Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Golden Entertainment 2018 Third Quarter Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Later, we will conduct a question-and-answer session and instructions will be given at that time. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, today’s conference is being recorded. I would like to introduce your host for today's conference, Mr. Joe Jaffoni, Investor Relations. Sir, please go ahead.

Thank you very much, Michelle, and good afternoon, everyone. By now, everyone should have access to our third quarter 2018 earnings release, which can be found on the Company website at www.goldenent.com, under the Investors section. Before we begin our formal remarks, we need to remind everyone that today’s discussion will include forward-looking statements within the meaning of the federal securities laws. These forward-looking statements, which are usually identified by the use of words such as will, expect, believe, anticipate, should or other similar phrases, are not guarantees of future performance. These statements are subject to numerous risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from our corporate working statements, and therefore, you should exercise caution in interpreting and relying on them. We refer you to the risk factors in our recent SEC filings, including our most recent Form 10-K as updated by our subsequent quarterly reports on Form 10-Q for a more detailed discussion of the risks that could impact our future operating results and financial condition and other forward-looking statements. During today’s call, we will discuss non-GAAP financial measures, which management uses and believes are useful in evaluating the Company’s operating performance. These measures should not be considered in isolation or as a substitute for our financial results prepared in accordance with GAAP. A reconciliation of these measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measure is available in our third quarter 2018 earnings release. Golden also provided supplementary information accompanying the earnings release, combined income statements for the third quarter and nine months period ended September 30th, 2018 for Golden Entertainment and American Entertainment. On the call today is Blake Sartini, the Company’s Founder, Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer; and Charles Protell, the Company’s Chief Strategy Officer and Chief Financial Officer. Blake and Charles will review the quarterly results, recent strategic initiatives, and then outlook, after which we’ll open the call to your questions. Thank you for your patience with that. And it’s now my pleasure to turn the call over to Blake Sartini. Blake?

Thank you, Joe and good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to our 2018 third quarter conference call. Third quarter results we reported today were short of our expectations as market softness on the Las Vegas Strip impacted the stratosphere in addition the Stratosphere. In addition to Stratosphere had some construction disruption with the bulk of 2018 room renovations occurring in July and August. And one of our busiest food and beverage outlets the Strat Cafe was closed the entire month of September. As a result the Stratosphere had lower occupancy room rate and retail revenues over the third quarter when compared to last year. And in our prior calls, I have spoken about minimal disruption associated with our ongoing work at the property, and I would categorize the disruption in the third quarter as within the anticipated levels. Additionally, given the Stratosphere is lack of group being space our occupancy and rate trends were more pronounced during the week when compared to weekends. Without group meeting business, room bookings are highly reliant on OTAs and set to higher volatility than other Strip properties. Occupancy was lower about 5.8% for the quarter and as weakness materialized at strip, we maintained a disciplined room pricing strategy for the Stratosphere and as a result ADR was down 1.3%. Now turning to our distributed gaming business which in general remains healthy and growing. We have seen continued pressure within our chain store locations in Nevada resulting from rapidly changing consumer behavior. Such as increased use of cashless payment options, as well as curbside and home deliveries. We have discussed these factors on prior calls and we are an active dialogue with the owners of these locations to either change the economic terms of our relationships or overtime remove ourselves from this segment of the distributive business…

Thanks Blake. For the third quarter, revenues were $210 million, down 2% to the prior year on a combined basis with American casinos. Adjusted EBITDA for the quarter was down 7% to $38.1 million compared to $41 million in a prior year. Most of this decline can be attributed to the performance of the Stratosphere, but we were also impacted by weakness and a distributed chain store locations in Nevada. As we think about what to expect in the fourth quarter we see trends that suggest year-over-year improvement, as well as some improvement to the third quarter. However, we do not foresee the dramatic increases in occupancy and room rate at the Stratosphere in the fourth quarter, and therefore the company will not meet its prior full-year EBITDA guidance for 2018. For our Nevada casinos, third quarter revenue is $110 million, down 4.8% for the prior year on the same property basis, while adjusted EBITDA declined 8.8% to $31.5 million. Our Aquarius property in Laughlin grew EBITDA by 6.3%, while our locals Las Vegas Arizona Charlie's casinos grew EBITDA by 5.5%, reflecting the strength of our diverse casino operation in these unique markets. However, Stratosphere's EBITDA was down 23% for the quarter affected by the widely reported weaker occupancy and room rates along the Las Vegas strip. Revenue remained flat at Rocky Gap Resort while EBITDA declined slightly year-over-year to $6.2 million. I want to add some color as to what happened with the Stratosphere this last quarter, and why we remain confident in the opportunity to invest capital in this asset. As you know, the property represents only 2,400 hotel rooms out of almost a 148,000 rooms in Las Vegas; approximately 75% of the bookings are done through OTAs with over 50% of the reservations booked within 30 days…

[Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from the line of David Katz with Jefferies. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Hi, guys. This Eric Lockenvitz on for David. How are you today? Great. So I just want to touch on some of the weakness you saw on the quarter in the distributed side. Can you just talk little bit about, and you mentioned the renegotiation of some of the contracts but just talk about how you're seeing those trends going to the fourth quarter?

So from the fourth quarter perspective, we actually see those trends stabilizing. I mean just to give you a sense of how far these chain stores have fallen. Their contribution to the business from an EBITDA basis was double in the same period last year. So again we've fallen quite a bit on a year-over-year basis. That's massed quite frankly very healthy growth that we've seen in our Taverns and the base distributed business with third parties. So we are excited to move forward and like we've said, we will not continue to pursue and operate these changes to our locations extent we can't make them profitable for the company.

Great. On the improvement in Tavern, are you seeing a lot of that from new Tavern openings or just the existing organic growth?

So, both, so our new Tavern openings, clearly we've got a format that has done better. I would say if you compare that to the overall Las Vegas locals market within the third quarter, our new taverns are on a revenue basis performed better than that. Where our old taverns depending on where they are and located perform in line a little bit lower than that.

Okay, great. And then just switching to the Stratosphere, and talking about kind of the results there, do you feel like the improvement you've been seeing in the fourth quarter is that coming mostly midweek or are you seeing more improvements in the weekends?

For us it's both. I mean we see it; again, I don't think we want to give too much guidance around the fourth quarter other than that what we've already said which is that we see modest improvement. At this point, our visibility as we said is relatively low relative to where other assets are with group meeting space. So modest growth on a year-over-year basis is where we are seeing modest improvement in the third quarter across the board both on the weekend as well as midweek.

Great and then just one last question on the OTAs. Can you just talk about how you've seen the dynamics of trying to reduce reliance on the OTAs? And how that's been shaping up lately?

Look, from our perspective when you don't have a lot of alternative sales channels we are relying on the OTAs. And again, as the property sits now it's our view and we knew this going into buying these assets that this is why we need to make this investment. So we don't have to be as relying on the OTAs. Couple of things is going to help that in addition to the group meeting space. The one card loyalty program that we're rolling out early next year will allow us a better visibility into the casino database. And we'll get some lists out of that, but again as I mentioned, that's less than 6% of the occupancy right now. There be a lift that you're going to see out of that as once we get the room meeting space put in place, and we're able to compete for that business which should make up roughly 15% to 20% of the room nights of the asset when it's all said and done.

Thank you. And I'm showing no further questions at this time. And I would like to turn the conference back over to Mr. Blake Sartini for any closing remarks.

Thank you, operator. And thanks to everyone for joining us today. We look forward to updating everyone on our continued progress when we report our fourth quarter results.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for participating in today's conference. This does conclude the program. And you may all disconnect. Everyone have a great day.