The most galling element of Mississippi’s backwards gaming regulation is the absence of statewide mobile betting–due primarily to the large population of fundamentalist religious nuts. There are a few clear thinking legislators that understand its importance but so far that hasn’t been enough to get it done: The state has retail sports betting but refuses to expand it to online/mobile access. The biggest ‘legacy casino market’ in the US–the state of Nevada–has done just fine so maybe this *isn’t* the problem in Mississippi. Increasingly difficult year-over-year comparisons were felt heavily in legacy casino markets Mississippi and South Dakota and reflect the strength of the consumer gaming market in spring 2021 as operating restrictions were lifted. sports betting market (-32.0%), as well as Kansas (-0.3%), Mississippi (-1.2%) and South Dakota (-1.6%) that are down by low single digits from last year’s pace. Bucking that growth trend is the idiosyncratic D.C. Through April, nearly all commercial gaming states are tracking well ahead of where they were at this point in 2021. The American Gaming Association (AGA) kindly blames Mississippi’s struggles on ‘the difficult year-over-year comparisons’ of the gaming industry’s rebound following the removal of COVID restrictions in 2021: Compared to pre-pandemic levels, visitation was down in April an average of 12.3 percent across the five states. Mississippi casinos registered the largest decline (-12.9%) while Illinois casinos welcomed the highest number of visitors – 806,302 – since before the pandemic. They also registered the largest casino visitation decline of any of the states that track this information (only five do):Ĭasino visitation levels were down year-over-year in April in four of the five states that report admission data (IL, IA, LA, MS, MO). Mississippi is one of only three gaming markets in the US that has seen a revenue decline from 2021 to 2022. The situation is somewhat better on the Gulf Coast where Biloxi and surrounding areas have a dozen or so casinos. Jesse Jackson gave Tunica County the charming sobriquet of ‘America’s Ethiopia’ though not inappropriate since 29% of the residents live in poverty. What is mentioned less frequently is the mismanagement of the state’s gaming industry by Mississippi politicians and regulators. ![]() The ‘party line’ is that it fell victim to the expansion of gaming nationally and that is certainly part of it. Employment in Tunica casinos is now less than one third of what it was ‘back in the day’. For a while, Tunica was the third largest casino market in the US behind Las Vegas and Atlantic City but that is no longer the case. The original epicenter for Mississippi casinos was Tunica, just under an hour south of Memphis, Tennessee. Mississippi is significant as it was the first decent casino ecosystem outside of the traditional strongholds of Nevada and New Jersey. I wrote about the decline of Tunica earlier this year: ![]() The fortunes of the Tunica gaming industry have been on the decline for over a decade. MGM will also receive a reduction in their annual rent to VICI Properties by $40 million USD when the deal closes in early 2023. Late last week, they announced they had reached an agreement to sell the operations of the Gold Strike Tunica in Tunica, Mississippi to Cherokee Nation Entertainment Holdings in a deal worth $450 million USD. MGM Resorts has made no bones about their desire to offload some of their excess gaming and hotel capacity. MGM will retain the Beau Rivage Resort & Casino in Biloxi, Mississippi. ![]() Cherokee Nation Entertainment Holdings owns the Hard Rock Tulsa Casino along with nine other gaming properties in Oklahoma.MGM Resorts has reached an agreement to sell the operations of the Gold Strike Tunica to Cherokee Nation Entertainment Holdings in a deal worth $450 million USD.
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