Stanley Leisure, the casino operator, has joined forces with a Malaysian firm in a bid to develop a network of Las Vegas-style sites.

It is hoped the joint venture with Genting, whose resort in South East Asia attracts more than 15 million visitors a year, would allow the group to build so-called super casinos in regional cities such as Leeds.

Although the Government recently announced plans to initially scale back the number of large regional casinos to eight, Stanley Leisure expects that in the long term it could have up to 10 sites.

The joint venture will pay £5.4 million for land Stanley recently bought next to Leeds United's Elland Road football ground.

Stanley, which has 41 casinos and a network of 660 betting shops, said last month that it hoped to use the site to build a regional casino complex costing up to £125 million which would rival any other development in the UK.

It said today that it would benefit from Genting's expertise in running casinos on the scale of those envisaged for the UK.

Genting, which is listed on the Malaysian stock exchange, has businesses ranging from leisure and power generation to paper, oil and gas. It is also in the process of breaking into the UK market by joining Stanley in buying London's Maxims casino.

The tie-up emerged as Stanley revealed that a favourable set of sporting results for punters had affected its high street betting business.

This was due to a series of favoured horses winning during the first quarter, and more recently the outcome of European football matches.

This largely offset continued growth in profits from fixed-odds betting machines. The machines were first introduced in 2002 and Stanley hopes to have 1,300 by the end of the year.

Bob Wiper, the Stanley chief executive, said the poor run of sporting results reflected the fortunes of rivals such as bookmaker Ladbrokes, which said last week that victories for a number of other top teams had "adversely affected" its gross win.

He added: "This is not a structural issue, this is just results going against us."

Stanley is due to post results for the six months to the end of October in January.

Both companies will only be able to move into regional casinos through the joint venture.

The group said it believed there could eventually be between 20 and 40 sites, despite plans to limit numbers initially, and it hopes to have around a quarter of these.

Genting has also taken a 9 per cent stake in Stanley after spending £36 million on eight million shares owned by the UK's company's chairman, Lord Steinberg. Other transactions involving Stanley will eventually take the holding to 10.2 per cent, with Lord Steinberg still owning 11.3 per cent.

Stanley Leisure shares stood 20.5p higher at 443.5p in afternoon trade.

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