uh visibility you know and it spanned the media companies it spanned uh you know leagues uh athletes like the mannings that we had uh and and we were approached by a marketing company representing a number of universities and we evaluated those in the context of the goal of uh bringing our brand forward and presenting it to their alumni uh the universities we chose were michigan state and lsu uh they both have very large uh alumni networks hundreds of thousands to a million their sports fans really resonate with the school and we thought that it would be a good uh trial to see if those relationships with the university's alumni association would drive affiliation to our brand and uh signups on behalf of the universities we entered into the agreements um and put in clauses and statements to ensure that we were only uh focused on their alumni and 21 plus uh alumni to be specific um and we also reviewed the statistics of the stadiums um to ensure that a very high percentage of the attendees were over 21 and that the average age was significantly over uh the 21 and so in combination with what we referred to earlier where we don't sign up anybody who's under 21 we don't take their credit cards we don't send out marketing materials and this is this is for the United States uh we felt that that all in concert uh was an appropriate uh effort uh to sign up the universities and do sponsorships with them and so that's how we came to the uh decision that we made and i'd like to add a little more context and kushel brye i haven't answered any more questions you have we also applied additional controls relative to how those advertisements would be portrayed within the limited stadium and arena areas right so we wanted to ensure that all of those materials would be directed individuals over the age of 21 that they would only be included within the arenas and stadiums they're not included elsewhere within university um and that as we've talked about that all of our content is kind of of the highest standard is does not propagate any sort of uh material that might suggest um problematic behavior amongst our customers um so all of that was intended to provide some further control around how we manage that while so as Eric mentioned it's explicitly avoiding any sort of direct communication individuals who might be under the age of one individuals who might have uh a college um email address uh so we tried to very much distinguish any sort of uh direct marketing to only those in over the age of 21 and all of our indirect marketing in areas where the average age was well in excess of the legal age to so can i ask looking at the article looking at some of the photographs i think you know there's correct me if i'm wrong a picture of probably the 18 wheeler that you're talking about um sort of being in a tailgating area so we had an app we had an applicant and a licensee come in um not too long ago within days basically pointedly saying they rip off requests from universities to sort of get involved advertising even promote the use of their facility which is a very different approach obviously than what you as a as a company have taken so i'm troubled by that because when we look at the research and we look at who's the vulnerable population it goes up to you know 25 26 year olds even um who are very susceptible to addiction and to the negative consequences of gambling this is a new introduction across the country this is obviously going to be brand new to the commonwealth we have a number of you know college students university students particularly in the boston area um and the aga standards pointedly say don't advertise on college university campuses and you guys seem to have drawn a line in yours that putting it in a stadium is a distinction from putting it on a campus or university so you could explain that rationale to me and why you think that that comports with responsible gaming yeah uh happy to so the distinction that we made was to try and tailor any sort of advertisement or marketing material from seizure sports book areas where the average age would be well in excess of the legal age to wager so you know we looked at the demographics where these sorts of materials would be presented they were far north of 21 which north of the additional age 25 26 that you mentioned and additionally the goal was to reach out to alumni that would be well over the age of legal age to wager and you know associate that group with what we're offering the seizure sports book i appreciate that licensees can take you know multiple different approaches to wagering and not everyone would agree with this particular decision but we did design numerous controls to try and very clearly restrict any sort of direct marketing to individuals under the age of 21 avoid you know association with areas outside of the stadium and the arenas and present experience that is similar to what you might see at some of our affiliations with professional sports by making sure that all of the individuals in that area demographic standpoint would be in compliance with our code and also with the sort of demographics that the aga's code of conduct looks at so in that respect we took a number of efforts to distinguish what we were doing and again we did so on a very limited basis as the business was expanding i can't tell you we don't have any plans to pursue such a relationship within the commonwealth nor are we pursuing other relationships elsewhere these are you know limited scope that took place during 2021 and as we've refined how we you know promote our product how we engage with our customers this is not an active part of our plans moving forward eric anything you might want to add to that no i think you covered it well jeff you know we recognize that we have a lot of different constituents you know we're we're a a b to c customer and we need the customers to recognize that our brand stands for quality and it stands for all the different attributes that we put forward including responsible gaming and we have employees that we want to be able to make those statements to we have partners we have you as the regulators and we have the communities in which we operate so we take all that feedback and it's not missed into account and we evaluate as we move forward what actions we're going to take and so to jeff's point we we uh we have heard views from other people that were different than when we entered into these uh agreements so when you say that it's not current part of your plans are you saying that you were no longer going to have these affiliations or are you going to continue the affiliations or is that something you don't want to answer in this setting we need to go in another setting what i'd say is there's some aspects of the agreements that we'd like to discuss in the executive session but we are not pursuing any additional agreements elsewhere or specifically in massachusetts but maintaining the ones you already have so long as we can maintain them in a way that we think adheres to all of the principles the controls we put in place we do expect to do so and can i ask you specifically about the photograph at michigan state with the 18-wheeler whether you confirm for me it's it's in the embedded in the article oh yes yeah it looks like a it's like a tailgating area you you mentioned the front page i'm sorry no no um that that that was in fact an area then that was 21 and up in order to confirm that for me yeah in order to get into the truck uh area where we had games we had uh support staff those types of things you had to be 21 years old to enter the enter the area yes okay and it's visible from outside the area but you just can't get in until you're unless you're 21 is that right that's correct it is visible and then and again if you need to answer this in executive session let me know but your standard is about 70 percent it looks like in your materials being over the legal age the 73.6 percent is what the aga code is um i'd be interested to know exactly average age is one thing but i'm curious what the percentage is in terms of um where in the stadiums with the the ones that you have the relationships with yeah we happen to provide some additional information in the executive session i will say we believe that we the standard was met here in both instances but we can give you some additional context great thank you i have something else but if i don't know if anybody else has questions on that i have a follow-up on that one first to my form of teachers um michelle bryan led our game sense program and then asked a question are you related uh questions we still have to do our rg regulations uh i thought i may have read in your application in the rg section but i may be wrong i was