SENSATIONAL ICE rips up the records book

LONDON (10 February) – A magnificent 23,891 gaming industry professionals defied a 48-hour strike on the London Underground to set a new record attendance at ICE 2014 last week. The figure, which at this stage remains unaudited, represents a 7% increase on 2013 and a 12% uplift on 2012, the last edition of ICE to be held at Earls Court.

Kate Chambers, Portfolio Director responsible for organising the world's largest business-to business gaming event, described ICE 2014 as 'the most dynamic celebration of international gaming imaginable.' Reflecting on the event, which opened on Monday with the International Casino Conference organised in partnership with the European Casino Association, she said: "I would like to pay tribute to the many thousands of visitors who navigated their way across London using a combination of taxis, cars, buses and even boats to get to the river fronted ExCeL Centre. This says a huge amount about their determination not to have gaming's most important business week of the year ruined by a strike.

"The ICE team also worked tremendously hard to put on an event which reflected the investment made by our visitors and the 503 exhibiting companies which occupied the 55,000 sqm of space at ExCeL. Not only did the team work harder but they also worked smarter. Our campaign was SENSATIONAL ICE and I hope the experience lived up to that pledge. 2014 represented our fifth consecutive year of growth and a 28% uplift on the 18,676 who attended ICE 2010. However, you are only as good as your last event and our job now is to reflect, identify the areas in which we could have done better, continue to do the things we did well and work in partnership with the industry to deliver on behalf of the industry once again in 2015."

Off the floor events organised by Clarion included the eight strong ICE Conference programme which comprised 40 hours of targeted learning and networking, as well as free to enter seminars on the Bitcoin phenomenon, gambling opportunities in India, the legal considerations and pitfalls surrounding gaming convergence, sports betting, new trends and developments in emerging and European jurisdictions, Think Tank seminars covering IT, Digital & Security, the first ICE Tribal Gaming Seminar and the high-level Asia Breakfast which was sponsored by Clarion's Japan Gaming Congress taking place across May 14th ­ 16th in Tokyo. Commercial Intelligence, Clarion's gaming research division, used ICE to launch the first independent survey of New Jersey based online players since the state regulated in November 2013.