“We were definitely the underdog,” said Kelly Burke, Ocean’s senior vice president. In 2021, Luxor sold a 50% interest in Ocean to the Ilitch family, which owns professional sports teams, a nationwide pizza chain and a casino in Detroit. Luxor installed a new management team and focused on profitability. He was in the process of turning over his majority ownership of the casino to New York hedge fund Luxor Capital in April 2019 when he was killed in a car crash in Denver. Ocean got off to a slow start and ran out of money under the ownership of Colorado developer Bruce Deifik, who bought the casino sight unseen. And for awhile, it looked as though history was repeating itself.

Perhaps no casino was less expected to succeed than Ocean, the successor to the ill-fated Revel, which shut down in 2014 without ever having come close to turning a profit. In terms of total net revenue, Bokunewicz said Hard Rock and Ocean’s respective 17.5% and 13.4% market shares seem to have come primarily at the expense of the Borgata, which lost 9.2 percentage points in the last five years, down to 22.3%. Hard Rock and Ocean both hired executives from Borgata, and went after the luxury segment of the market, which Borgata has long dominated. Jane Bokunewicz, director of the Lloyd Levenson Institute at Stockton University, which studies the Atlantic City gambling market, said Hard Rock and Ocean have helped grow the overall market, even as individual properties lost share to them.

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