Average Rivers Casino hourly pay ranges from approximately $8.66 per hour for Bartender to $25.00 per hour for Casino Dealer. The average Rivers Casino salary ranges from approximately $27,000 per year for Cage Cashier to $107,509 per year for Slot Attendant. This means that an average bar makes between $25,000 and $30,000 a week, assuming average-priced drinks of $8, average main dishes of $13 and average appetizers of $6. Most money made by a nightclub comes from alcohol sales, and bars can make between a 200 to 400 percent margin on drinks served, which can mean a healthy profit for the owner.
If you’re entertaining dreams of owning your own casino one day, you’ll need anywhere from a few thousand dollars to a few billion.
The casino business is so lucrative that every time a new casino opens as “the most expensive casino ever built,” investors pop champagne bottles and raise a toast. It wasn’t always that way. Only a few decades ago, casino operators built on slim budgets.
Steve Wynn gambled big in the late ‘80s when he opened The Mirage in Las Vegas. Wynn and his backers invested an unheard-of $630 million in the new casino. At the time, industry analysts calculated the casino would have to turn an average daily profit of at least $1 million to meet its financial obligations.
The Mirage was supposed to pay for itself over seven years. Wynn paid off the debt in less than two years. That works out to more than $4 million profit per day.
In 2019 dollars, that isn’t so bad. If a casino has only 1,000 gaming machines, it can turn a $5 million daily profit just by retaining an average $1000 per machine.
According to a 2015 Las Vegas Sun article, about 40 million people visited Las Vegas on an annual basis at that time. That works out to nearly 110,000 visitors to Las Vegas daily. There are just over 100 casinos in Las Vegas.
In 2017, it was then reported that annual visitors had climbed to more than 42 million.
If each visitor loses only an average of $100 per day, Las Vegas is raking in $11 million in casino earnings every day. The reality is much more startling.
In 2013, the University of Nevada, Las Vegas published a study on the daily revenues of the 23 big casinos on the Strip. To be included in the study, a casino had to produce gaming revenue at least $72 million a year. The average for each of the big 23 turned out to be over $230 million per year.
That’s a far cry since The Mirage opened in 1989, but competition has changed the city’s gaming industry. Here is a deeper look at what it costs to build a casino.
Location, Location, Location
If you want to build a casino for as little as possible, buy cheap land. Where that wicket becomes sticky is in finding the right land. Not only do you need favorable laws allowing gambling and zoning for casinos, but you also need at least a good nearby highway.
Las Vegas is a hub for three Interstate highways and several US highways. The city is also home to McCarran International Airport. About 40 million passengers pass through the airport every year.
Considering AmTrak carries passengers to the city as well, tourists visit the city by car, bus, train, and plane.
If you decide to build your own casino, lacking the transportation channels that Las Vegas boasts means your location will attract fewer annual visitors. This probably explains why few cities dominate the casino industry. The casinos need both good zoning and access to transportation to attract visitors.
Hence, you should expect to pay a lot of money for the land.
Size Counts In Every Way
The Mirage currently boasts about 2,000 slot machine games. While that sounds like a lot, the WinStar World Casino in Thackerville, OK has about six times the floor space as The Mirage. The WinStar opened in 2003, making it 14 years younger than The Mirage.
According to their website in 2019, the WinStar holds about 8400 slot machines. They also have a 55-table poker room, all squeezed into 400,000 feet of floor space. If you want to compete with the WinStar, you’ll need a lot of floor space and thousands of more games.
Amazingly, Thackerville only has one Intestate highway passing through it. The nearest international airport is in Dallas, TX. WinStar is competing on size and landscape.
The casino is owned and operated by the Chickasaw Nation, who had plenty of available land for development. That’s an advantage over the average commercial developer. By owning the land as part of their reservation, they were able to invest more in creating a high-quality resort.
You Need a Hotel and Restaurant
One reason why good casinos cost so much to build is the bigger casinos contain or are paired with big hotels. By providing their visitors with safe, comfortable accommodations, they ensure those visitors spend more time in their gaming areas.
On-site entertainment and dining venues enhance the hotel and casino experience. The farther away from Vegas and Atlantic City one gets in the United States, the less extravagant the casinos tend to become.
Only a handful of states and cities allow commercial casinos to congregate in their jurisdictions. The demand for suitable land limits the competition.
Biloxi, MS is North America’s third big commercial casino hub.
In Biloxi, venues like Beau Rivage, Treasure Bay, and Hard Rock offer attractive accommodations and gaming areas.
