You know January was bad in St. Louis when the lowly President‘s $2 million take was the only revenue increase in the area. While the Harrah’s Entertainment/Ameristar Casinos pair of Maryland Heights riverboats continues to dominate the market with a 57% share, Pinnacle Entertainment‘s late-blooming Lumiere Place continues to suck customers away from the competition, being essentially flat year/year while everybody else slipped 2% or more.
Even though the President is a money-losing proposition for Pinnacle, lawmakers may intervene to keep Missouri regulators from stripping its license. After all, if every casino whose bilges were filling with red ink was de-licensed for that reason, the U.S. casino industry would become considerably emaciated at present. The Missouri Gaming Commission‘s weak reasoning attempts to put a legalistic rationale on a very real frustration: Although the President is a charity case, Pinnacle clings to it as a means of playing keep-away with the Show-Me State’s 13th and final license. That’s a license that could go to a new and more lucrative casino, so watching Pinnacle prop up its failing riverboat is understandably irksome, at least if your brief is to help generate tax revenue for Jefferson City.
You or I might think the company’s game is just not cricket. Pinnacle is certainly facing the karmic consequences of persuading voters to bar the state to new entrants (unless an existing casino goes out of business or is sold). Hell, if the President sank at its moorings, Pinnacle would probably put a slot machine in a lifeboat and declare, “Business as usual.” But that’s a situation that Missouri voters countenanced (to the extent that they pondered the ins and outs of the gaming bidness). If the MGC is going to make Admiral Goeglein and Captain Giovenco walk the plank, it’s going to have to demonstrate that the President is a menace to life and limb or something comparably dire. Besides, why deprive us of the piquant spectacle of Pinnacle deliberately inflicting financial losses on itself lest somebody, somewhere else in Missouri should get to open one more casino?
