Full House Resorts, Inc. Aktie

Greetings, and welcome to the Full House Resorts First Quarter 2026 Earnings Call. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, this conference is being recorded.

It is now my pleasure to introduce your host, Mr. Adam Campbell, Corporate Controller. Thank you, sir. You may begin.

Thank you, and good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to our first quarter earnings call. As always, before we begin, we remind you that today's conference call may contain forward-looking statements that we're making under the safe harbor provision of federal security laws.

I would also like to remind you that the company's actual results could differ materially from anticipated results in these forward-looking statements. Please see today's press release under the caption Forward-Looking Statements for the discussion of risks that may affect our results.

Also, we may reference to non-GAAP measures such as adjusted EBITDA. For a reconciliation of these measures, please see our website as well as various press releases that we issue. Lastly, we're also broadcasting this conference call at fullhouseresorts.com, where you can find today's earnings release as well as all of our SEC filings.

And with that said, we're ready to go, Lewis.

Good afternoon, everyone. I will be quick with our prepared remarks today since I know there's another call that's about to start. We had a solid first quarter. Revenues were $74.4 million in the first quarter of 2026, which compares to $75.1 million in last year's first quarter.

Within this, American Place was up about 7%. Also, keep in mind that last year's number included $1.3 million of revenue from Stockman's, which we sold in April of 2025. So on an apples-to-apples basis, revenues grew by 0.9% in the first quarter.

Adjusted EBITDA in the first quarter of 2026 rose to $13.2 million. That's almost 15% higher than our adjusted EBITDA in last year's first quarter, which was $11.5 million. We had growth at almost all of our properties, American Place, Chamonix and Bronco Billy's, Silver Slipper and Rising Star all had large percentage increases in EBITDA.

At Grand Lodge, which is our smallest property, we continue to be impacted by refurbishment work that when it's done, should meaningfully upgrade the overall experience. And regarding our sports skins last year, we had an additional active skin last year. So the decline in 2026 reflects that fact.

At American Place, our temporary casino continues to show significant growth. Revenues increased by 7% to $31.8 million in the first quarter of 2026. Adjusted property EBITDA rose 8% to $8.3 million. In the first quarter of 2026, our table games hold was 1.2 percentage points lower than in last year's first quarter.

For April 2026, the state's gaming revenues just came out. We had a very good April, which you probably already saw yesterday, with total gaming revenues up almost 6% versus April of 2025. Our table hold percentage was off again in April 2026. If we held as expected, our total gaming revenues would have been up almost 16% versus April of last year.

Turning to Chamonix and Bronco Billy's. Our revenues were down slightly to $11.3 million from $11.6 million. Revenues were affected by several things. First, the Bronco Billy's casino was pretty torn up in January and February as we replaced carpets and installed new ceilings. The Bronco Billy's side now feels quite complementary to the Chamonix experience.

Second, the unseasonably warm weather resulted in less cash business in the quarter. Two of Cripple Creek's biggest events both occur in the winter, Ice Fest and Ice Castles. They're both great experiences, and each one brings more than 100,000 people to town, but warm weather hindered those experiences and adversely affected city visitation.

Third, we had some unprofitable promotional activity in the prior year period. We have an entirely new management team that joined us beginning in April of last year, and they are working to make sure that our marketing spend is much more efficient. We had a good quarter in Colorado despite those factors.

In last year's first quarter, adjusted property EBITDA was minus $2.3 million. In this year's first quarter, it was minus $1.3 million, an improvement of 42%. It's a seasonal market strongly favoring the upcoming summer months.

With the new property team, we've spent a lot of time focusing not just on efficiency and costs, but also on our overall marketing efforts. That analysis continues to show a huge opportunity for us that awareness and penetration into Colorado Springs remains extremely low. As guests visit us for the first time, they realize that we didn't build a commodity product of more slot machines. They realized that we created a very unique experience.

We often compare Chamonix to Monarch and Black Hawk as both have similar levels of quality and are targeting a similar type of guest. The total Black Hawk gaming market, not including the neighboring casino town of Central City, was about $875 million over the last 12 months.

Monarch has 1/3 of the hotel product in Black Hawk, so it's reasonable to think that they have at least 1/3 of the gaming revenue. The reality is they could be higher than that given they're skewed toward a higher-end guest. Using those numbers as a basis, our slot win per day at Chamonix and Bronco Billy's was about 1/4 of Monarch slot win per day.

Our table win per day was about 16% of Monarch. Therein lies the opportunity. The numbers that Monarch is generating aren't unusual for an underserved gaming market. If we can improve our win per day figures, so they are just 45% of Monarch, and we will have earned a very good return on our investment in Chamonix.

