Two years ago Indian gaming achieved a record year for growth. Alan Meister’s annual Casino City’s Indian Gaming Industry Report showed that in 2014 that tribal gaming broke records for the fifth consecutive year, reaching an unprecedented .0 billion, nearly 2 percent higher than the year before.
Meister’s work took in 489 tribal casinos in 28 states run by 243 tribes and encompassing 352,000 slot machines and 7,800 gaming tables.
Tribal gaming and commercial gaming are running neck and neck, with tribal gaming accounting for 43.5 percent of the gaming market and commercial casinos account for 44.2 percent.
However there are great disparities between the two sectors. California and Oklahoma, the two-best performing states, accounted for 39 percent of the revenues, with the top ten states accounting for 85 percent. Twenty states saw revenues climb while they went down in eight. Moreover growth has never bounced back to the prerecession days of 4 percent, last achieved in 2007.
Non-gaming amenities grew by 5 percent. According to Meister, “The faster growth of nongaming revenue is indicative of the importance of nongaming amenities in the evolution of Indian gaming facilities.”
Arizona is one of the states that has seen a growth in revenues for four consecutive years. In 2014 the state’s Indian casinos made $1.82 billion. Arizona is just behind California, Oklahoma, Florida and Washington in revenues.
In February the Yavapai-Prescott Indian Tribe announced that it would be building a new casino resort in the Prescott area.
Meanwhile, California’s record Indian gaming levels could actually put the kibosh on efforts to legalize iPoker in the Golden State. Several bills have been introduced over the past several years. None have been successful.
The most recent iteration is AB 2863. Although several tribes are pushing the bill, different factions are deeply divided over the issue. The fact that tribal gaming revenues continues to climb may have removed any sense of urgency by the various coalitions.
The bill’s authors, Assemblymen Adam Gray and Reggie Jones-Sawyer. The bill limits licenses to either tribal casinos or card rooms. Major poker brands, such as PokerStars, would need to pair up with a tribal casino to enter the market.
This bill’s future is expected to reach a crisis point in the next few weeks. But a comfortable cushion of gaming profits could prevent it from being considered urgent enough to unite all of the disparate elements and pass it.
