Performance Guru

There’s a famous commercial conveying the confidence of a stock analyst with the slogan, “When E.F. Hutton talks, people listen.”

Todd Eilers has become the E.F. Hutton of the slot market.

Eilers was gaming analyst for Roth Capital when he and fellow Roth analyst Adam Krejcik decided to form Eilers & Krejcik Gaming (EKG) in 2012 as a consultancy devoted to gaming analysis. Today, there is not a slot manufacturing executive who, when promoting a new game, does not refer to the game’s ranking in the “Eilers report.”

Specifically, they refer to the monthly Eilers-Fantini Game Performance Report, which is created through a survey of hundreds of casinos to reveal the highest-performing slot machines in several categories, as well as slot cabinets, online slot games and overall supplier rankings.

The report is at the core of the founding of EKG.

“In my first couple of years (at Roth Capital), I was covering casino operators,” Eilers recalls. “Then, after about two years, the lead analyst who was covering the suppliers got promoted, and I took over the supplier coverage.”

Eilers began speaking to casino operators to ascertain which games and suppliers were doing well. “What I found was that each call was different, and what one slot manager liked, the other didn’t,” he says. “I thought I just needed a bigger sample size to make sense of what’s working in the market. That’s where the slot survey idea came in.”

Eilers saw a short-cut to creating such a survey in tapping gaming analyst Frank Fantini. “I had subscribed to the Fantini daily newsletter and knew Frank, and I knew he had really good coverage in the gaming space,” Eilers says. “I knew that I wanted to put together a quick survey for slot managers to fill out, but I didn’t have a lot of contacts with casino operators—not nearly as many as Frank did. That’s how we ended up partnering.”

Eilers left Roth Capital in 2012 but kept growing the survey along with Fantini. By that time, online gaming—already popular in Europe—had entered the discussion in the U.S.

“Adam Krejcik had worked with me at Roth for three or four years,” recalls Eilers. “He did a great job overing the online gaming space, and I was more focused on the land-based suppliers. The thought was that there just wasn’t a lot of market research focused on those areas… That’s how the idea came up to start our own firm.”

EKG started with market research for use by casino operators. “We had the survey, but that was more about purchasing and leasing, and supplier-level data. We didn’t have anything in terms of specific game theme and cabinet performance.” The idea to grow the slot survey into what would become a vital industry tool, Eilers says, came from none other than Matt Wilson, currently the CEO of Light & Wonder.

“At the time, he was with Aristocrat,” Eilers recalls. “In Australia there’s a firm called Max Gaming that provides a similar type of service just for the Australian market. He mentioned that, and I liked the idea, so we started out small, with just a few casinos. The idea was the same as our survey—if you participate by sharing some data or filling out the survey, you get our market research for free.”

The Eilers-Fantini Game Performance Report grew quickly in popularity among operators and suppliers, and the database of casinos participating in the survey grew with equal speed.

Meanwhile, suppliers to the industry began considering a high rank in the Eilers-Fantini report as a badge of honor, using top spots in the survey to market their slot games, cabinets and online games.

It was for this reason EKG started its Slot Awards program, now in its seventh year. EKG determines winners across more than 25 product categories including both land-based and interactive games utilizing a data-driven process combined with a distinguished advisory board. It also has established a Slot Awards Hall of Fame, with recipients honored at a gala annual event.

“We thought it might be something fun to just celebrate the industry,” Eilers says of the awards. “There are other award shows, as you know, and they’re all great. Everyone’s got their own niche, but we felt we’d make this one just about the games.”

Eilers’ goal for 2025 is the same as it has been for years—grow participation in the survey, and grow the database for EKG’s research and products. This year, that database reached the milestone of 500,000 customers.

“We’re always going to be focused on growing our database coverage,” Eilers says. “The next milestone is 600,000. We’re still seeing growth in the U.S. market, but international (growth) is a big initiative for us. We’re expanding into the EMEA and Latin American regions with the same concept—collecting data from casinos and publishing reports just for those regions.”

That means when EKG speaks, many more people will listen.