Saracen Casino revenue climbs in ’23
Saracen Casino Resort had its next-best month ever in December, capping a year that saw the casino do almost 21% more business than in 2022, based on tax receipts and statewide gambling numbers.
The top month for the casino was March 2023. Getting close to that month, when tax refunds were coming in and betting on college basketball was reaching its frenzied conclusion, is a good sign, said Carlton Saffa, chief market officer for Saracen.
“We expect to have good months in March and April,” Saffa said. “People are never more liquid with cash than during tax time. We are no different than any other big business – Target, Walmart, mattress companies, Trotter Ford – you all do well during tax time. So it’s no surprise that we had our best month during tax refund season. What’s cool is that in December, we got that close to beating March. That bodes well for the next gambling cycle.”
The additional revenue also puts smiles on the faces of officials from Pine Bluff, which has received $14.5 million overall since the casino opened, and from Jefferson County, which has received $6 million.
Mayor Shirley Washington said having Saracen in Pine Bluff has allowed the city to give its employees raises and to put money back for a rainy day.
“Before Saracen, some of our city employees were making $19,000 a year,” she said. “You can’t make a living on that, and we had constant turnover. This has allowed us to give those employees raises as well as increase pay for police officers and firefighters.”
Washington said people come up to her to say they now have decent paying jobs.
“They say they’ve got a bank account for the first time,” she said. “It has helped transform our community.”
The city’s reserve funds have also climbed, thanks to Saracen, Washington said.
“When I got here the reserve fund – basically our savings account – was around $2 million,” she said. “We try to add at least $500,000 a year to that, and now it’s up around $7 million. That’s important because if something were to happen to the casino, we would have to be ready.”
County Judge Gerald Robinson also said the tax revenue from the casino had allowed the county to beef up its reserves.
“In the first few years, we took 70% of the revenue and put it into our reserves and 30% into county general,” Robinson said. “Once the reserves started building up, we went to 5050. Now we have what will likely be about $2 million in county general reserves, once the carryover money is allotted, and we also have built up reserves in several other departments, such as maintenance and operation of the adult jail, the road department and emergency response.”
The savings accounts are important, Robinson said, because if there are unforeseen events, such as from bad weather, the money to address those problems is in place.
“I’m thankful for the casino,” Robinson said. “I’m glad we made the decision to bring it here. It has created a lot of jobs, and they pay property taxes as well.
They have turned Pine Bluff into a destination spot.”
According to the Arkansas Racing Commission, which provides gambling numbers for the state’s three casinos – Oaklawn in Hot Springs, Southland in West Memphis and Saracen – Saracen paid about $21 million in gambling taxes in calendar 2022. Last year, that number was more than $25.4 million.
Out of that, the state gets 55%, Pine Bluff gets 19.5% and Jefferson County receives 8%. That means that in 2023, Pine Bluff took in almost $5 million, while the county received a little more than $2 million. The casino also pays a variety of other taxes, the same as any other business in town.
The casino opened an annex — across the street from what would become the full-fledged casino — in September 2019. About a year later, the casino opened, but it struggled in the early months because of the covid epidemic. The years 2022 and 2023 were not as bothered by such problems, but the increase in revenue last year did come at a time when gasoline prices and inflation were high.
One of the bigger changes of late has been Saracen’s mobile sports app, which is pushed on billboards and TV ads, and, as Saffa said, captures the majority of all mobile sports betting in the state.
“We’re doing about what we expected,” Saffa said. “We don’t take it for granted. Today, two-thirds of the mobile sports bets placed in the state are placed on our app. To show how important that aspect is to us, we had three meetings today on the sports app and one on the slots. This is an emerging and developing market. It’s very tech heavy and we still have a lot of runway to grow.”
Unlike someone buying a product online, where the sales tax goes to the municipality where the person lives, when someone bets on the sports app, that money might as well have been bet in Pine Bluff as far as the taxes are concerned.
“We do a ton of business in Northwest Arkansas and Jonesboro,” Saffa said. “But Pine Bluff and Jefferson County get the tax piece.”
Consequently, for 2023, Pine Bluff received about a half-million dollars from the gambling tax on Saracen’s sports app, and the county has received about half that.
Saffa said the beauty of the sports app is that it is as near as someone’s phone, meaning that the quality and ease of use are the most important factors, considering that customers have other options.
That is why Saracen continues to tweak the sports app. Most recently, the casino rolled out an option on the app called Betswap, the first of its kind in the country, Saffa said. Through Betswap, a customer can sell an ongoing parlay bet. They may have bet on the Detroit Lions to win the Super Bowl months ago, for instance, when the odds were very low of that happening. Now, though, with the Lions still in contention, that bet could be sold through the app to someone willing to pay much more for it than it originally cost.
“It’s one more reason to book bets with Saracen,” Saffa said.
Another area the app has dipped into is ping pong, known more formally as table tennis.
Saffa said that the interest may have developed during the covid era when table tennis was one of the few sporting events being played. For whatever reason, Arkansans in noticeably large numbers began following the sport and betting on it.
“We found a niche crowd that likes to watch table tennis,” Saffa said. “Now table tennis is very important to us, and we wanted to know how we can lean into it. In the end, we secured the rights to live-stream the games, which is something our customers really appreciate.”
Not to overlook the brick-and-mortar casino, it’s worth noting that more than $165 million was gambled on table games in December 2023, one of the larger months the casino has had. But even that element of Saracen’s business has changed. The number of slot machines used to be in the neighborhood of 2,000, but it’s down to 1,753 now and may drop a bit more, Saffa said.
“We call that ‘right-sizing,’ and it’s no different than the Krogers and Walmarts of the world in managing their floor space,” Saffa said. “When we opened, our floor, which is huge, looked like a corn field of machines. It was almost a warehouse of machines. Now we are spacing out the machines a little bit into smaller groups and putting more space between them. Harrah’s actually originated the idea, that being that you could increase volume by decreasing the number of machines. Our machines used to be like cigars in a cigar box, but now we are better able to showcase our machines and they’re better staged on the floor.”
What hasn’t changed, Saffa said, is that machines have to defend their own existence.
“If a machine is underperforming, then that game probably goes away,” he said. “I’m very proud of our slot team, headed by Lou Rosa. He is obsessed about having the latest and greatest machines on the floor. The proof is in the pudding. With fewer machines, our slot revenues are up.”
The casino is also looking at a major upgrade in its physical presence, with
construction starting on an event center
in 2023 and work to start on a 13-story hotel in a couple of months. Those projects, Saffa said, should be finished by the end of 2025.