INTERVIEW MAY 2026
Interview with Soo Kim Executive Chairman, Bally’s Corporation: Regulatory change is like gravity — there is nothing more certain than that
The Executive Chairman on the primal pull of gambling, why omnichannel is a structural bet not a marketing strategy, and what he sees when he looks at a struggling casino that others have written off.
Interview
Our editor had a conversation with Soo Kim, Executive Chairman of Bally's Corporation, about why he believes the human need for risk is the oldest business thesis in gaming, how the structural economics of land-based and online gambling make the omnichannel model not just attractive but necessary, and what his career turning around distressed businesses tells him about where Bally's goes from here.
From the outset, Kim is direct about what drives the industry he has staked a significant portion of his career on. Gambling, in his view, is not an aberration in human behaviour. It is an expression of something far older — a need that has sent people across deserts and oceans, and that finds its modern outlet in a sports bet placed from a sofa as easily as at a casino window. Understanding that, he argues, is the starting point for understanding both the opportunity and the obligation that comes with operating in this space. And for Kim, operating in this space means only one thing: operating under license, inside the regulatory framework, without exception.
Soo Kim, Executive Chairman, Bally's Corporation.
Box-out: Soo Kim Executive Chairman, Bally’s Corporation
Current Title: Executive Chairman, Bally's Corporation (effective January 2026); Managing Partner and Chief Investment Officer, Standard General L.P.; Chair, The Star Entertainment Group
Company: Bally's Corporation — ballys.com
Background: Soo Kim was born in Seoul and raised in Queens, New York, the son of Korean immigrants. He attended Stuyvesant High School and graduated from Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. His career began at Bankers Trust before he co-founded the fixed income business at Och-Ziff Capital Management and later co-founded Cyrus Capital Partners. In 2007 he founded Standard General L.P., a distressed and special-situations investment firm focused on leveraged US middle-market companies. His entry into gaming came in 2011 when Standard General led the creditor group that took ownership of the Aliante Casino and Hotel in North Las Vegas following the bankruptcy of Station Casinos — a turnaround Kim oversaw as de facto CEO of the holding company. He was also a board member of Greektown Superholdings during its restructuring. Standard General became an activist shareholder in Twin River Worldwide Holdings from 2016; Kim became Non-Executive Chair in 2019 and guided a period of rapid expansion — from its original Lincoln, Rhode Island property and Biloxi, Mississippi casino to 14 casinos across 10 states within roughly two years — culminating in the company's renaming as Bally's Corporation in November 2020. He was named American Executive of the Year at the Global Gaming Awards in 2021 and assumed the role of Executive Chairman in January 2026.
Industry perspective
"Regulatory change is like gravity — there is nothing more certain than that."
— Soo Kim, Executive Chairman, Bally's Corporation
The itch that will not go away: gambling as a human constant
Before Kim talks about balance sheets or construction timelines, he talks about human nature. It is where his argument begins, and in some ways where it is most revealing.
Why do people drive too fast, sitting too close to the car in front? Why do they jump out of aeroplanes, or dive into water so deep the light disappears? Kim's answer is that the impulse is not irrational — it is constitutive. Human beings have always sought risk and the unknown. He reaches back to Marco Polo navigating the Silk Road, to Alexander the Great pushing into territories no army had entered before. "Scratching the itch of the unknown," as Kim frames it, is not a modern pathology. It is among the oldest recorded human motivations.
The particular insight he offers is about when that itch becomes most acute. Holidays and periods of transition — the moments when ordinary routine lifts and life opens up into possibility — are also the moments when people confront the bigger risks they have been deferring. Should I start that business? Should I leave that relationship? Should I dare to go somewhere I have never been? These are not small questions, and the emotional weight they carry is real. What the lottery ticket, the casino trip, the bet placed on a match provides, in Kim's reading, is a way of touching that feeling — of being briefly in the presence of chance and consequence — without fully committing to the larger leap. It is a proxy for the existential risk, and it serves a genuine psychological function.
This framing matters because it also clarifies where the obligation lies. Kim does not minimise the reality of problem gambling, and he is careful to distinguish the broad human experience of seeking risk from the specific harm that gambling can cause for people with an underlying vulnerability. The same emotional conditions that make gambling appealing in moments of transition — the holiday, the life crossroads, the need for something to change — are precisely the conditions under which the most vulnerable people are at greatest risk. That is not an argument against the product. It is the argument for why it has to be regulated, and why the licensed operator is not the problem but part of the answer.
