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City of Dreams is situated on the so-called ‘Cotai Strip’ in the Cotai section of Macau, an autonomous territory that occupies a small peninsula on the south coast of China and two offshore islands. Owned and operated by Melcro Crown Entertainment, City of Dreams originally opened in phases between June and November, 2009, but a fifth, 40-storey hotel tower, named ‘Morpheus’, opened in June, 2018.

Like its main competitor, The Venetian Macao, which stands directly opposite, City of Dreams is one of the so-called ‘mega-casinos’ – which include luxury hotel developments, gourmet restaurants and round-the-clock entertainment – that have replaced traditional gambling houses in Macau in recent years.Both City of Dreams and The Venetian Macao are Las Vegas-style resorts, but City of Dreams is generally considered the more stylish of the two.

The casino floors at City of Dreams, collectively, cover 420,000 square feet, or 4 hectares – in other words, roughly the size of four football pitches – and offer over 500 gaming tables and over 1,500 gaming machines of one form or another. Table games include baccarat, blackjack, craps, poker – Caribbean Stud and Three Card, but not Texas Hold’em – and roulette. Slot machines, with minimum stakes between $0.02 and $5, number in excess of 1,200 and are supplemented by electronic gaming terminals offering variations of video poker and the ubiquitous ‘Big Wheel’ among other games.

Aspers Casino is named after gambling impresario John Aspinall, affectionately known as ‘Aspers’, and opened as a joint venture between his son, Damian, and Australian casino operator Crown Resorts in late 2011. Aspers Casino occupies the top floor of Westfield Stratford City – one of the largest, if not the largest, urban shopping centres in Europe – in Stratford, East London.

Indeed, with 65,000 square feet of gaming space, Aspers Casino was the first of the so-called ‘Las Vegas-style super casinos’ established in the United Kingdom, following the 2005 Gambling Act, and remains the largest casino in the country. Previously, under the anachronous 1968 Gaming Act, the number of high-stakes gambling machines in any gambling establishment was limited to just ten, but Aspers Casinos offers hundreds of slot machines and electronic gaming terminals, allowing gamblers to play for high or low stakes at their discretion.

Of course, the casino floor also hosts numerous traditional gaming tables, including baccarat, blackjack, craps and roulette, while the poker room – a brightly lit, modern space – has capacity for hundreds of players at any time. Naturally enough, Aspers Casino regularly features professional poker tournaments but, overall, the aim is to attract low-stakes, recreational gamblers, rather than their high-stakes, professional counterparts. Two bars, an à la carte restaurant and entertainment, including live music, make Aspers Casino an attractive proposition as a leisure destination, day or night, regardless of fortune.