The Beau Rivage may be the best known of the Biloxi casinos. They only offer about 1800 slot games. Owned by MGM Resorts, Beau Rivage promotes its hotel, entertainment, dining, and nightlife venues equally with the casino.
These are not afterthoughts. They are part and parcel major pieces of the whole package.
According to Fixr.com, the average cost of a hotel in the United States is just over $22 million. A hotel comparable to the resorts at WinStar or Beau Rivage will easily set you back in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
Factor in the Cost of Games
Assuming the hypothetical new casino brings in a lot of slot machines, how much do they cost?
The website HowMuchIsIt.org rounds up a list of price ranges for popular slot machines. Expect to pay at least several thousand dollars per basic game. The enhanced games may run $30,000 or more for the consoles.
Assuming you pay $20,000 for a brand new game and begin with a small investment of 500 machines, expect to finance about $10 million just for the slot machines.
If you can bring enough people in, the games should pay for themselves in only a few months. That’s not so bad.
However, the games will need to be maintained. A new casino must include the cost of hiring qualified staff or for paying authorized service contracts.
Plant Operations Are Expensive
Whether you’re building a roadside casino with 100 machines or planning a massive resort with more than a handful of casino games, the buildings will need electricity, water, heating and air systems, sewage, and maintenance areas.
A large resort has a plant facility with workshops, storage rooms, receiving areas, and more. Even a small casino needs a place to service machines and receive products and services.
Assuming a modest 200-room hotel is built on the property, it will have its own plant facility. Ditto for a small restaurant.
This new casino will need tools and equipment no one thinks about when pushing buttons and counting cards. There are lighting systems, sound systems, security systems, communication systems, and staff offices.
Employees will need dressing rooms and lockers, or at least their own break room.
Administration will need at least one office, maybe two if there is a dedicated full-time security team.
The cashiers will need a counting room and vault.
All these facilities must be built out, equipped, and brought online. This is all before you hire your first employee.
Conclusion
If the idea of building a new casino seems crazy, it is. This is an industry for billionaires and rich investment fund managers to play in. It’s not for the faint-hearted or small business person.
It’s true there are hundreds of small casinos that do just fine. With only a few dozen to a few hundred games, they cater to local customers. They don’t need big highways, trains, and airports.
Even so, the cost of setting up a small commercial will run into the millions of dollars. Most communities won’t accept commercial casinos. Most states don’t license them. The Native American tribes may contract with casino management companies but only the big ones.
In short, it costs a lot of money to open a casino. Buying one is out of the question for most people. Donald Trump is believed to have lost about $1 billion in investors’ money by trying to buy his way into Atlantic City.
Short of inheriting a small fortune or casino, this kind of development is one game well beyond the reach of typical investors and small business owners.
The more you lose, the more casinos win. ( Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
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Gambling is good business, or at least a profitable one. According to the American Gaming Association, in 2012 the 464 commercial casinos in the U.S. served 76.1 million patrons and grossed $37.34 billion.
Each year gaming revenues in the U.S. yield more profits than the theatrical movie industry ($10.9 billion) and the recorded music industry ($7 billion) combined. Even the $22.5 billion combined revenue of the four major U.S. sports leagues is dwarfed by earnings from the commercial casinos industry.
Gambling is such good business that despite reported negative impacts — such as increased poverty and unemployment, higher crime rates, and decreased property value in nearby neighborhoods — the state of Illinois early this year passed a law to allow slot machines in all establishments that sell alcohol.
Gambling is not just common, it's also accepted. Despite the fact that for an estimated 4 percent of the population gambling represents a problematic and even pathological addiction, 85 percent of Americans feel that gambling is either perfectly acceptable for themselves or if not themselves for others in a country where more than 20 states now allow some form of commercial casino.
It's not too hard to see why casino lobbyists believe casinos make a positive contribution to the communities in which they operate.
It's far less easy to understand why so many Americans enjoy gambling even though it tends to result in the loss of money.
You lose, the casino wins
As a general rule, we tend to repeat behavior that produces desirable results and avoid behaviors that result in loss. We repeat jokes that people laughed at, choose jobs that we enjoy and that pay the most money, and avoid behaviors that produce fines. Following this logic, one would expect a gambler to only play as long as they are winning and then cut their losses when they begin to lose.
Yet gambling appears to operate differently; players play faster after losses and bet persistently regardless of the percentage of payback, magnitude of return, or the lack of winning entirely. So what encourages gambling behavior if losing occurs more frequently, and payouts do not exceed buy-ins?
One explanation is that gamblers poorly judge the actual probability of winning, even as their pile of tokens and coins dwindles before them.
