Revel gets forgiveness; Illinois gets hammered

You’ve heard about the “Gamblers Wanted” marketing campaign at Revel that refunds slot refunds over $100 — if you’re a member of the players’ club. There’s another catch: You don’t get a cash refund but additional free play, doled forth in small, weekly installments. I have to say that Randall Fine is fiendishly clever to have dreamt this up. Best of all, it actually seems to be achieving its objective of bringing the bread-and-butter gamblers to Revel.

In the meantime, CEO Jeffrey Hartmann utters one of the greatest understatements of the 21st century, when he says of Revel’s rollout, “We’ve made a lot of mistakes.” True that. It’s magnanimous of Hartmann to include himself in the blame but he wasn’t on the scene. Kevin DeSanctis was … and he’s still on the payroll. If only our own screwups were ‘punished’ in like manner. (Trump Taj Mahal has a ‘better mousetrap’ of its own: lapdancing.)

Slot routes slammed Illinois casinos last month. That’s what I’m forced to conclude after June brought a 10% drop in Illinois riverboat revenues ($131 million, gross). Whenever you think the Land of Lincoln’s gambling industry has fallen as far it possibly can, the bottom drops out again. One of the strangest storylines is Penn National Gaming versus itself in the St. Louis market. Now that Penn is firmly entrenched at the old Harrah’s Maryland Heights casino, in Missouri, it seems to have sounded the death knell for Alton Belle (once the flagship of Argosy Gaming), whose revenues plummeted 27%. Penn’s upstate casinos, by contrast, were only 4% off last year’s pace.

Rivers Casino (left) hit a nasty speed bump, falling 17%, although its $35 million gross vastly outperforms every other Illinois casino. (At $17 million, Harrah’s Joliet is the closest competitor.) No one’s revenues increased compared to 2012, but the Rivers numbers suggest the competitors like MGM Resorts International‘s Grand Victoria (-4%) are starting to claw back business from the newcomer. But for the Illinois Lege to add more casinos in expectation of making more money would be textbook insanity: Doing the same thing and expecting a different result.

Ohio casino results for June came out today and, having belabored the matter recently, I won’t bore you with the details. The only newsworthy item is that Horseshoe Cincinnati is doing an industry-average $206 per slot per day. Given its location and feeder markets, wasn’t it supposed to be performing better?