Gambling, in this framing, is one expression of an impulse that predates any regulatory framework. The state lottery has long provided a sanctioned outlet for it; the question Kim raises is how much that model has genuinely evolved in the way it addresses demand and communicates risk. Suppression, as the history of prohibition demonstrates, does not extinguish the impulse — it drives it into less governed spaces. The channelisation challenges that regulators across Europe and the US continue to grapple with bear that out directly. Anything with genuine potential for harm needs to be regulated, not eliminated. For Kim, that is not a concession. It is the foundation on which everything else is built.
Bally's Baton Rouge, Louisiana. One of 19 Bally's properties across 11 US states — the land-based foundation on which the omnichannel thesis is being built. Courtesy of Bally's Corporation.
From bargain hunter to casino builder: the logic behind the bet
Kim came to gaming the way he approaches most things — through distress. Standard General led the creditor group that took ownership of the Aliante Casino and Hotel in North Las Vegas in 2011, following the bankruptcy of Station Casinos.
The property had been built for $662 million on the expectation that North Las Vegas would grow into a residential hub; the financial crisis turned the surrounding area into a foreclosure zone. Kim installed a management team, stripped out the Station Casinos branding, reconfigured the floor, and watched the property return to profitability within 14 months. Boyd Gaming bought it in 2016 for $380 million.
He served as CEO of the holding company during that period — a fact he notes with some wryness, observing that not many people know it.
The lesson he took from Aliante was not primarily about casinos. It was about what happens when you isolate a business from its structural problems, install the right management, and let it find its natural customers. The same discipline shaped his involvement in the Greektown Casino restructuring in Detroit. What drew him back to gaming more seriously was the opportunity Twin River presented: a tight, well-run regional operator with its Lincoln, Rhode Island property and a casino in Biloxi, Mississippi, and a balance sheet that could support expansion — and, critically, a regulated business in a jurisdiction where the licence had been earned.
That last point is not incidental to Kim's investment thesis. He operates exclusively within licensed, regulated markets.
The opportunity he has pursued in gaming has always been inside the framework, not around it — turning around assets that struggled operationally, not ones that carried regulatory doubt. Between 2019 and late 2020, Bally's moved from two properties to 14 casinos across 10 states, one of the fastest expansions in US regional gaming in that period. It renamed itself Bally's Corporation in November 2020, acquired the Gamesys Group for $2.7 billion in 2021 to establish its international interactive division, and from 2022 moved into the construction phase: Chicago, Las Vegas, New York.
Chicago is the position Kim describes with the most evident conviction. Bally's holds the only casino licence within Chicago city limits — the first and, for now, the only casino in the largest city in the American Midwest. The permanent resort at 777 West Chicago Avenue is targeted to open in late 2026 into 2027, with approximately 3,400 slot machines, more than 170 table games, a 500-room hotel tower and a 3,000-seat theatre. Editor's note: Bally's confirmed in May 2026 that the opening is now targeted for spring 2027. Being first in a market of that size is, as he frames it, both a significant opportunity and a significant responsibility. New York, where Bally's holds one of only three licences awarded for the city area — a proposed $4 billion resort at Ferry Point Park in the Bronx — carries similar weight.
Kim is careful to separate his identity from that of a traditional casino owner. He describes himself first as someone who turns businesses around, and second as someone who operates them. Bally's move from acquisition into construction reflects the same underlying logic applied to a different moment in the market cycle. The distressed-asset era produced a portfolio.
The construction era is about deciding which positions within that portfolio are worth pressing — and pressing them while the structural conditions remain available. He adds something that sits outside the usual investor language: he bets on himself. The conviction driving Chicago and New York is not purely analytical. It is the same disposition that took him from Queens to Princeton to founding Standard General from scratch. Volatility, in his account, is not something to be hedged away. It is where the opportunity is.
The omnichannel thesis: why physical and digital are the same customer
The most substantive part of Kim's thinking about Bally's current strategy concerns the structural economics of land-based versus online gaming — and why the gap between them makes the combination more durable than either model alone.
His framing is precise. Physical casinos are capital-heavy and customer-acquisition-light. The property costs a great deal to build and operate; the customer, once inside, tends to stay. Online gaming inverts the equation. The capital requirement is comparatively modest, but customer acquisition is expensive and retention is weak. A player active on two or three platforms simultaneously will follow the next attractive offer wherever it appears. The mechanics of online retention require constant reinvestment in personalisation, promotions and experience design — a dynamic this publication has examined in detail in its series on digital persuasion and player psychology (igamingreview.com/social-media-ai-and-the-psychology-of-play-old-rules-new-channels-decoding-persuasion/).
The omnichannel argument, as Kim makes it, is not that a loyalty programme can bridge both worlds — though Bally Rewards attempts to do exactly that. It is that the same person exists in both channels, and that serving them well in one makes it materially harder for a competitor to pull them away in the other. He pointed to Italy as an instructive example: a significant portion of Italian land-based operators' recent growth has come from their online operations, not from the machine floor alone. The question he poses is whether an operator wants to be in that position, able to capture growth across both channels, or whether it concedes one and competes only in the other.
