A major casino company shocked the gambling world on Tuesday by voluntarily bowing out of the race to run a New York City area casino.

MGM Resorts International, operator of Empire City Casino in Yonkers, said it was withdrawing its commercial casino application with New York gambling regulators. Las Vegas-based MGM Resorts said it made the “difficult decision” to remove itself from consideration because “the competitive and economic assumptions underpinning our application have shifted,” since the licensing process formally began in June.

“The newly defined competitive landscape — with four proposals clustered in a small geographic area — challenges the returns we initially anticipated from this project,” the company said in a statement. “We know our decision will impact many individual

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