The leading Maryland-based gaming and entertainment company with a solid presence across the country, Cordish Companies, opened its Live Casino Pittsburgh at Westmoreland Mall in Hempfield, Pennsylvania, nearly four years ago.

The premium gaming and entertainment location’s poker room will now undergo a renovation that has a price tag of $3 million. The works will see Live Casino Pittsburgh move its poker room from the second to the first floor of the casino.

Moreover, the space used by the poker room previously will be completely revamped into a Sports & Social restaurant and bar. In addition to a bar and restaurant, sports fans and bettors alike will be able to experience the thrill and excitement of a new lounge that will be used for a range of events.

Besides the relocation of its poker room, Live Casino Pittsburgh also plans to increase its high-limit gambling area. Three new gaming tables and slot machines will be added to the new 850-square-foot space. What’s more, a bar is also going to be added.

The poker room on the second floor marked its debut at the casino back in 2021. However, according to Sean Sullivan, Live Casino Pittsburgh’s general manager, who was recently interviewed by Trib Live, the relocation becomes a reality after the operator received customer feedback.

The exec said that the casino listened to its guests who admitted that the poker room may be left unnoticed on the second floor of the venue. Sullivan said that this vital feedback ultimately pushed the casino into the $3 million investment that will redevelop the existing poker room area and move it to a location near the entrance of the casino.

The New Poker Room Will Be More Visible, Easily Accessible

The new poker room location will make it more visible and is expected to even boost visitation. According to Sullivan, the move was necessary, considering that some people didn’t even notice the poker room at its current location.

The work required for the transfer of the poker room started about two weeks ago. Live Casino Pittsburgh anticipates that the redevelopment will be completed this October.

The new poker room will use a slightly smaller area in size. Overall, the space will be 1,050 square feet and will offer six table games with games such as Omaha and Texas Hold’em.

The announcement comes after recently, Bryan Prettyman was appointed by Cordish Companies to the role of SVP of property operations at its new Live! Casino and Hotel in Louisiana.

The property in Bossier City represents a $270 million investment and is expected to open its doors to visitors in the first quarter of 2025.

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Kindred Group, the principal club sponsor of Middlesbrough FC, has vowed to donate its front-of-shirt sponsorship space for the upcoming match against Millwall FC. According to the gambling operator, its logo will be temporarily replaced by the logo of the MFC Foundation.

Kindred, which is the company behind leading betting brands such as 32Red and Unibet, said that the move seeks to draw attention to the foundation’s award-winning work. MFC Foundation’s work consists in raising aspirations and improving the life chances of people across Teesside.

The increased visibility will promote the non-profit’s invaluable work. For reference, MFC Foundation’s activities are supported and funded by a number of influential commercial partners, such as Kindred Group.

Kindred is also a supporter of MFC Foundation’s Think With Your Feet, a program that enables local men to meet, play soccer and discuss their mental health issues.

In addition to donating its front-of-shirt sponsorship space for the upcoming match weekend, Kindred also donated its hospitality access to the Millwall fixture to participant from MFC Foundation’s Walking Football and East Cleveland Fitness sessions.

Under the agreement, Boro’s players will also wear MFC Foundation’s logo during the warm up session on Saturday.

Kindred Group Is Committed to Making a Change

Kindred Group’s managing director for the UK, Neil Banbury, explained that the company is determined to implement a new kind of sponsorship model. To that end, Kindred seeks to be a positive influence and promote initiatives such as the MFC Foundation’s programs.

We are in a position to positively influence clubs and communities and take that responsibility seriously. That’s why it’s great to be able to highlight MFC Foundation – and its range of work across the region – in this weekend’s game.

Neil Banbury, MD UK, Kindred Group

Meanwhile, Lynsey Edwards, MFC Foundation’s head, thanked Kindred for its support, praising the opportunity to reinforce the importance of MFC Foundation to the wider soccer community.

We’re grateful to the support from our partners that supports the varied work we do across the region, and we look forward to building on that in the months ahead.

Lynsey Edwards, head, MFC Foundation

In other news, Kindred recently added live casino content from OnAir Entertainment to its portfolio.

