Las Vegas Baccarat Revenue Continues to Rise
Recent times have seen a great deal of negative financial news from Las Vegas. For instance, in January this year, revenue was down 3.8% year-on-year from the famous Las Vegas Strip. However, there has also been an increase in baccarat play, which has given economists and industry experts reason to be optimistic about the future of the high-end casinos on the Strip.
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High Roller Baccarat Players Boost Revenue
While the aforementioned figures relate to January, the month before was very different, with a record $905 million in gaming revenue, which represents an 11.2% increase on December 2022.
Baccarat is a high roller game and plays a significant role in increasing revenue for the Las Vegas Strip. Win from the game reached $218.7 million, which was an incredible 50.1% increase on the previous year. Furthermore, baccarat volume grew to $839.5 million, the highest it has been since the pandemic, showing that high-roller gaming is making a steady comeback.
Wall Street analyst John DeCree also highlighted the fact that there was impressive baccarat performance in November, which coincided with the first Formula One race to be held in Las Vegas. He said that the win from table games in both months had been boosted by baccarat and that this was a reason to be optimistic for the Strip’s higher-end properties.
January was a very strong month for Nevada as a whole, with gambling revenue up 0.8% year-on-year at $1.28 billion. However, there was a decline in table, counter and card games revenue. It fell 7.5% to $393.5 million in January. Revenue from craps, blackjack and roulette all fell. In contrast, baccarat saw revenue increase by 8% to $98 million.
Impressive Yearly Results for Baccarat
Baccarat didn’t just perform well in isolated months, it also performed admirably when looking at the Strip’s gaming total for 2023. There was a 10.6% increase in table game revenue to $4.1 billion and high-end baccarat accounted for $1.5 billion of this.
This was the Strip’s third-highest yearly total ever for baccarat, close to 30% more than in 2022. More than $8.8 billion was bet on baccarat, which was a 13.5% increase from 2022. Furthermore, Strip casinos won a total of 16.6% of baccarat bets, the most they have done in the last two decades.
Further Reasons for Optimism
As noted at the start of the article, while baccarat revenue is performing well, it is not all good news from the Las Vegas Strip. For instance, towards the end of January, Caesars Entertainment announced that it expected to see a loss from the fourth quarter because of its Strip venues.
However, more recently, a gaming analyst at Truist Securities, Barry Jonas, wrote in a research note that “Strip results are solid, despite some mixed commentary from Caesars.” He also pointed out that results from the Las Vegas local gaming market have been strong.
A similar sentiment was expressed by DeCree, who highlighted a 6.5% year-over-year rise in December gaming revenue for local casinos.
Furthermore, more than 40.8 million people visited Las Vegas in 2023, the largest single-year total since the pandemic. December 2023 saw close to 3.4 million visitors, a 2.7% increase on the same month in 2022. The annual total was 5.2% higher than in 2022 and the highest since 2019.
The Super Bowl LVIII took place at the start of February, which is likely to have attracted a number of high rollers, so strong baccarat results can be expected once again and analysts will be eagerly anticipating the publication of February’s figures. In other words, there are multiple reasons to be optimistic about the future of the Las Vegas Strip so those who prefer a high-end casino to online baccarat do not have to worry for the foreseeable future.