Rhode Island is the live test of this proposition. Bally's operates the state's two casinos and holds the online gaming licence, placing it among a small group of companies with both the regulatory position and the operational platform to run a genuinely integrated offer. Kim is direct that this is a long-term commitment, not a short-cycle margin story. He expects to see the model prove itself as Chicago opens and as the New York licence moves from development rights toward a functioning resort.
The customer, in his reading, is always the same customer. Their preference for a physical trip on some occasions and a digital session on others is a function of the occasion, not the person. The operator's job is to meet them in both places with a coherent identity — one that makes switching unnecessary. Where that connection works, the product becomes stickier than either channel alone. Where it does not, the operator is running two separate businesses that happen to share a brand.
Twin River Casino, Lincoln, Rhode Island — the original Standard General acquisition and the starting point of what became Bally's Corporation. Courtesy of Bally's Corporation.
Gravity, lemons, and the patient operator
Bally's operates across some of the most complex regulatory environments in gaming: US state-by-state, the UK online market through its Intralot stake, and Australian casinos via the majority position in Star Entertainment, which continues under special supervisory conditions in New South Wales and Queensland following state inquiry findings. Kim treats this not as exceptional risk but as the industry's permanent condition.
His view returns to the same foundation. Regulation exists because the product touches something primal, and anything with genuine potential for harm requires a framework. He is not reluctant about that requirement; he argues for it. The prohibition comparison reappears: a market without adequate governance does not eliminate demand, it drives it underground, where consumers are less protected and operators have no incentive to self-regulate. The channelisation problem that has occupied European regulators for much of the last decade — the persistent flow of players to unlicensed operators even in mature markets — illustrates what happens when the licensed offer is made less attractive than its alternatives. As this publication's Redefining Reasonable series has tracked (igamingreview.com/redefining-reasonable-the-catalyst-years-2020-2025-what-drove-the-regulatory-shift/), the definition of adequate player protection continues to tighten, and the operators best positioned in the most regulated markets are those that moved ahead of the requirements rather than responding to each change as a surprise.
"Regulatory change is like gravity," Kim says. "There is nothing more certain than that." The response he describes is the same one he associates with his own formation — making lemonade from lemons, finding the opportunity inside the constraint. In jurisdictions where the regulatory bar rises, the cost of compliance becomes a barrier that a well-resourced operator absorbs more easily than a fragmented one. Tightening does not slow him down. It changes the competitive landscape in his favour.
Star Entertainment remains the unresolved test of that thesis. Kim chairs the board and has spoken publicly about AML compliance and the restoration of regulatory trust as absolute priorities. Whether that commitment translates into reinstated operating conditions in Sydney, Gold Coast, and Brisbane is a question the regulators, not Kim, will answer. What it demonstrates about his broader approach is the consistency of the method: enter a distressed situation with governance problems, install discipline, build the case for rehabilitation. It worked at Aliante. It has worked across successive restructurings in industries that had nothing to do with gaming. The proposition at Star is the same one, at greater scale and under greater scrutiny.
Conclusion
The bet Kim is making is not a complicated one to describe, even if it is a large one to execute. Human beings will continue to seek risk and the unknown — they always have, and they will always find ways to bet on it. The question is which operators capture that demand under licence, with the infrastructure to serve customers across both physical and digital channels, in markets where the regulatory environment selects for scale and governance capability. His answer is that Bally's, if the Chicago, Las Vegas, and New York construction pipeline delivers, will be among a small number of companies positioned to do that at the level the next decade in US gaming will require.
Whether the market agrees will be known in roughly the same timeframe as the Chicago opening. Until then, the question of whether the omnichannel thesis pays out operationally — not just strategically — remains open. Kim has made his position clear. He is betting on himself, on volatility, and on the oldest impulse in the room.
Further Reading & Key Sources
Business Wire, 16 March 2026: Bally's Corporation Q4 and full-year 2025 preliminary results
SEC GOV Bally's Corporation SEC Form 8-K, 27 January 2026:
Soo Kim appointed Executive Chairman
CDC Gaming, April 2021: Standard General and the Aliante Casino turnaround
Bally's Corporation / PR Newswire, May 2026: Bally's Chicago tops off permanent casino, marking major construction milestone on path to spring 2027 opening
Gaming and Leisure Properties, September 2025: An update on GLPI's landmark Chicago investment: Bally's flagship downtown Chicago casino resort
Company figures cited in this article, including property count, Chicago casino specifications and New York development costs, are drawn from Bally's Corporation press materials and have been verified with Bally's during the factual review process.
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