MACAU BUSINESS
From 1979 Iran
“It was really amazing,” he tells Macau Business of that lightbulb moment. Alidad Tash returned to Macau and began not only to
explain what he had seen but to understand it in depth. What is special about NCB?
From his research two conclusions evolved: NCB is a variant of baccarat invented many years ago in Nepal, which travelled to South America, and then to Australia and Malaysia, and, more surprisingly, was not new to Macau… At least in Crystal Palace – one of SJM’s small satellite casinos
– there were three NCB tables, which was great because it avoided having to ask the Gaming Inspection and Co- ordination Bureau for their authorisations. With only months before The Venetian opened there was no time to waste. In other contexts, Alidad has been labelled the inventor of NCB in Macau. “I did not,” he insists. “I was in the right place at the right time.” The NCB was an almost instant success in The Venetian and when Alidad Tash subsequently joined City of Dreams he aggressively converted all mass and most premium mass baccarat tables to NCB.
So what is so special about NCB? “The difference is the pay out,” he explains. NCB is “a perfect substitute for traditional baccarat” because the table layout, rules, and player experience are exactly the same as traditional baccarat – with only one difference – which is why it is so easy to adapt to by players (see text in these pages). Alidad doesn’t save the adjectives in describing it as both “genius” and “amazing”. In short, it is as if the old game now brings more customer satisfaction and more money to casinos. If today nobody can imagine the mass market without NCB, in the beginning this was not the case. “Of course there was some resistance,” he concedes, even though Sands had already opened in 2004 and was a big hit with conventional baccarat. But the results spoke louder and within a few months NCB had picked up considerable momentum.
26 SEPTEMBER 2019
underwent one of its most transformative moments. The Islamic Revolution of 1979 led to the replacement of the government of the last Shah of Iran and heralded the arrival of Ayatollah Khomeini. Alidad’s parents realised that living in Iran was no longer an option. They were in such a hurry to get him out, in fact, that they could not wait for him to obtain his own passport. Instead he entered the US – legally – as an accompanying minor on his father’s passport. His father dropped him off at a boarding school and told
A
him to wait a few months while he returned to Iran prior to emigrating to the US with Alidad’s mother and sister. But upon his return to Iran his father had his passport taken away for five years, leaving Alidad’s immigration status in the US in “a bizarre – legal limbo – situation”. Eventually, Alidad obtained his own passport, but the only visa he was granted stipulated that he had to stay in the United States and study, unable to return if he left. As a consequence of this turn of events, Alidad became “stuck” in the US from the age of 13 to 24. During this time, his parents found it very difficult to obtain visas to see him – with his mother managing to visit him just once, and his father twice, due to repeated rejections from embassies around the world. He managed to obtain permanent residency in 1990 upon
completion of his studies, following which he finally returned to Iran, and having obtained two Masters degrees in the US. The first is in mechanical engineering from the University of California, while the second is in statistics from the University of Southern California. Alidad’s first experience in the gaming industry was with
The Venetian Las Vegas in 2000, overseeing casino marketing analysis and gaming machine optimisation. He moved to Macau in early 2006 “to explore the new gaming frontier”.
lidad Tash was 13 years old when his homeland, Iran,
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