trying to find that language but that um is it there for us to say that you will comply with all of our that you understand that you have an obligation to comply with our regulations and then in addition would you be willing to work with our our director of responsible gaming in his division to perhaps um i'm not going to say the aga um uh i'm going to say why not work with ours so the aga's are uh tenants are superb but we also are developed we have our own framework so you may go beyond what you've said in your application uh chair that's absolutely fair uh we will comply in entirety with all of public public regulations and we will work with all the stakeholders in massachusetts design the best responsible gaming program possibly can thank you okay um can i just make a statement and jeff i'm not trying to be fresh so please don't take it that way but i'm trying to understand how you could put something in a um college stadium where i would say and i've been in many of them majority of the people that go are 18 19 and 20 and yet today you're telling me there's data that shows otherwise i'm really trying to juggle in my mind how that's an accurate statement i mean we have as you know many college uh sports here in boston and i've been to many many of them and half a section is student sections they're 18 the 19 the 20 21 22 it's a it's a great question that was the first question we asked of the potential relationship was can you assure us what this demographic looks like within your status so that we're not just kind of skirting by this that all of these advertisements would very clearly meet our standards and would say as we think uh you know also we could block an a g code of conduct for instance uh and we did receive information uh from the partner validated by our ultimate partners at university that comported with our standards and we'll give you some additional context within executive session so that was the first thing one of the very first things we asked we want to make sure this was the right sort audience for our material and we were sure that it was and so as we look at these relationships now and moving forward obviously we're going to continue to evaluate that and if we think that what what you mentioned mr hill uh becomes the case that these are not being effectively directed at individuals over the age of 21 then we would reevaluate thank you can i also ask in those situations do you have responsible gaming messaging that goes with the advertising at those universities we do we have responsible gaming messaging in all of our advertisements so you know the stadium not just within these context billers dms have responsible gaming messaging on our advertisements as well and then do any of those and again if you need to talk about this in executive session that's fine but do any of those also entail giving mental health support or addiction support at those respective institutions uh with those resources would it be available if both institutions and in both states uh they're toll-free helplines where our uh not just our customers i mean specifically at the institutions where you have the marketing relationships those colleges in university of michigan and ls u we would we would direct those individuals to the statewide resource uh which is our practice everywhere to point them to those who have no no specific money that bolsters addiction services or anything at those institutions those educational institutions they're not currently specific teams at those institutions that provide that specific service risha maynard i'm gonna just put some food for thought out and it's really in response to commissioner nill's question it's not going to be what i'm saying is not going to be popular probably amongst my colleagues being from a very um a state that has no professional sports and i'm from kentucky uh the university of kentucky is the professional sports team there we call we call everyone that sits in the lower level is the gray hairs if you've ever been to rafferina right because there's literally no one even close except the student section to 21 or under in the entire rafferina and so when i think about east lansing when i think of baton rouge i feel very differently than than thinking about and and having the assurance that you're not um looking to expand into the commonwealth in the same way i think very differently i mean you know my grandfather with an eighth grade education is a rabid university kentucky fan he never set foot in university of kentucky right and so that's just you know it's a way of life it's a way and it's something that i view very differently because i am used to seeing college sports as being predominantly over 21 crowd depending on where you're going now i do have concerns about where you're where you're promoting um but i can see that you could reach a 21 plus crowd um pretty regularly uh at certain universities you've been a follow-up did i see and you know christian hill you you raised a really good question because that went through my mind too but when i read the application i had to think about it that when you were doing your research you said now i think you picked 70 percent not 85 percent but at least the 70 percent were 21 and older in wherever you are advertising did i read that correctly i know yeah a ga is 73.6 but i believe cesars is 70 right but i but is that there i've seen you know for for investors which i've seen 85 percent also being proposed this thing maybe it's in our white paper but at least you were picking 70 percent correct that's correct and we would apply that to all of our you know branding and promotion deals right so in massachusetts that you know we we haven't adopted a percentage standard um and that's something for us to think about but it did make me think that at these at these particular two universities you have what mr. maynard points to it's much more of a professional sport um audience than what we might see at some of our local schools and and new england universities um and and colleges uh which would probably lean to a lower a lower average age um why those you know i i i understand what commissioner maynard is saying with that said um outside of the venue i think uh commissioner ryan and past meetings you we've raised concerns about what's happening on the campus itself um and then just in terms of your marketing generally um and i i may have missed it too but i i thought i saw some commitment to ensure that you're not promoting any kind of excessive gambling irresponsible gambling that i don't want to put word to him out and if you have that language i'd love to see it no that's right so one of the tenants of our marketing and advertising code is that um our advertising is not depict encourage or condone excessive or responsible activities we never imply that gambling is a right of passage for young adults nor the gambling is an acceptable means of satisfying other family work or life commitments um so could you just point to that in this section um jack so that i can satisfy my my failure to note that more precisely um where was it is it in your plan it's uh it's in our marketing advertising code and i'll find where we've included that within the application um and i certainly read it so which is also probably available on our website and i'll send you i'll send you that material here shortly maybe i read it in the the attachments it was in the along attachments and so in that yeah that would like me and we we covered in slide 19 earlier today as well maybe that's also where i said thank you okay and go on um yeah so i can sort of say i think the the proof is in the pudding as you look at our material right how we use our brand we focus on fun we focus on customer engagement and rewards uh we don't have advertising that suggests that things are risky or that um you know customers should engage in behavior uh as an escape uh what we're doing is providing entertainment experience and we want all of our customers to be here for the right reasons to have fun and hope as you look at you know our caesar and our cleopatra you'll see that same sense of fun my colleagues probably have some better ways to describe it because my description of marketing is from a very lawyerly perspective so i'll eric again if you want to add to that um i think that's just that's embedded in all of our promotional materials and the way that we operate i think you said it well jeff and i think if you look at our advertising creative our tv commercials over the last year it really really has been focused more on the narrative of what caesar stands for uh around the customer and around the hospitality aspect of of our brand um we obviously do promotions and um you know