As ever, most of the blame can be laid at baccarat’s door, as the vertical’s revenue fell 12.4% to $169.6m. The comparison is a bit misleading, as August 2013’s baccarat revenue was up 55% over the previous year thanks to a 19% hold. August 2014’s baccarat hold was a still healthy but more mortal 16%. Mini-baccarat fared much worse, recording a $4m loss for the month as win rate fell to -3.3%.
By comparison, blackjack had a very good month, rising 11.4% to $103m, while craps fell 5% to $31.4m, narrowly beating roulette’s $31m, which was basically flat. The rest of the table games reported as follows: three-card poker ($12.2m, -3.7%), pai gow poker ($9.7m, +11%), let it ride ($3.2m, +0.5%), keno ($2.5m, +3%), pai gow ($1m, -48%) and bingo brought up the rear with a whopping $62k (-76%). Slots revenue was down less than 1% to $522.7m.
Brick-and-mortar poker revenue fell 4.6% to $9m, while the state’s three licensed online poker rooms reported just $742k, down from $958k in July and even further off the $1.04m peak recorded in June, which benefited from the influx of players attending the World Series of Poker.
Nevada sportsbooks saw revenue tumble 20.3% to $11.4m, despite setting an all-time betting handle record for the month of August. The books kept a healthy 17.4% of all football wagers, but that was down from an even better 20% last August, which limited football revenue to a modest 5.2% gain to $10m. Baseball revenue fell 36% to $3.3m as hold fell to 2.8% from 4.3% last August. ‘Other’ sports recorded a $1.6m loss, while laggard basketball bettors cashing in winning tickets resulted in a $938k loss. Parlay cards were flat at $613k and Nevada’s pari-mutuel racing fell 5.9% to $4.5m.