Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator Instructions) Our first question comes from Justin Sebastiano - Morgan Joseph & Co., Inc.
Justin Sebastiano - Morgan Joseph & Co., Inc.
You talk about Four Winds exceeding your expectations in the second quarter. Since you can’t give us the actual number for what they did, what were your expectations for the quarter?
Lyle Berman
We can’t give that either, but what we can say is that what we’re referring to is the budget. The property in conjunction with ourselves developed a budget for 2008. Certainly that budget was based on the results of the first four or five months of 2007. And based on that budget we are exceeding that budget.
Justin Sebastiano - Morgan Joseph & Co., Inc.
And you said that you did very well or you marketed to Chicago. Is it fair to say that a lot of the performance came from the Chicago people?
Lyle Berman
No, not really. I think it came across the board. When you look at our market, we deal primarily in three markets: Western Michigan and Northern Indiana; those two markets were actually as close to any of the other casino; and then you have the Chicago market and in the Chicago we’re the furthest away. And we get our smallest revenue from that Greater Chicago market.
Justin Sebastiano - Morgan Joseph & Co., Inc.
Right, but with this marketing push you don’t think that helped kind of ramp up?
Lyle Berman
It certainly helped, but it wasn’t the difference between success or failure. It helped beat the budget certainly.
Justin Sebastiano - Morgan Joseph & Co., Inc.
And when did you stop that marketing push to Chicago? I assume you curtailed that since the Horseshoe opened?
Timothy J. Cope
We continued that through about the end of May, middle of June timeframe.
Lyle Berman
And then certainly we didn’t want to go up against the Horseshoe when they opened.
Justin Sebastiano - Morgan Joseph & Co., Inc.
So in July did you see the people from Chicago continue to come and then kind of fall off since Horseshoe opened?
Timothy J. Cope
We’ve been looking at the overall numbers. I don’t think we’ve yet looked at that. Each month we review the detail but we haven’t reviewed July yet so I can’t tell you exactly where it fell off or not. What’s interesting is a tremendous amount of our revenue comes from what we call rated play. So we know exactly where people are coming or not coming from, but we haven’t reviewed that yet.
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