we will highlight those from in our in our marketing from time to time in order uh to gain customers and and retain customers but the primary creative uh elements that that we've really invested behind is is the overarching storyline of what caesar stands for and they all include the responsible gaming uh elements that are required and that are in our guidelines thank you other questions on this section yeah i do i have a comment and a request um your answer and it was referenced in the suitability discussion in e3f 01 where we asked you to list fines violations citations etc and a couple times throughout the application and in your suitability you put what i i think i can nicely say is a rather cheeky response which is you know hey when you do business this is going to happen etc additional information available upon request which you know the request was in the application and you've been in business a long time and so i realize you may have a lot that are de minimis um but you didn't even attempt to put in something saying within the last x years or you know where a fine was greater than a certain amount of money and so to me that answer is not sufficient and i want more information i want a substantive response to this to be able to really gauge suitability and responsible gaming it was in e3f 01 which is the um responsible gaming section i i believe that same paragraph appears again elsewhere in the application and i'm trying to find it e3f 01 isn't in our section but i know i read it in the scrolling version last night we have now the section by section because it's hard to do the scrolling um version so it's yeah it's i mean it's in the responsible gaming section specifically when you're asked to list out like i said the fine citations that sort of thing um i'm not seeing it in front of me now e3f one it's not e3f one it's definitely one of them yeah i'm not i didn't make my original i don't know commissioner skinner you know the same way but now i have to go to a different version but i definitely read that in the scrolling version last night i think i went through um that right e3f okay and that one let's see how the one where it's the same response was given because maybe it's referenced i know in the suitability report but i and i remember when i read through this the very very first time i was a little taken aback by it in the moment and then i saw it a second time i didn't write down the first reference which was i think earlier in the application the one that jumped out at me most notably was the one in the one in e3f one e3f one it's so funny e3f one i know it's so funny it's not in my it must have been added after it got loaded onto my because i'm using my desktop so that's funny um and now i'm looking at the suitability report to see where that response is uh commissioner ron i can speak to that uh just certainly we do not intend to apply anything cheeky in that response uh i believe a separate exhibit uh implied a fine threshold i think it was a $50,000 to specifically enumerate those fines uh which we did within that exhibit and i think in that section we also know that additional information could be provided on request uh with the intention of noting if there were matters below $50,000 that you want to supplement that we would be happy to do so um we we can and will provide a comprehensive fine schedule of all matters so including those under $50,000 um so on the you know behalf of of us as an applicant uh there was certainly no intentionality there about um skirting the request or not being responsive we hope that we satisfied it by addressing the specific threshold it's clear that we did not do so in this context and that will be very quickly resolved if you could direct me to that because i'm not seeing a threshold limit in the application so if there's another threshold that was put out there maybe in the suitability context if you could point me to that if you could point me to the BED uh i was thinking of the BED versus the application which did not set a threshold right we were brought with the application right um uh madam chair if you're in the scrolling version it's page 590 of 722 is it yeah i'm not in the scrolling version now so but could you could you read the the section to me commissioner mater and and the response please sure list any fines violations citations and or corrective actions required by the applicant in response to insufficient or proper policies procedures operations advertising marketing and any and or my eyes are strained any other business related to sports wagering or other gambling enterprises and the answer was um the applicant and its operating affiliates and subsidiaries from time to time received various warnings fine citations and other types of disciplinary actions related to various aspects of its business these matters are of a routine nature and are often resolved through the administrative process of the regulatory agency that issues the warning fine citation or disciplinary action additional information is available upon request so i believe commissioner o'brien's um characterization so yeah yeah and that's the same language that appears in the suitability section yeah g3 f i said g earlier Todd so i hope you found i hope you realize that by now but maybe that's where i was remembering it um mr. Hendricks if if you were to come um go back to your records would there be would you be able to do a compilation of all of those um matters absolutely i am i'm going to call on gli um i don't know gli if you have experience with operators and Joe you may not be missing but if they have experience with operators to know um what is standard out the language that mr. Hendricks referred because um this is a new industry to us and so it will be helpful to have context to um for that response um and in what we may see um i'm i'm i'm not sure if the fresh i'm not sure how that was response was made other applications so under under 50 000 there's a reason why i guess it's under 50 000 i actually share i heard from uh carah and there's i stand corrected there is no uh threshold amount in the penalty portion of the BED there is a threshold amount in the litigation piece which got me confused but no threshold amount in the uh discipline portion excuse me madam chair was there a specific question for on the tech side i'm i thought mr. Hendricks was leaning in Joe um the the response that was given with respect to an inquiry around um again i don't have the language in front of me but the assessments and fines and it was generally answered um Jeff if you want to give that i think um for some context i wondered if you could be helpful you may not be able to be helpful it's not in your realm i was thinking maybe Kevin might share we're looking for the threshold right now um so just kind of looking through the application uh on the side as well um i guess i go back to the initial concern which to note that hear you uh appreciate that we didn't provide a false response here and that's going to be remedy post-taste okay and you should probably label it for both the e and the g could you say it again please when they do submit uh and supplement they should reference the e and the g numbers because it's asked in both places and i believe the the threshold that we were referring to is in item 28 b of the b e d um so that that was the reference that uh i used earlier um again it properly or not understand that we need to supplement these materials we do have a a full fine schedule that we provide very quickly all of which were resolved promptly uh and fines were paid promptly so um but we we apologize for the for that there's no no intentionality behind it to be dismissive of your concerns uh we're just trying to kind of respond to it uh separately noted threshold and we did not do so properly so i you know we will get that resolved for you very quickly okay i could probably speak briefly like more generally um uh without even in regards to the actual uh application here that uh since the commission is new to sports betting and the technology uh if there was ever an issue post launch that came forward uh that issue could enter granted everything i say is in um up to the decision of the commission and very likely will uh if there was an issue that came forward uh to have an investigation and on the technical and the forensic side uh which g li i don't want to say does all the time because this doesn't happen all the time but uh we have a planning experience in that in that area to uh issue a technical report to if anything were to uh go um not according to plan so i don't know if that adds light to that situation in on a more general sense i don't want to speak specifically to any type of uh um