Just want to clear something up on why Vegas takes 1st place for fight cards

[Kirkland Laing]

There are about 1000 guys who the casinos target on a regular basis. These are guys who can be guaranteed to drop at least a million dollars at the tables in a trip to Vegas (interestingly, about half of them are of Chinese origin, those guys like to gamble.) To get these guys to come to Vegas, and to one casino in particular, they're given free private jets to and from, free suites, free everything. But most importantly, a free ticket or three for the fight. The only thing they pay for the whole trip is their chips. If you do the maths you can see that if you can attract a few percent of these guys for a fight then the casino giving the promoter a site fee of five plus millions (in the case of Hatton/Manny) on top of the ticket sales is enough to make even Wembley look unattractive as an alternative. Like I said at the time they were negotiating the fight, they're not fighting in Vegas because they can make more money fighting at Wembley.

You can see why Tyson was so popular in Vegas, a lot of those guys would be queuing up for a fully comped trip to watch him. He was an absolute goldmine for the casinos in the 80s/90s.

And under the very top level there's a market of thousands/maybe 10000 guys who are worth a free ticket/room because they'll drop many thousands in a weekend that the various casinos have lists of. But it's the real high rollers, the guaranteed million a trip guys that make the site fees worth paying for the casinos.