{"id":892035,"date":"2025-08-10T07:14:35","date_gmt":"2025-08-10T14:14:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/shop\/?p=892035"},"modified":"2025-08-10T07:14:40","modified_gmt":"2025-08-10T14:14:40","slug":"no-hope-for-espn-bet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/blog\/no-hope-for-espn-bet\/","title":{"rendered":"No Hope for ESPN Bet?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Penn Entertainment<\/strong> opens its new, $185 million Hollywood Joliet<\/strong> tomorrow. It could use the boost. Land-based casinos continue to perform for Penn, despite CEO Jay Snowden<\/strong>‘s dubious competence. Its much-vaunted digital strategy is another matter. Online return on investment just got reduced 25%, meaning that Penn will lose $200 million on sports betting and iGaming this year, not a mere $160 million.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

Even so, Penn is buying Wall Street<\/strong>‘s complaisance with $850 million in new brick-and-mortar projects (all well-justified) and $235 million in stock buybacks, something that strikes us more and more like shareholder bribery. Small wonder that it was illegal 45 years ago. <\/p>\n\n\n

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The buyback announcement still wasn’t enough to placate J.P. Morgan<\/strong> analyst Daniel Politzer<\/strong>, who reduced his price target from $24\/share to $22. (PENN was trading at $17\/share at the time.) The company is hurting in Bossier City<\/strong> from the impact of Louisiana Live<\/strong> and in Council Bluff<\/strong>s from inroads made by Nebraska<\/strong> racinos. In its overhyped digital sphere, Penn expects to finally turn a positive return on investment ($5 million) in the fourth quarter. That might be enough to keep ESPN Bet on life support. The promised 20% market share for the service, however, still languishes at 3%. Penn’s guidance “assumes” that will escalate to 4% in 4Q25. Will that be enough to save it? Politzer reports that perennially optimistic Penn is “upbeat on the upcoming NFL<\/strong> kickoff, citing its new FanCenter<\/strong>, ESPN<\/strong> integration, improved tech stack, and more targeted marketing<\/em>.” That didn’t sell Politzer, who ascribed zero valuation to most of Penn’s online operations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Consolation, as always, could be taken from terrestrial operations (Earth to Snowden!), which were mostly 4% up. Also, Hollywood Joliet is opening six months earlier than planned, unheard-of in an industry which can rarely finish a casino on schedule, leading to the bane of the ‘soft opening.’ No such misfortune in Joliet<\/strong>. “Management noted elevated pockets of promo spend at times during the quarter, but believes it will subside in the future,<\/em>” wrote Deutsche Bank<\/strong> analyst Steven Pizzella<\/strong>, capturing Penn’s wishful-thinking management style. There was one bit of good news from the online world: “Pre-existing customers who play\u00a0PENN’s standalone casino app are increasing their spend across both online and retail channels<\/em>,” Pizzella noted. So maybe fears of online cannibalization are overheated.<\/p>\n\n\n

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At least Penn could celebrate<\/strong> some good news from Maryland<\/strong>, where Hollywood Perryville<\/strong> hopped 4.5% to $7.5 million, in a good month for the smaller casinos. Also manifesting an improbable turnaround (“elevated pockets of promo spend” perhaps?) was Horseshoe Baltimore<\/strong>, up 8% to $14.5 million. Not so fortunate was MGM National Harbor<\/strong>, down 4.5% to $68.5 million. Maryland Live <\/strong>seems to have lost some business to Horseshoe, down 4.5% to $59.5 million. Ocean Downs<\/strong> jumped 6.5% to $10 million while Rocky Gap Resort<\/strong> gained a point to $5 million, part of a larger turnabout strategy<\/a> by Century Casinos<\/strong>, albeit complicated by Century now putting itself up for sale<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One might vaguely recall<\/strong> the name of Steven Witkoff<\/strong>, the feckless former owner<\/a> of Fontainebleau Las Vegas<\/strong>. Witkoff owned it for a time after Carl Icahn<\/strong>, paid four times its negligible value, mulled changing its name to The Drew<\/strong> and ultimately didn’t accomplish squat<\/a> except keep the place warm for the Soffer family. Well, Witkoff has failed upward<\/a> and is proving to still be every bit as much<\/a> of a screwup. Don’t say<\/a> we didn’t warn you<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Penn Entertainment opens its new, $185 million Hollywood Joliet tomorrow. It could use the boost. Land-based casinos continue to perform for Penn, despite CEO Jay Snowden‘s dubious competence. Its much-vaunted digital strategy is another matter. Online return on investment just got reduced 25%, meaning that Penn will lose $200 million on sports betting and iGaming […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":83928,"featured_media":861395,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1728],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/shop\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/06\/Penn_Entertainment_logo.svg_.png?fit=320%2C114&ssl=1","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/shop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/892035"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/shop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/shop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/shop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/83928"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/shop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=892035"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/shop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/892035\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":892040,"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/shop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/892035\/revisions\/892040"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/shop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/861395"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/shop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=892035"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/shop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=892035"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/shop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=892035"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}