situation so i i'm assuming some of these could be technical in nature and could be outside the technology jeff i'm sure yes no that's joe um jeff mr hendrickson that's correct i mean there oh across the scope of the enterprise there have been instances where there's even out operational control a technical matter or a procedure that was not followed that resulted in the fine um so we we can and we'll build that schedule very quickly or just you know and maybe you can answer can't don't want to answer this here and maybe it's an answer for second session but would you be able to say whether any had to do with um violations of states expectations regarding response for any other jurisdictions expectations are very good for you um uh i want to confirm against the schedule i mean i don't want to give you bad information off the cup but i will confirm for you that's fine i don't want to put you on the spot either okay all right so um in terms of this section um this is section forgive me um section p there are outstanding questions around the response for gaming and and issues around reporting on fines and includes suitability the suitability section and g section g and we um is it fair to say that we've asked um the applicant for additional information okay and we have that ability to do so under our regulatory statement over um earlier today uh health service okay so commissioners and um i want to see do we have a consensus then that at this point we need more information and it does not be me expect patience that what i'm sensing i think that's an accurate statement yes okay skitter thank you um kricia mayard you're you feel the same need additional information okay then now we'll move on to um section f where we are looking at the g-offencing the kyc and um issues around monitoring and other issues do we have questions for for the applicant i can say that many of my questions were addressed through the presentation today it's very helpful for me to see that uh to hear you you address those in the presentation michelle bryan um just a question that i probably should have asked earlier on in terms of the um the system but the helpline that you have i wanted to i was wondering where it was located and also what the language capacity is on that do you have you know english spanish vander and like what's the realm of languages if someone called a live person the uh so the call center we have is predominantly located in las vegas we have uh about 30 operators in new jersey um and we do have just through the nature of the employee base uh they do speak other languages but at this time we only offer english on the ivr and other um and other approaches we have considered going with some spanish as well um and it's a very valid point uh that you're raising but right now it's english other questions on the technology as i said the um the presentation was very helpful i do think that one note i i i noted that you stress the the um limit setting and i do think that probably our director of um responsible gaming would have different um nuances on on on the setting and and so that's why i i asked earlier would you be willing to work with our responsible gaming uh division i think you might even use the term problem gambling more where there's been a shift from that language i'm wrong correct me but i do think there's opportunity for growth in that area with that said um what for the the piece that we just discussed i i did feel your responsible gaming section was was quite responsive we we didn't ask that you adopt um a particular set of tenants and i thought that your approach was wholesome but i do think that the um the issue that we just addressed still needs to be addressed but um with respect to the technology um i would just say there's probably some room for um additional nuanced language around the rg piece looking forward on on that piece of the technology evolving any other comments or questions richard do you feel that they have met the responsibility expectations under section count yes yes okay i agree all right then we'll move on to g questions on g nothing the only thing i would say beyond what's already been said um and what they're going to supplement with is ideally we would get um the oversight in our part that didn't exclude the one entity qualifier ideally when we get the supplemental we can also get from ieb um that entity qualifier okay any other any other questions about the suitability as well as the compliance issues i'm just looking at my notes anybody else need time to look at their notes again i'm i'm looking also on the financial stability piece and then i think we're going to address that in the executive session i know it's it's quite late but i'm hoping everybody can hang right in there for the executive session could we choose to go into it so some of the questions on finance would be addressed there too so pending that um are we comfortable with section g i feel like we need the supplemental sure i do anyway right so um with that piece being taken care of and then with the finance piece being addressed in executive session right now so we're saying it does not need expectations because of those i think it needs to be supplemented both of the the section we didn't put in and then what we've asked them to add right but otherwise it met expectations i'm not going to say until i see the the supplemental information madam chair no i guess is there anything else then is there anything else maybe i should bring nothing else missing from my perspective now yeah those are the only outstanding items for me thank you commissioner same all right commissioner hill there there goes a cat's tail yeah all right now i have dueling cats today all right with um that said commissioners um i'm going to recommend that we take a a short break but we should probably consider first whether we can go into executive session um before we move into our virtual room so council grossman help us out here well i think the the challenge here is going to be to identify all of the issues that the commission is has identified to discuss an executive session i have a running list that i'd be happy to go through just to make sure i have these things right so that we can identify which provision of the law allows the commission to go into session um so if i may um there are there were the issues from the 2013 um suitability report that were initially discussed i know we took a pause on that is that still i think we resolved it because it had been released okay so cross that one off the list the next one were the four essentially action items out of the state of nevada involving the duplication issues of the identification the timely identification of those issues the customer service matter and the failure to uh notify the commission of the suspected theft at the retail location are those i think the nevada and virginia were taken care of commissioners and then both also those are also okay outstanding so um okay on a high level those involve um which dates again uh washington dc and um it's a tribal gaming uh yes so those two and and they involve what i understand it would be a matter that pending so put it into a competitive disadvantage should you disclose that is that the issue but i think shared the the manner in which we remediated those matters i believe would fall into a uh competitive trade secret category so we were able to explain that and why we blew that through the case and then should you disagree we'd be happy to discuss it publicly okay can i press one with that work sure so those are okay so those are we're on page nine here of the ieb report uh those are the two matters identified um at the top that's items two and three so if i i just want to make sure we're talking about the same thing so it's the offense date of may third 2022 and uh october 25th 2021 there's no information as to what that was about so it's hard to say i guess we just have to at this juncture take mr hendrick's word for it that they're just competitively sensitive information and and go from there well we would if we determined that didn't meet the um threshold we would come back into a public session discuss it right right okay so that's one and two uh number three was uh questions relative to the player acquisition um information that's uh in response to um question e2 e01 in the application i so that would seem to squarely fit within the competitively sensitive um framework if can remind me who's what question is that who's which picture is asked that question um i i think a couple of us did is this the rsm information yes oh yeah i think commissioner skinner did i think i did too i don't know if anybody else i i think i heard it differently um i maybe i i