Churchill Downs Inc., owner of America’s most well-liked horse racing event, has long been a little bit of an enigma in the online gaming space.
On one hand, Churchill can only really be believed of as a heavyweight. The business founded TwinSpires back in 2007, which these days remains one of the country’s most popular wagering websites. And their 2014 acquisition of Big Fish Games, a “freemium” gaming business, was turned about and resold just three years later for more than $100 million more than the buy cost.
Yet Churchill Downs has struggled to find its location in on-line poker or casino gaming. Following acquiring Bluff Media in 2012 on speculation that online poker would soon be prevalent about the United states, they ended up mainly folding the operation just a couple of short years later, at a time when just 3 states had legal on-line poker and Churchill was not involved in any of them.
Now that Pennsylvania has legalized on-line casinos and poker, Churchill is once once more making noise around the industry and has acquired Presque Isle Downs Casino.
Will the horse racing giant lastly become a fixture inside a regulated US online gambling?
In early 2012, when the table was initially becoming set for legal online gambling to come to the US, Churchill was clearly one of probably the most aggressive companies when it came to staking out their position in what appeared to become an enormous development market. Offshore poker had been kneecapped by indictments against a number of from the biggest sites, but on-line poker was nonetheless thriving in much from the globe.
The Bluff acquisition was the centerpiece of Churchill’s ambition to be a significant player in US online poker as soon as legalization occurred – an outcome they believed was quickly around the way. While Bluff, like most poker media businesses, had been hurt badly by the industry’s fall, Churchill was rumored to possess paid top dollar for assets that integrated a number of print magazines, web sites and an online tournament results database.
Integrated in that purchase was the Bluff.com domain, which numerous believed would one day be the brand of their on-line poker providing.
Whilst the move to purchase Bluff Media was surely a good for its prior owners, it turned out to be premature for Churchill Downs Inc. Three and a half years following the purchase, the prospects for federal online poker legislation had been all but dead, and Churchill’s genuine cash poker site was nowhere to become found. A talented team of employees was stuck without a path to profitability, and also the project was shut down indefinitely.
Given the way state-by-state online gambling legislation has proceeded to this point, it’s hard to blame Churchill Downs – among other people – for staying out of the mix. As lately as October of 2017, it looked as though a fifth straight year would go by with out any new states legalizing on-line poker and/or casinos.
But things are altering, and not just in Pennsylvania. New states are taking a deeper take a look at gambling expansion, such as various combinations of sports betting, on-line poker, every day fantasy sports, online casinos and on-line lotteries. The legislative map changes often, and we appear to become talking about various states nearly every month. However the general picture is progress. State governments have noticed the success of on-line gambling in New Jersey and are looking to replicate it.
Meanwhile, Churchill Downs Inc. understood that to be a player in this new game, they needed to expand their brick and mortar portfolio into states exactly where on-line gambling has been legalized – some thing they had attempted but failed to do in New Jersey a few years prior. They did just that with their acquisition of Presque Isle Downs – a racetrack and Category 1 casino close to Erie, PA. Whilst the newly acquired home should be an immediate revenue generator based on its present business, it’s clear Churchill has its eye on entry into the iGaming space.
Whether or not the Bluff brand comes back into play is anyone’s guess – it is been mainly dormant for the much better component of 3 years. But you can bet the farm Churchill will have an internet casino presence in Pennsylvania.
Pennsylvania’s going to be a tough marketplace for on-line casinos and poker sites, with substantial taxes and charges to overcome before reaching profitability. It is still to be determined just how much competition there will actually be.
Churchill Downs Inc., however, is difficult to bet against within the space. They’ve had achievement with freemium casino games and have operated a premier wagering website for more than a decade. The odds are affordable they are able to figure out how to be effective with an online casino as well. As their stock cost indicates, they’ve carried out fairly nicely in the majority of their ventures the past couple of years.
Poker’s a different story, with the key aspect usually being liquidity. And whilst rivals may quickly have the ability to draw upon the population of as many as four different states, Churchill would likely be confined to just 1. It is possible they stay out of that game entirely and instead concentrate on casino, sports and racing. It appears unlikely they’d get involved in poker unless they found a way to network with an existing website in New Jersey – a challenging prospect in itself.
General, I would classify the Churchill Downs acquisition of Presque Isle Downs as one which will possess a substantial influence on the state’s on-line gambling market, using the caveat that it might not matter much or at all for poker. In whichever verticals they do participate, anticipate them to become gunning for the leading.