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Matt Weissman walked into the center of the Sands Casino Resort Bethlehem gambling floor, held up his cell phone and excitedly snapped a shot of the casino's latest attraction.

"Dude, you gotta check this out," the 29-year-old visitor from Cincinnati sent by text to his brother. "Biggest collection of [hybrid table games] I've ever seen."

That's the reaction Sands officials were hoping for last week when they opened the nation's largest live electronic table games "stadium" in the nation. And Weismann is exactly the kind of gambler they were hoping to attract — young, tech savvy and adverse to playing anything called a slot machine.

Sands has put itself at the head of what some analysts say may be the next craze in casino gambling. Hybrid table games combine the ease and fast pace of a slot machine with the feel of a live dealer. They've become common in the table-games-heavy casinos of Macau and Singapore, but are only recently finding their way to the United States.

It's so early in their evolution that it's unclear whether they'll catch on with the gambling public, but Sands isn't waiting to find out. While a handful of casinos are experimenting with a few dozen, Sands is all in. It spent $5 million to remove its underperforming juice bar, Infusion, and replace it with a stadium-style setup of 150 seats — easily the largest in the country. Then it hired 40 new workers to run it, Sands CEO Mark Juliano said.

Parx Casino in Bensalem recently installed 50, and Mohegan Sun near Wilkes-Barre will soon open 20, but neither is large enough to build them into a circle that would be considered a stadium.

Juliano is convinced his bet will pay off.

"We thought about phasing it in, but decided if we're going to do it, let's do it big and let's do it right," Juliano said. "We figured it would take something this size to create an energy — to make it a place that people gravitate to."

Wanting to first work out any bugs in the new technology, Sands won't start marketing its latest project until after a grand opening later this month, but the rest of the state's casinos are likely anxious to see if Juliano's wager is a good one.

"You can bet they're all watching to see what happens at Sands," said Richard McGarvey, spokesman for the Pennsylvania Gaming Control Board. "If this turns out to be popular, they'll all want them.'

The stadium terminals look similar to slot machines and each player has their own. There are no chips and no cards dealt to the players, but a live dealer in the middle of the stadium deals a hand that can be seen on video at each machine. The games are faster than traditional table games because there's no stopping to cash in money or pay off bets. The player's machine does all that electronically. When players are ready to leave the table, they simply hit a button and grab their money voucher.

Because each player's bet is unaffected by other players, there is no worry about being intimidated by superstitious or more experienced players.

The biggest draw for some is the minimum bets, as low as $5. Sands currently offers no $5 blackjack tables and during the busiest times on Friday or Saturday nights, the $10 minimum tables sometimes go up to $20 or $25.

The stadium terminals are programmable, enabling players to choose from several languages, including English, Mandarin and Spanish, and give a tutorial in their chosen language, Juliano said.

Jay Patel, 33, of Allentown likes live tables, but he was at the stadium because it let him play several games at the same time and on this night, he just didn't feel like socializing.

"It's new and it's faster," Patel said as he placed bets on two separate baccarat games. "I'm not really in the mood to talk to other people today. I just want to play. It's kind of like gambling without the fun."

Frank Legato, a Wilmington, Del., gambling expert who is managing editor of Global Gaming Business, said Sands' play on the hybrid games goes beyond the usual attempt to attract younger gamblers. With its unique draw of more than 50 buses a day from the heavily Asian neighborhoods in Flushing, Chinatown and Brooklyn, New York, Sands easily has the state's highest number of Asian gamblers — so many that it has hired more than 500 Mandarin-speaking workers to greet them.

"This type of gambling is extremely popular in Asia, particularly in the casinos in Macau and Singapore," Legato said. "This is going to keep their Asian clientele happy and probably even appeal to a few Asian high-rollers."

Bill Kearney, a recovered gambling addict from Philadelphia, is not impressed. Kearney, who said he lost his family, his business and $2 billion playing table games in Atlantic City in the 1980s, said hybrid tables are a thinly veiled attempt by casinos to attract young people before they find somewhere else to blow their money.

"I see what they're trying to do. They want to hook these young people coming off their video games and computers," said Kearney, who in recent years has been fighting gambling expansion in Pennsylvania and Massachusetts. "Personally, I don't think it's going to work. I think these things are going to have a limited draw."

Limited or not, they'll likely only increase Sands' statewide dominance at the tables. Sands has raked in more than $225 million at table games such as blackjack, roulette and craps over the past year, easily outpacing the second-place Parx Casino by more than $70 million.

There's another reason why Sands could hit the jackpot with the new hybrids: taxes. Pennsylvania's tax on slot machines, at 54 percent, is among the highest in the nation. However, because table games require a casino to hire more workers — dealers, supervisors, pit bosses and finance people — to run them, the tax on table games is just 14 percent. The theory is that what is lost in tax revenue is gained in job creation.

The new hybrid games allow Sands to run the whole stadium with just a handful of dealers, but they're taxed at the table games rate of 14 percent.

"Well, there you go. I'm surprised they got the state to agree to that," Legato said. "If they fill those seats they're going to make a lot of money."

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