heard wrong could you just go over it again section e though i don't i don't recall that being in section e let me pull this up here it's uh for the answer in g is it b3 yeah that's the market here hold on market market market revenue and then second revenue in section c e2 e01 b and c for market share discussion i got the market share one next but as far as the player acquisition information is concerned and the modeling that is response to question e2 e01 well that wasn't my question if i can maybe clarify i think that was the graphic that i wanted to note the commission as part of the market share discussion so while it was in a different section i think it's relevant for market share um analysis but section b which is section b yeah okay so part of the the market share projections uh which is discussed in b3 g01 would may include the player acquisition information which is in e2 okay so we'll we'll call that one subject that would seemingly uh fit under the competitively sensitive uh banner and i think you would have grounds to move to discuss that with the the one caveat and we can um kind of navigate this is that i believe teresa mentioned that there are some publicly infer accessible information that is associated with that that we should not talk about uh privately but we can get to that the calculations that were referenced in the confidential section that so so um the confidential section noted by caesars referenced that they leveraged publicly identified you know publicly published information to estimate their handle so i think that the underlying assumptions used in their model are public but i don't know if their actual calculations are public i think that those calculations could probably be uh created based upon public public information but so i i would look to you um to define what would be confidential or not well i think to the extent that we're just talking with the calculations and how they develop their market share projections even if they use publicly available information it would still be competitively sensitive so that that would be okay okay anyway i think we're okay on this one having with teresa's clarification i think we're okay so the next one um i have on my list relates to the marketing agreements with the colleges and the future plans that um the entity may have as to how to move forward with those so that's one of the issues i flagged if that's still of interest number five i have the percentage of underage individuals who may have access to or visibility to certain marketing information and this i think related to what i mean commissioner ill mentioned it specifically and how the calculations were made relative to the stadium um information and otherwise highly uh commissioner brian if you're speaking to us you're on the we had the same question coming from different angles which was what's the actual percentage demographically of that group um and then i don't know if commissioner hell had a a different angle on that question but it's all within sort of what is the demographic information they got in making those decisions okay so though that would um it seems to me squarely fit within the competitively sensitive area as well yeah okay um so those are the five then that i have identified are there others that any i have a number of a couple of conditions and more supplemental information that was required but that's not related to this commissioner i had another one i was asking about the diversity spend breakdown and i believe it was heather who said that that information wasn't public publicly disclosed yes i have that one down too on these on the the actual spend right yeah diversity spend for vendors yeah diversity spend but i think in terms of dollars um did you get project um and um the projected revenues that's all that was also part of chorises no projected revenues in general yeah that she because it just there was limited information given there there's assumptions that need to be discussed but i think she's more comfortable um because the information is more confidential chris if you want to elaborate yeah i think the the there was limited information so in order for us to kind of share our observations as it compares to what is in the application we'd have to disclose i think information that the property had identified as as confidential for example the projected handle calculations in that event that again that would seem to fit under the competitively sensitive header neatly so i think that would be okay as well other any others that that's seven we have before we address the whether or not we're going to vote to go into executive session i um i am quite aware of the hour but i'm also quite aware that we've had um a category one applicant waiting in the wings today um i know that executive director wells had to go to do some other business um as she continues to be executive director of the agency um missioners we're going if we go into executive session we have to decide whether we're going to come back to public um farm um to the extent that we're willing to work into the evening um i'd like to know that i don't know what everybody's sentiments are i mean i think we're going to executive session and close out as much of this as we can and then we resume with the cat ones at the next meeting i don't think it's a good idea to come out of this at five thirty six o'clock and jump into someone else's application but i think the cat one should be resolved before we come back to finish this off since this is a cat three but i think we go into executive session to answer all the questions we have right now to make sure other than the supplemental information we're done well we might come back into public session once we're in here there are there's some opportunities here um or maybe not uh if we were to make a disposition um wondering um if mr. Hendricks if you were able to get that that um list to us now i don't know if that's something that's available so that i'll be blunt madam chair i'd like um i'd be to have it as well unsuitability so i i don't think i'm in a posture to take a vote on this today and i don't want to rush it and work to be blunt we're also missing part of what was supposed to be in the suitability and it's not there because of our error so and that's not on blaming anybody we're doing a lot of stuff right now trying to get it done but i think we can still keep the ball moving wrap this up as much as possible get to the cat ones and then come back to the cat threes we do have days baked in to make sure that we get to everybody i'm just thinking this is fresh in our mind so i'm trying to to think about that to commissioner brian um so i think that um director milleos i think that use um i believe it was that director wells would suggest that this could be the issue around the missing suitability piece could be a condition i'm just gonna be blunt with you madam chair i don't feel comfortable with that okay i don't know how anybody else feels well that the other three commissioners feel but i'm trying to find options here commissioner brian i'm not aware of that i'm not taking positions i'm just exploring options because they were presented to me so i'm i want to make sure we're we're thinking about so i hear you commissioner brian that you you wouldn't be comfortable with that being a condition commissioners i think that we can reach agreement to go into the executive session i think we should do that after a break we've only had a lunch break um so yes we are we are overdue and quite frankly i'm i'm reaching my capacity so i would hope that um we would not plan to return to the public meeting um to to to close out um this business with caesars or to begin another application presentation um at the late hour we started at nine this morning and like i said i'm i'm approaching my capacity yeah i understand that for sure um and so you would not come back but um assuming all questions were answered in the second session which we can't necessarily assume you would not want to come back or disposition i would not want to come back for my reasons but also you know i want to make sure that all the commissioners are comfortable moving forward and i know we have at least one commissioner who's not okay commissioner may or commissioner hill i don't care i'm interested to find out what we would learn in in an executive session you know it's hard for me to speak one way or the other if you know we're talking about you know um 10 instances of things that should have been reported that weren't maybe i can make a decision if we're talking about a thousand maybe i need to read them i and i just don't know what the universe looks like i think until we reach into that session um and