It was a historic moment as the Chicago Cubs managed to take the World Series for the first time in over 100 years, which was a cause for celebration throughout the city of Chicago and from fans all across the country. Illinois fans made it pretty well known that they were happy about the victory, but these celebrations and excitement were not good for everyone. Illinois’s trusty neighbor Indiana is home to an abundance of casinos that have reported that the Cubs victory caused them to see a 5% drop in revenue for the month of October.
There are five casinos in Indiana that managed to earn $80.72 million last year during the month of October, but this month they only saw earnings of $77.6 million. Granted, that’s still quite an income for these establishments, but this is less than what they have seen previously. Based on what the Indiana Gaming Commission reported, this is actually less than what they’ve seen for the past couple of years.
Dan Nita, who is the general manager for the Horseshoe Hammond Casino, stated that there was a ton of excitement surrounding the cubs win and you could definitely tell that the area was hit by baseball fever. Throughout the month there had been fifteen playoff games, and a number of these were occurring during the weekend. The weekend is the busiest time of the week for gaming venues because that’s when most people seek out entertainment, and with so many people instead focusing on the Cubs they were seeing a drop in customers.
According to Nita, casinos were seeing business as usual up until about 6pm in the afternoon on the weekends. This is about the time that playoff games would start, and so many of the customers would leave to go watch the Cubs play instead. Nita isn’t the only manager to affirm this, as the Ameristar Casino General Manager Matt Schuffert also cited that there is a drastic decrease in casino traffic whenever a Chicago sports team is performing well during the important part of the season. This has a negative impact on casino customer numbers and revenue.
Despite this, the Majestic Star I that is located in Gary actually saw an increase in their earnings and raked in $7.26 million during October. In the previous year they had only earned about $7.04 million, so this was actually good for them. It’s likely that outside factors played a role in the increase in revenue, which would have been higher if it wasn’t baseball season and the Cubs were not performing as well as they had been. Other casinos in the area did not see the same results.
While everyone is very happy with the results of the World Series and it seems that the Chicago Cubs have finally broken their curse, it did come at the expense of gaming venues who are more than likely pleased with the season drawing to a close.