Category: Casino News

It was a bouncy May for casinos both on the Las Vegas Strip and locally. The former was up 3.5%, reaching gambling revenue of $742.5 million. Locals casinos hopped 5% for a haul of $277.5 million. The Strip win was particularly impressive given that baccarat was down 6.5% to $122 million. The problem wasn’t hold percentage so much as a 2% dip in action. But other table games leapt 13% to $217.5 million on wagering that was 11% higher. Strip slots saw 6.5% more coin-in, to tally $403 million (+2.5%). Locals slots were up 3% to $229.5 million on 4.5% more action. Locals table win was $48 million, a 17% gain spurred by 16.5% higher wagering.

ESPN Bet was supposed to be the salvation of Penn Entertainment. Now it is looking like its downfall. Penn’s venture into online gambling has had very mixed results. iGaming has brought with it great success. Sports betting, however, has been an unmitigated disaster. After PR and stock-price debacle Barstool Sports turned turtle, irresponsible Penn CEO Jay Snowden sold it back to Dave Portnoy for $1. (That’s not a typo.) Throwing good money after bad, Snowden doubled down with ESPN Bet. At first it looked like a potential winner. But it has lost money hand over fist, with no end to the red ink in sight.

That promised megaresort in Chicago is disappearing like a mirage. This week, Windy City Mayor Brandon Johnson (D) met with the editorial board of the Chicago Sun-Times and expressed doubts that $1.7 billion Bally’s Chicago will ever get built. It’s already lost the support of the pro-casino Chicago Tribune … and now Hizzoner appears to be slinking away. Said the mayor, “I know our team is working with ownership to figure it out like we figured out some of the other things that I’ve inherited. It just has to make absolute sense … I think that one’s still to be determined, to be perfectly frank with you.”

Las Vegans continue to be taken to the cleaners, this time by the Oakland Athletics and their slippery owner, John Fisher. Seems that the A’s have quietly applied to spend as little time in Las Vegas as humanly possible. They’ve asked to hold eight “home” games out of town. This home-but-away fiction is humored, to a lesser extent, by Major League Baseball, to facilitate exhibition games overseas. Not that anybody is falling over themselves to invite the cellar-dwelling A’s to town but one can’t blame the feckless Fisher for dreaming.

Hardly the cruelest month, April made up for some recent and discouraging numbers for Las Vegas in particular and Nevada in general. Gambling receipts on the Las Vegas Strip tallied $666 million (the Mark of the Beast?), a 6.5% improvement over 2023 and 38% higher than May 2019. Locals casinos fared up even better, being up 16% overall, to $270 million. Table game hold was up on the Strip and baccarat was much tighter as well. Wagering at the tables (+20%) and slots (+43%) eclipsed 2019 figures. Baccarat winnings vaulted 80% from last year (when, to be fair, hold was very loose) and non-baccarat table games nosed up a percentage point. The one-armed bandits saw a 4% decline in coin-in.