High rollers, known as 'whales' in the industry, have kept Macau afloat for years, but now investors are placing their bets on a flood of little fish from the mainland.
To widen their appeal to a growing number of middle-class mainland tourists, casinos in the enclave are devoting an increasing number of tables to smaller stakes, cash play.
But perhaps the biggest test of the new mass-market approach will be the widespread introduction of electronic gaming, or slot machines.
Ubiquitous in casinos worldwide and occasionally scorned as one-armed bandits, low-cost slots were traditionally seen as antithetical to Macau's high-rolling ethos.
'Our older colleagues told us to forget it, that it wasn't going to work, that Macau was a place for hard-core gaming addicts,' Lawrence Ho Yau-lung, the head of Mocha Slot, a joint venture with Australian gaming outfit Publishing & Broadcasting, told a gaming-industry convention held in the territory this week.
Indeed, Macau casinos have long revolved around VIP gambling rooms, where whales are brought in on package tours and routinely lay down tens of thousands of dollars on a single bet.