Top Cat

How to play Top Cat

All nine of Atlantic City’s casinos agreed to new labour deals this summer without a strike, although its union opted for just one-year deals instead of the typical length of three or more years. This was in response to increased uncertainty related to looming competition from both New York City casinos and New Jersey’s own online gaming industry.

In Las Vegas, the Culinary Union has unionised the entire Las Vegas Strip and secured historic wage increases during the last round of negotiations. Those deals are about halfway done now, and Culinary is no stranger to strikes, having used them as leverage to secure new deals in the run-up to the inaugural Formula One Las Vegas Grand Prix in 2023 and and Super Bowl the following February.

Jess has covered the global gaming industry since 2022. A native of Reno, Nevada, he’d like to note that it’s Ne-va-da, not Ne-VAH-da.

What is Top Cat?

Then my life went into a sort of holding pattern for the next few years. I was getting tired of freelancing. It was too limiting, and I wanted to start my own thing. So in February of 2020, I started to set up the groundwork for going out on my own. It is now up and running at The End Game Investor (EGI). The theme is precious metals investing and trading in the context of the End Game, the end of the financial system as we have known it since 1971, taken from an Austrian Economics perspective.

Then, one month later, the end of the world as we know it actually happened. The Coronombie Apocalypse, everyone masked up and the Fed printed a skrillion dollars and I lost most of my other freelance arrangements as everyone went into hiding and confusion and pandemonium.

But the groundwork for my own thing had already been laid, as did the actual global backdrop for speeding up what I was already predicting was going to happen anyway. So I focused up and got it started. I still wrote for CalvinAyre.com though, which actually hung on, to my pleasant surprise.

What is Top Cat?

“Stakeholders increasingly want evidence that initiatives deliver meaningful outcomes rather than simply demonstrating good intentions,” Skinner suggests.

That shift is increasingly visible across the sector, with DEI framed less as a standalone initiative and more as part of everyday business culture.

For Grainne Hurst, CEO of the Betting & Gaming Council in the UK, the evolution has been clear. “The conversation has moved beyond representation alone towards inclusion, retention, well-being and progression,” Hurst explains. “Businesses increasingly understand that DEI must be embedded in everyday culture, not treated as a separate initiative.”