Some examples of this phenomenon can easily be seen in the language of gamblers. 'My luck is going to turn,' 'A win is coming,' or 'I am on a hot streak,' are all statements that speak to an over-confidence in one's ability to predict functionally random events.
Gamblers will often say these things after an unusual series of outcomes, for example, ten straight losses on red at roulette. The gambler may then proceed to bet more on red, in the false hope that the next spin is more likely to come up red due to the overall probability of the game (50 percent chance of red).
This flawed logic is called 'The Gambler's Fallacy.' It stems from a misunderstanding of how probabilities are assessed; in fact the outcome of the previous spin of the roulette wheel has no influence on the outcome of the next spin. The probability of red remains stubbornly fixed at 50 percent.
Missed it by that much
Another example of how gamblers misjudge losing outcomes can be seen when individuals respond to losses that are similar in appearance to a win. Receiving two out of three symbols necessary to win on a slot machine is a loss but players often respond to this 'near miss' with excitement, increased betting and more persistent play.
How Much Money Do Casino Owners Make A Year
Winning and almost winning are such similar events to many people that they respond in the same way to both. People pause, for example, for longer after a win than a loss. This is known as a 'post-reinforcement pause.' People often pause for longer after a near-miss.
It's no accident near misses are pretty common on slot machines.Mark/Flickr, CC BY-SA
Winning and almost winning are so alike in gamblers' brains that research on the dopamine-transmitting pathways of anticipation and reward show remarkably similar activation patterns for a near-miss and a win.
Near-miss effects are not limited to outcomes that look similar to win. Outcomes that are closer to a win in a more abstract sense also cause a similar response.
For instance, the near-miss effect has been demonstrated in games where 'nearly winning' might relate to scoring a number that is close to a winning number, such as in blackjack.
Near-miss outcomes are not the only form of almost winning that contributes to the behavioral confusion faced by gamblers. Modern slot machines also present a myriad of features that are designed to confuse outcomes.
Slot confusion
One feature present in almost every modern slot machine is the partial win or 'loss disguised as a win.'
Since slot machines have gone from the traditional 3-reel 1-line slot machine to the modern 5-reel video slot, often with 25 or more winning lines, near-miss outcomes have become almost unidentifiable from other losing outcomes.
By encouraging individuals to play on more than one line, casinos have created a scenario where players are awarded a win on almost every spin.
Despite the increased frequency of winning, the proportion of money returned is often far less than the entire bet, such as winning 10 cents on a 50 cent bet. This 80 percent loss is accompanied by the same sounds on the machine as a real win and occupies the same area of the screen that wins are reported in.
Since noticing near-misses on modern slot machines is difficult, game makers have incorporated other game features such as free-spin symbols, mini-games, and progressive awards, which create new near miss situations while often not guaranteeing any increased value of a win themselves.
![How Much Does Casino Owners Make How Much Does Casino Owners Make](/uploads/1/3/5/8/135861438/890496600.jpg)
For example, special symbols might be placed on the reels that provide 10 free spins whenever three appear anywhere within the game screen. These symbols will often make a special sound, such as a loud thud when they land; and if two symbols land, many games will begin to play fast tempo music, display flashing lights around the remaining reels, and accelerate the rate of spin to enhance the saliency of the event.
When you win these sorts of outcomes you feel as though you have won a jackpot; after all, 10 free spins is 10 times the chances to win big money right? The reality is that those 10 free spins do not change the already small probability of winning on any given spin and are still likely to result in a loss of money. For many games, features such as this have entirely replaced standard jackpots.
These features share one important characteristic: they allow the casinos the ability to provide more outcomes that feel like a win while not increasing the actual payout. The effect of these features is so significant that in 1989 the Nevada Gaming Commission banned algorithms that purposefully increased the prevalence of near-miss outcomes. Of course, this only applied to the intentional increasing of near misses when a loss is already determined, i.e. artificially producing a near miss instead of what the reels would have normally landed on.
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Unfortunately, these laws do not preclude the intentional design of reel layouts that, without additional manipulation, produce frequent near misses and losses disguised as wins. These laws also do not apply to the newer game features which either highlight the near miss, such as accelerating reels, or create entirely new topographies of outcomes, as is the case with free-spins or mini-games.
While the question of how to best manage artificial manipulations of near misses may be a topic of future regulatory discussion, the decision to play games with these illusions will ultimately fall upon the end user.
Average Casino Profit
As long as you are willing to expose yourself to the game in the first place, the casino need only sit back and wait. And with increasing availability of casinos across the U.S., they won't need to wait long.
The authors do not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article. They also have no relevant affiliations.
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