so i would say that we go into the session and i can't make a decision until i see what what's presented and you know why i'm asking this question it's not to put any pressure on us but i'm i'm i'm told by my lawyer that i have to decide this if we're going to come back or not so i am in asking my fellow commissioners if we're coming back or not um i think i would prefer to go into executive session and not come back into a public session madam chair okay all right chair yeah i didn't say this but i i think commissioner o'brien said it um but uh commissioner maynard actually raised a good point if we're hearing um from the applicant for the first time all of those other issues about all those specific incidents um i would also like to have ieb take a look at that information in the context of suitability right so you know we're all hearing it but i think ieb needs time to assess so my worry is this is that we're going to have all this information in executive session but we probably need to put it on to a public record what we expect and what we're going to do so while we may i think i'm hearing from my fellow commissioners we probably won't get to a disposition we might need to come we might want to keep this public meeting open so that we can come back and give direction to the applicant on the public record does that make sense so that we can say what what it's outstanding um and then that would give direction for them on the public record as to what needs to be done it's outstanding does that make sense i'm now trying to this is completely legal uh does that work better than us just guys treat with that session counselor grossman yes if i understand what your your proposal it would be to deal with the executive session issues then come back and just for the public record say this is what we're doing next yeah really quickly not an extended not so technically we'll come back and we'll keep this open the public to the extent they're hearing we'll understand it sounds that we will not make any determination but we may give direction and and uh for what might be outstanding so that makes sense commissioners okay i'm seeing not okay thank you so um commissioners as you know i need to read this into the record and then we would need to vote are we all set question uh council grossman on process yes um i think as far as you're reading into the record of course we only have to focus i think on the uh i'm just trying to pull up the agenda just up to i think just a competitive um yeah yeah i don't think you know i don't think you have to get into the privacy exemption or the security okay yeah okay because i think we resolved on the first matter where privacy might have been a concern all righty the commission anticipates that it may meet an executive session in conjunction with its review of the ws i us lc oh my goodness i'm so sorry and with its review of the american wagering ink there's entertainment ink application in accordance with gl chapter 30a section 21 a 7 in gl chapter 23 and section 6 i to consider information submitted by this applicant again american wagering ink in the course of its application for an operator license that is a trade secret competitively sensitive or proprietary in which it disclosed publicly would place the applicant at a competitive disadvantage do i have a motion that everybody rush it once i'm not trying to be going to executive session for the reasons just stated by the chair on the record thank you commission o brian second any further discussion all righty commission o brian hi mr hill hi mr skinner hi mr maynard hi i vote yes i want to point out that the public section of commission meeting will reconvene at the conclusion of the executive session consistent with what we just discussed thank you and it is now five o'clock when would you like to reconvene commissioners state your time i'm just gonna five thirty it's all half hour can we do like 15 20 minute i just have file care stuff on the other end that's being pushed off i'm good with 20 i i never want to log on myself and i don't blame you i don't blame you okay we'll reconvene at five 20 everyone grab a bite or whatever thank you again for the very long day just as far as the technical issues go and mr handrex and all i'm not sure if you have the invite i can send that over to you if you don't have i was going to ask if you just for the appropriate zoom link we'll have our folks on i'm sorry that you may not have that again and it's been a long day for for crystal two and i don't see oh there she is i don't see her her face but i think she's still down the hall um so crystal if you can help uh council grossman with um the links um we definitely need rsm crystal i don't know man or anyone else i sure that yeah i'm not sure if we have i'm sure someone has mr handrex email i certainly have mr broga's email i can send it to him i don't i don't know if i have it and karen must have it as well or someone so if we can just make sure the applicant mr handrex gets the invitation and make sure our team for rsm has an invitation and chair i don't think you um we need to forward the invitation to the investigator on the geum side right the just need rsm for our outside contractor i um that's what it appears ryan christia skinner commissioner maynard christia hill if you want the real investigator i can have kevin murphy here i know he's been on all day but um you don't need him i think it would be helpful to have them present so that they can at least hear if they're going to be the ones involved in the additional investigation i part of you um director liliah okay then i i'll connect with kevin offline then okay and you'll take care of forwarding that invitation all right everyone thanks so much we're going to go to that for a different virtual room we will return to this virtual room at the conclusion of our second session thank you so much pod i just emailed you jeff's uh email okay let's say let's send that over yeah to hf thank you very much hi everyone are you still there dave for who took the screaming yes i am here okay i just making sure someone still has the street yep i still got everything going all right thanks thanks no problem there's the cat tail where's mango wherever there's food there's mango so now that food is out and about in the kitchen for dinner and stuff he's down there he and the dogs ground for the food oh my mojo i just i walk in and he just thinks i'm all only there for treats he doesn't only want to treat yeah i mean i heard the bird yesterday for the first time i was you got it you have a bird now no oh the purr i heard the purr today well it's a purr that sounds like a bird yeah i just she's got the sweetest little chirps and purrs yeah it's so polite mango on the other hand like he's incredibly vocal and can adjust but it's just obnoxious most of the time you know like just demanding i almost seconded a motion from mango yesterday everyone said a while you'll see my face just in a look of pain it usually means he wants to climb up and i've been trying to block him and he decides to dig in i can we can take down the um thanks i think that was all streaming everyone so we had our pet check um so this was reconvening um our public meeting a mass gaming commission public meeting number it's still number four a lot incorrect um and um we just came from a executive session with um our applicant and our advisor are us amon attendants um i'll take a vocal because we're using this virtual platform good evening commissure of rye good evening i am still here thank you good evening commissioner hill i am here thank you good evening commissure skinner good evening i'm here first time i said good morning good afternoon and good evening all in one day in public and we're going to be saying good night soon and uh commissioner maynard good evening good night commissioner there we go okay um so in terms of our um we have i see some members from um mgm on board um i knew that we probably needed to verify our um what our next steps would be um we we thought that we would we have the opportunity commissioners um to proceed and um under section seven i'm item seven of our agenda to make a determination on american wagering inks application there was a suggestion that we um would might want to wait for another piece of information from um iab we um i know that the one proposal because that could be a condition i want to throw that back out but i think that there was a suggestion that we would not be making a determination i want to revisit that in the event anybody changed their minds okay so um to be very clear to the applicant we will want to revisit this matter and um i guess that from my perspective we have mgm waiting on their category