When it comes to hosting big events, nobody does it better than Las Vegas. May kicked off with the long-awaited, much anticipated boxing match between Floyd Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao. Dubbed the "Fight of the Century" the bout failed to deliver the outcome or the action in the ring that many onlookers had hoped for, but it was a big winner and money-maker for the folks at MGM International. The following two weekends saw the Rock in Rio USA music festival at the MGM Resorts Festival Grounds on the north end of the Strip. Throw in the Billboard Music Awards, honoring some of the hottest names in popular music, broadcast live on ABC from the MGM Grand Garden Arena, and it was some kind of month for MGM, Las Vegas style. Why mention these big recent MGM-hosted events in Las Vegas you ask? Well, for the first time in a long time, I checked out a couple of their properties on the south end of the Las Vegas Strip for this month's Blackjack Insider. Along the way, I saw firsthand what appears to be a true paradigm shift on display.

MGM Resorts International is a publically traded company listed on the New York Stock Exchange (tickers symbol MGM) with a market capitalization of over $11.1 billion at the time of this writing. The company's shareholders voted for MGM Mirage to change its name to "MGM Resorts International" in June of 2010. The new name was thought to emphasize the brand's global scope and increased non-gaming strategy. As a blackjack player and gambler that sentence should set off some ‘red-flags" when it comes to your pursuit of gambling, err, gaming as a form of "entertainment."

When the ink dried on MGM's $7.9 billion merger with Mandalay Resort Group in 2005, the company controlled more than half the hotel rooms on the Las Vegas Strip and made MGM Mirage the largest gaming company in the world, for a brief moment. It was surpassed later that year when Harrah's Entertainment acquired Caesars Entertainment in a deal that was allegedly spurred on by the announcement of the news of the MGM-Mandalay merger. The casino-resorts "arms race" was on which ultimately lead to the changes and conditions, many negative, which we as players and guests now encounter in the current version of "Casino Land."

Mandalay Bay is a 43-story luxury hotel and casino located on the southern end of the Las Vegas Strip. This South Seas themed property opened March 2, 1999. One of the property's towers operates as the Delano, an upscale hotel. In addition, the Four Seasons Hotel occupies a portion of another of the Mandalay Bay towers and is independently managed. The property is large with over 3,300 hotel rooms and a 135,000 square-foot casino. The Mandalay Bay Convention Center, adjacent to the casino, offers 1,000,000 square feet and construction is on-going that should nearly double that capacity when it opens for business in 2016. The 12,000-seat Mandalay Bay Events Center hosts headline concerts, sports competitions, and sundry other events.

Somehow I never managed to stay at Mandalay Bay when I was a semi-frequent Las Vegas visitor. I played some blackjack on the six-deck games over a decade ago, but not enough to generate any juicy marketing offers. I did spend a fair amount of time in those days and prior hanging out listening to the musical acts performing in the now defunct "back lounge" as well as in the lounge near the parking garage entrance. For a few years the clientele was stellar and the music was outstanding. The House of Blues was also a regular stop on Saturday nights. It's still open and I did catch a show there at the end of last year, but that was a rarity for me these days. Currently Mandalay Bay is primarily another corporate property that seems less and less interested in gambling and brings in the majority of its revenue from other sources. That's true of pretty much all the large casino properties that are owned by companies that trade on stock exchanges.

Mandalay Bay has well over 60 table games scattered throughout five pits, plus the high limit area and the Lotus Room. There's the standard array of "carnival games" with multiple tables of Three Card Poker, Crazy 4 Pokers, and Ultimate Texas Hold ‘Em. I noticed at least seven roulette wheels and there were eight full-size craps tables grouped together. There was also a Free Bet Blackjack game and a couple tables of Blackjack Switch. The Lotus Room is filled with baccarat, Fortune Pai Gow, and Pai Gow. There are also four blackjack tables that are only open during maximum capacity weekends like the fight weekend mentioned above.

I alluded to a paradigm shift taking place in the intro. My first clue was walking through the table games area of Mandalay Bay and seeing table after table of blackjack dealt out of continuous shufflers (CS) that paid 6:5 on player blackjacks. The majority of the blackjack offerings in the main casino were of this variety. I did find two double-deck games and a couple of eight-deck shoes that paid 3:2 on player blackjacks. All these games began at $25 per hand. Anything below a $25 minimum bet only pays 6:5.