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Ontario iGaming has released a market report for the first quarter of 2023, and online casinos continue to hammer online single-event sports betting in the free commercial market. More than 80% of the action (83%) and over 70% of the nascent market’s revenues came from casino gaming rather than sports betting.

The numbers starkly contrast with some of the projected estimates coming out of the Canadian province before the market opening in early 2022. Those numbers seem to have all but disappeared from the news, being overwhelmed by the sheer reality of what it is in fact, that Canadians like to bet on casino games a lot more than they care to bet on sports.

iGaming Ontario Fiscal Year Began April 1

When referring to first quarter numbers, the information relates to (Q1) of the 2023-24 fiscal year which ran from April 1 through June 30, 2023.

Outside and casual observers might also be surprised which sports got the most action with basketball leading hockey by orders of magnitude. Sports bettors were “turned off” by betting ads all over television and other media and the country hasn’t won a Stanley Cup in ice hockey for three decades.

That being said, online casinos dominated the money story with over 5x as much in wagers ($11.6B vs $2.B) than sports betting but operator win was much less as a percentage of turnover, as is to be expected, when comparing the amount of money players left on the tables, in the virtual slots, and on the book. Casinos produced $392M in revenue as opposed to the $182M that betting generated.

The market currently has 71 gambling sites in operation, five less than at the end of the year but has picked up one additional operator. The number of active accounts has shrunken a bit as well to less than one million.

However, it must be kept in mind that it does not mean there are a million online gamblers in the province that play at regulated, taxed, and licensed websites as each account is counted separately.

The minimum number of participants could be as few as 12,958 or as many as 920,000. Among other reasons, since many operators only allow one bonus across all of their websites, it’s highly unlikely any but a small handful of customers have over 50 separate accounts, but it’s also a stretch to think that nearly anyone has less than half a dozen – making the probable number of actual active players fall somewhere on the lower end of the spectrum, but still in the hundreds of thousands.

The average spend per active player account during Q1 was $197.

Money wagered on slots was more than that wagered on all table games combined, and here again the apples and oranges must be sorted out. Slots spins happen more rapidly than table game bets in succession so the games will see a lot more betting, however, table game bets – both virtual and live dealer casino bets, are usually larger. Regardless, slots made up some 48% of all wagers while live casino games made up about 32% of all gaming wagers with virtual random number generator-based table games accounting for at least 8% of the remainder while peer-to-peer bingo games made up the rest.

This quarterly report was the first time that game-by-game volumes could be extracted from an iGaming Ontario report.

First Full-Year Numbers Released in Tandem

Following is a breakdown of the 2022/2023 fiscal year numbers (FY2022-23 – April 4, 2022, to March 31, 2023) as provided by the authority.

• Last year, casino games, including slots, live and computer-based table games as well as peer-to-peer bingo, accounted for nearly $28B (78%) of total wagers and $940M (67%) of gaming revenue.
• Betting, including traditional sports, esports, proposition, and novelty bets accounted for $7B (20%) of total wagers and $433M (31%) of gaming revenue last year.
• P2P poker accounted for $992M (3%) of total wagers and $40M (3%) of gaming revenue last year.

None of the numbers above in any section include Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corp. (OLG) information, which will be released at a later date. As such, it is not possible to directly infer any amount of direct losses or cannibalization to the long-existing Crown Corporation public/private partnership operation which formerly ran a monopoly on Canadian-licensed casino games through its PlayOLG website.

As always, Canadians in Ontario and other provinces are free to bet at offshore casinos as well – with those numbers still obscured by a lack of centralized regulatory reporting in jurisdictions such as Malta or any reporting from licensing jurisdictions like Curacao which handle those operators.

The Kahnawake Gaming Commission does not provide market reports either.

“As part of its commitment to sharing aggregate revenue and market insight reports, iGO intends to continue releasing, at minimum, a market report every quarter,” iGO said Wednesday.

Source: iGaming Ontario’s FY 2023-24 Q1 Market Performance Report, iGaming Ontario, July 19, 2023

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