one application as well as their tethered um um partner um of um that mgm i um director wells we've worked hard on our schedule um and in our our thought process i know that commissioner brian suggests that this applicant be pushed into january my preference would be ideally if we could um if they if they they could be the matters could be addressed that we'd be able to turn to this on monday i'm not sure um of the outstanding matters michelle brian you're looking for iab's piece this is for caesars madam chair not mgm right just trying to but is there is there a way to put them at the end of mgm and ppc's main cat one and address them once that's done in terms of what we're waiting for from iab is that the application from um from the parent company and the list of uh a fulsome list of the discipline so what the and the the entity part that was missing because we didn't include that in the initial request yeah yes so that would be the application we can have our licensing division do a deficiency review of that iab is doing no independent review of the entity qualifiers of this point but we can have a deficiency review performed on that and on the catalog of fines or catalog of discipline all right are you wouldn't iab wouldn't do the shortened review we do that for the applicant entity but we are not under the regulation we are not doing that for the entity qualifiers yeah unless we ask for something above the and you know i noticed that when we did this yesterday that that had been carved out to be the applicant and then the individuals and no entity qualifier so right now let's specifically want more that is the baseline threshold that's being done by iab that's right and that chair for scheduling um uh i've been in contact with uh goss for guarding mgm's application i know they do he does have a personal matter of long standing on the 20th so they're hoping they can avoid the 20th if possible but they i think it's the cat one but i don't know pat at pat mandamus on i don't know if you can't comment on that but that's my understanding to put them on monday i'm sorry karen what what for scheduling i think gus is unavailable on the 20th but does bet mgm need gus to be there is it just uh the sports book for mgm springfield where gus needs to be there karen karen discuss i just want to clarify the oh i didn't realize you're on i'm sorry i i do but clearly this takes precedence of anything else so it's the 20th is the best day make it so i'll walk my schedule around right here well just to be clear we're gonna go forward as soon as the commission is ready for us to go forward you know commissioners i know it's really late but we've got this whole group sitting here and looks like everybody's ready to go but i'm i'm not available madam chair i have got kids downstairs that need attention right now i'm not available it would be nice we have a meeting tomorrow that i need to finish looking at minutes for that i haven't had a chance to do it so it's just not going to happen tonight i like the idea and it would be nice i would love to accommodate but for me i can't go on beyond you know another half hour or so it's just and it's not fair to it's not fair to commissioners it's not fair to staff and it's i don't think it's fair to mgm springfield because they won't have my full attention is it at all possible that this matter could be continued it could be taken up tomorrow morning is that at all possible we have reg matters and things on tomorrow morning we we do have another matter and is it possible it is possible by an amendment of our agenda i um i understand i am i think i can say that i am alone tonight because and i'll say because i i'm in this office and i'm willing to to accompany you but i am hearing to my fellow commissioners that they they can't um and i'm i'm very i'm very sorry um it is it is there's a lot of a lot of things that we're all weighing and everybody is weighing their their various um priorities and i i'm sure myself um as i think about um where i am sitting right now and thinking about how i'm going to get all these meetings into the calendar the way that we need to um because i've probably been looking at that very closely um for our applicant today um you have some i guess we should be clear um and again mgm i'm hearing that um Karen up i i guess i'm going to have to talk to you up offline and get back to pat and and talk about another another proposal for days um i'm hearing you know tomorrow's a proposal and i'm not sure that's yeah my only my only thought i'm starting we're starting at 9 30 anyway tomorrow oh i i have this oh yeah you're right 9 30 okay so um we do appreciate it's been a very very long day today we're not asking at all to say please stay tonight it's been a very long day from all i'm including the yeah where you even started this public meeting yeah um so um president kelly and and uh and and daniel and jed and pat my apologies that we couldn't be clear earlier today um everybody has been more than patient this is um as you know right a process and we are we are going to attack this in a thorough fashion you've already been part of this so you can be particularly appreciative of where we are um if you will but give me um the opportunity to talk to the other applicant now i um i feel that we need to turn back to that matter they're not to completely you know push our luck here just want to put sort of all options at the table if the hearing could be continued rather than closed is there an option on friday for any time um i know that that day had been taken off the table from me um i am absolutely willing because i was going to be traveling i am taking that trip off the table now because um i had already decided that because um my husband and my daughter and her boyfriend will be attending the pats and raiders game without me so that that day i'm making that decision now because of the work um it was our christmas gift and this um so this is friday and that's what i was going to talk to caren about we can open up friday if we could have this discussion and then get back to everybody because i don't really want to publicly discuss my federal but no no i'm just saying i'm saying i don't know i don't know if friday is available for anybody else but i want it to be a i don't want my friday to be the factor anymore um because i can do an evening evening flight if i decide we're we're open to jet jet we're we're open to anything but we leave that to the commission and right that's what i'm saying the negotiation of our days well that's one day i that was a one day that was clear and in many ways it was kind of a gift for everybody to get caught up on right i was gonna say a lot of us a lot of us because of that tried to have that be the one day to do a number of things before the end of the month and so it's gonna be very difficult for me to clear that day okay so um i just wanted it to be known that it's not um that's not a factor for me anymore i'm chair i i and maybe i'm over underestimating what we've got tomorrow in front of us i could hop in on the morning if this was continued i just want to throw that out there so morning tomorrow morning tomorrow morning if we started that tomorrow we have to we have to ask um our council is this an emergency because there's nothing properly posted can we get it on and if everybody was willing to do an eight o'clock start i can't do an eight o'clock start madam chair i can't do that yeah this isn't the end of the afternoon we really shouldn't do it tomorrow it wasn't noticed for tomorrow right it's just not not an emergency but it what if it's a continuation of today is that a way to do it and maybe not in the morning but what about after the meeting tomorrow i mean i know after i would ask then that it would be i'm on public forum but i need to be with my husband at three o'clock tomorrow oh okay then we will take care of that i'm going to be with him yeah that's a priority yeah i can read i can be group after three but it'll probably three to four and out of pocket i think maybe we discuss this offline and get back to everybody i don't i think it's been a long day for everybody so just let us know you don't have to discuss this for us thank you yeah thank you there's a lot of very closed windows and there's only one i i have to preserve this month tomorrow three to four yep absolutely um so um we could possibly but again we have a posting problem tomorrow um and that would be you know if we didn't close out this it would be a continuation because i'm comfortable doing that if we don't adjourn this could we do you know a four o'clock and i can find myself in front of a computer somewhere madam chair yep no the schedule has been given to us for a few weeks