All-Star Fishing

What is All-Star Fishing?

That’s the commonly told story of how the Naked City, a community of low-rent apartment buildings and houses in the shadow of the Stratosphere just north of the Las Vegas Strip, got its nickname.

Not a single newspaper reference to Naked City appears in a Las Vegas newspaper before a June 20, 1982, Las Vegas Review-Journal cover story headlined: “’Naked City’ a Las Vegas Battleground.”

In that story, Lt. John Conner reported investigating 10 killings in the neighborhood in 16 months. “Most of them appear to be drug-related,” the homicide chief said.

What is All-Star Fishing?

“For a hundred years this game lived on the corner,” he said in TCS/JOHNHUXLEY’s press release. “Now it’s got a dealer, a pay table and a seat at the table in a real casino. Same dice, new floor.”

Cee-lo—derived from sì wǔ liù (Chinese for “four-five-six”)—is played with three six-sided dice. Popular among Chinese-American players as early as 1893, it was adopted by hip-hop culture in the late 1970s and became a fixture on the street corners of Harlem, Brooklyn, and the Bronx.

Nas, the Notorious B.I.G., and Jadakiss all referenced the game in their music. Kool G Rap called his 1995 album 4,5,6, and its title track included the line “Headcrack, time to get the bread”—the lyric that most likely inspired 50 Cent’s casino adaptation.

But it was Thomas DeCarlo Callaway who gave the game its biggest mainstream exposure, and gesture of love, when he took his stage name, CeeLo Green, directly from it.

About All-Star Fishing

Macquarie’s Beynon agrees with that sentiment, pointing to the relative stability of gaming companies through tough economic stretches such as the Covid-19 pandemic. Bankruptcies in the sector have been low relative to the broader market, he notes, and both land-based and digital companies have reason for optimism moving forward.

“It’s certainly not lost on us that this sector has underperformed for several years in a row just because it doesn’t have either the growth of say, tech companies, or the perceived free cash flow-insulated businesses, which we believe it does…We’ve thought there’s been value in the sector for a few years, particularly this year,” he told iGB.

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.