In their first month back after closures due to the novel coronavirus (Covid-19), Nevada casino revenue reached $566.8m, down 45.6% year-on-year, with sportsbooks in the state reporting their first monthly loss in almost seven years.
Nevada casinos were permitted to reopen on 4 June after closing in mid-March due to the novel coronavirus (Covid-19) outbreak. June’s results therefore included the full range of casino games for the first time since March.
Revenue for June, incidentally, was down 8.3% compared to March’s total.
The state’s $566.8m in revenue came on player stakes totalling $8.20bn, down 31.4% from June 2019.
Of this revenue total, $394.1m came from slot machines, a 28.1% year-on-year decline, as players staked $7.04bn, down 24.1%.
Revenue from table games including betting on sports and racing, meanwhile, fell 57.3% to $172.7m on stakes of $1.16bn, down 52.2%. As part of its reopening guidelines, Nevada issued limits on the number of players who may sit at a single gaming table. These limits included three players per blackjack table, six players per craps table, four players per roulette table and four players per poker table.
Blackjack was the most popular table game, bringing in $54.5m (down 39.5%), on stakes of $397.0m, a 36.6% drop.
Baccarat, which had seen the largest stakes every month casinos were open since November 2019, slipped to second, as players bet $352.4m from which casinos generated revenue of $47.5m.
Craps revenue fell 45.4% to $19.9m on stakes of $109.2m and roulette revenue fell 50.0% to $16.5m on bets totalling $74.5m.
Texas hold ‘em poker revenue fell 43.5% to $5.5m, three-card poker revenue dropped 59.7% to $4.1m and Pai Glow poker revenue fell 45.2% to $4.6m.
The Board published sports betting figures for the first time since March, after redacting figures for April and May. This was in order to obscure the amount collected from online poker, as Caesars Entertainment’s WSOP.com brand is the lone online poker brand in the state and the Nevada Gaming Control Board is not permitted to provide figures for a single operator.
Sportsbooks in the state handled wagers of $77.9m in June, down 75.9% year-on-year, but made a loss of $483,000, their first loss since July 2013.
Of this $77.9m, $61.7m was staked online, with the remaining $16.2m bet in person. Online revenue came to $2.3m.
The loss was primarily due to retail payouts on football bets from prior months, such as those related to the NFL Draft in April, from which operators lost $5.3m. This was around seven times higher than the losses posted for June 2019, despite customers staking just $991,000 on the sport.
A total of $9.7m was bet on baseball, generating revenue of $1.4m, while $5.6m was bet on basketball, producing $296,000 in revenue. Sportsbooks also made a loss of $185,000 on hockey on $212,000 worth of bets.
Other sports generated revenue of $3.3m, down 27.1%, but these were the most popular form of action among punters, as players bet $61.6m on these sports, up 1.5% year-on-year.
Casinos in Clark County, which includes Las Vegas, took in gross gaming revenue of $441.0m, down 51.4% year-on-year, making $281.8m from slots, down 46.1%, and $159.3m from table games, down 58.5%.
Casinos on the Las Vegas strip had a particularly slow recovery, with revenue coming to $238.3m, down 61.4% year-on-year. Slot revenue fell 59.6% to $113.3m and table game revenue declined 62.8% to $125.0m.
Players spent $1.87bn on slots and $848.3m on table games on the Strip in June, for combined stakes of $2.72bn.