now and yeah some of us have tried to build our others life around the schedules we were given and i would not be able to come here tomorrow four o'clock okay so you can't eat it okay so you there so that's i'm sorry brad that i can't then i'm trying to keep everybody in mind i'm just understood yep thank you so that comes back to monday madam chair excuse me i'm sorry as commissioner brian suggested a couple times could we take this scheduling matter up i just want to be respectful of the app of today's applicant that's why i'm talking that's why i'm talking about monday now because i feel we should return to the applicant if we can have all the pieces that's where i was going from the start commissioner so thank you um if we have all the pieces if we won't have the pieces then we have to shift and we go to mgm if they're available um i hear that gusts wouldn't be available on the 20th but would be available on the 19th ideally we could finish up this if there are all the pieces could fall together on monday morning and then we would go to mgm at one madam chair just to clarify once again i was having a private conversation with karen about what my schedule looked like but the 20th is the most convenient for the for the commissioners i will be here for the 20th madam chair so don't worry about me schedule as as it suits the university but we really work out as accommodating everybody and get really we're pretty good we're pretty good so um but i want to be respectful of this applicant so the question is the outstanding items could they be resolved by monday the start of monday and if not yeah go ahead i believe we could provide all of the requested material by the start of day on monday i guess i just wanted because we might end up working somewhat through the weekend to provide all of that in a fully completed fashion so i i would ask when would the commissioners need to receive the material in order to digest it before i discuss it so so madam chair there this is a cat three applicant so we do have dates baked into january so if the prioritization is the cat one then we can absolutely get to the cat ones next week and then make sure we start off wrapping up this this applicant i mean even if we can't get to it before we become unavailable next week i i hear you but i i think i understand that there's also some issues for our testing and karen if you could if you could built into our schedule where we are doing the tethered earlier was a testing issue does that get implicated here yes i mean i think a lot of this madam chair ties into tomorrow's meeting because tomorrow the commission is scheduled to approve internal controls if that those regulations pass and go forward on tomorrow we may have a few extra days in january to give the commissioners a little wiggle room but we had originally scheduled that all these decisions needed to be made by the 19th of january to give gli enough time to review all the internal controls and get all this uh information ready for an operation certificate to allow for a pre-march madness launch so that's why this is this is so hard right now is because if you push the determinations out too far the operation certificate timeline gets compressed and we may not be able to finish so i'll get more information from gli once we see what happens tomorrow with the regulations on the internal controls okay so i'm hearing you i know i asked this question but i don't know if i heard the answer just as this would be could mr. hendrix the application that lorata needs that has that been submitted not fine it has not yet we are literally working on that while we're in this so that probably is going to not be submitted until monday is that what i'm hearing or could it be submitted before because loretta's team needs to director lilios's team needs to do its work in other words am i hearing correctly we would not be ready to move on the african on monday morning first thing it doesn't sound like it from what we want to make sure that we give you uh obviously basically especially a very fulsome application for cei that will likely be filed at the earliest over the weekends it would be available at opening a business on monday but i want to acknowledge it's going to be a large application so okay so that's really helpful so yes mgm would you be prepared before first thing on monday morning yes yes excellent thank you all right so gentlemen um and i because i don't know if i see any of your women colleagues with you right now i think you can go get dinner um now back to our applicant um thank you very much thank you i thank you all of the kelly thank you so much all righty um okay so now we need to talk about what exactly does our applicant need to do for a new to do for us so that when we we do have them come before us again everything is nice and tidy and clean um i think we should also discuss um i think we won't discuss conditions now because that would be part of our disposition so it's really anything that supplements the application at this point correct hon like one is completing the application by our inadvertent um matter so that's being taken care of and then um second the list of the my say is how would i what's the word um i mean is it i would call them disciplinary actions infractions or yes thank you i wanted to tell you assessments and fines but it's really disciplinary actions so we'll get that fulsome list it may be in a um spreadsheet however um is there particular items of information that you want on that so that when it comes it's fulsome enough for commissioner you want the nature of it where it happened when it happened and if there were any but what the um is it specified in there loretta i think doesn't specify we actually we did we sent us a communication um good thing there's a and there's a um you know a chart in the application we sent a supplemental communication indicating exactly what we needed okay so we'll have all of that clear so that's going to be a supplement what's next is those two i think it's the the missing piece from suitability and then that list unless i don't know if any of the other commissioners had anything else that they wanted supplemented okay i don't have anything that i i think is in paper form for the applicants to provide but we still have to close out the discussion on the diversity spend i think that might i think that might be part of our disposition discussion commissioner skinner i think similar to maybe what we did yesterday commissioner yeah i agree i just i'm noting for the record no i think there might be a few other items on that but in terms of um anything so that the um seizures is complete and it's in everything we're expecting for our disposition discussion all right now um um with that said uh mr. Hendricks we have marked up the 19th and the 20th for these matters we will monitor when everything comes in and i'll take the temperature of my fellow commissioners to see if we can get this before us before before the um the end of the 20th otherwise we don't anticipate meeting on applications again until january or correct yeah the third we have other business and then it would be four so that's what we'd be looking at well thank you we will endeavor to provide that material as quickly as possible also making sure it's as robust as possible uh we'd love to make an agenda another 19th or 20th we also understand the commission has a lot on its plate so if it's later we understand and and the reason why i'm being particularly careful here is that i think you could get the piece that we're looking for on on on disciplinary action quickly and it was our inadvertent you know action that is causing a little bit of delay and so i am trying to be empathetic here and try to get you you heard so that's why i was persistent in this discussion everyone um because there is only really two items missing so thank you and and um thank you for your patience today um and we will reconvene on this matter as soon as it's reasonable for us to have an ability to review what's outstanding so thank you commissioners do you have anything else for the outfits just to thank them for their time and their their presentation yeah thank you very much thank you um and yes go right ahead oh sorry i was just going to say thank you as well for all of your time today thank you mr hashin okay let's get um let's get out of here um everybody is hungry so commissioners are all business some taking care of we'll be ready to tomorrow morning remember 9 30 at our next meeting is there any other commissioners business it's not madam chair i move to adjourn second thank you okay um christina hi hi commissioner hill hi mr skinner hi mr maynard hi and i vote yes five zero thank you everyone