Part of that improvement will involve ramping our hotel occupancy from 41% today to the 80-plus percent that Monarch achieves. And so the marketing team is laser-focused on awareness. There are about 1 million people in the broader Colorado Springs area. There are another 400,000 people that live in the southern suburbs of Denver. That's about 1.4 million people for our 300 guestrooms and 700 gaming positions.

Within that geographic spread, there are several specific ZIP codes that can meaningfully move the needle, and those ZIP codes are receiving a lot of our attention in a new digital campaign that we're rolling out. Preliminarily, April had good numbers with an estimated 9% increase in net slot win and a 20% increase in net table win.

On the balance sheet side, we had about $41 million of liquidity at the end of the quarter, including the undrawn portion of our revolver. The summer season tends to be our strong season. That, combined with the lack of any major construction spend right now, should benefit overall cash flow in the near term. We've been very transparent about our efforts to fund the permanent American Place casino as well as refinance our existing debt.

If you recall, we mentioned on our last earnings call that we've been working with a funding source that is prepared to fully fund construction of the permanent American Place casino. We have funded -- we have funded the gaming license, land, slot machines, temporary casino, assembly of the workforce, the mailing list, all at a total investment today of about $170 million. The new financing will provide the approximately $300 million needed to move into the permanent facility. That solution requires a lot of legal paperwork, which the team is diligently making its way through. We continue to feel very good about that solution and look forward to giving you more details once we can, potentially in the next few weeks.

We are confident enough on that financing that we expect to commence construction within the next few weeks. The early stages of construction take time, but not much capital. By starting now, we hope to open the permanent American Place about 2 years from now.

Our earthmoving drawings were approved a couple of weeks ago by the City of Waukegan, and we are working to obtain the other government approvals needed to begin construction. We have put together a good construction team that is well versed in building regional as well as destination casinos. They include Power Construction, which is currently building the new Hollywood Casino in Aurora, Illinois. They're one of the largest builders in the Chicagoland area. We have W.A. Richardson Builders, who will act in an oversight role. They're one of the largest construction firms here in Las Vegas and have great experience developing casinos from their days at Mandalay Resort Group, including the Grand Victoria casino in Elgin, Illinois. They also recently built the Fontainebleau and Durango resorts here in Las Vegas. And then we have WATG as architects. Their team has a long list of hospitality projects under their belts, including the Venetian in Las Vegas and the Hard Rock in Rockford, Illinois.

Lastly, we're currently allowed to operate our temporary casino until August of 2027. In conjunction with our anticipated financing, a bill was introduced into the Illinois legislature to extend that date by 18 months. That would ensure a smooth transition from the temporary to the permanent, including continuation of the approximately $30 million per year in gaming and other state taxes that we currently pay. Typically, items like this in the legislature are voted on late in the session, which ends on May 31. That's everything I had, Dan, what I missed?

I think you got it. We'll go to questions. All right. We'll find out from the public. What we missed.

[Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from the line of Jordan Bender with Citizens Bank.

Maybe not the quarter that you wanted necessarily in Colorado, but on the expense, that continues to look better. I see my math gets me to expenses down about 10% in the quarter. How much more do you guys think you have left to take out if we don't get any material revenue uplift from here?

Well, there's a lot of blocking and tackling that's happened, and we'll continue to control the cost. But there's stuff like we have an outsourced housekeeping service, which they only clean like 9 rooms a day, and we end up paying for that. Down at the Silver Slipper, we clean 14 rooms a day. So we're looking to bring that in-house, and we have to hire about 30 housekeepers to do that. Our laundry service, we think we can get more efficient.

We hired an AGM in the first quarter who has a background in hospitality and food and beverage, and he was in a similar role at the Ameristar in Council Bluffs and before that, the Ameristar in East Chicago. And a real good guy, and he'll -- and he's working on that sort of thing. We also hired a Finance Director in the first quarter. And frankly, we are getting much better reports, reporting out of it, and that's helpful. But to really get to where we want to be, we need to improve the revenues. And we've got a lot of new marketing people working on that, and it's much more sophisticated than it was a year ago.

And it's a constant process to try to make the marketing spend more efficient and targeted, like Lewis mentioned, digitally approaching certain ZIP codes. I mean that's a more efficient way to do it and so on. So there's a lot of different aspects to this.

One of the other things we're looking at doing, of course, the business there is very -- like most casinos slanted towards the weekend. And so you're trying to hire people in a somewhat difficult place to hire them up in the mountains. So we're looking at going out and offering people like a $5 an hour premium if somebody only wants to work on weekends. And the kind of the back story on that is if somebody is willing to go on their payroll working only, say, Friday and Saturday, they will not qualify for the health plan because it's less than 32 hours a week. And the health plan cost us more than $5 an hour per employee. And so you might find somebody who's already gainfully employed or maybe they're retired non-Medicare, but they kind of like the idea of being a barista in our coffee place on Saturday morning it gets them out of the house. We'd love to have that employee.

And so we're looking at all sorts of ways to be more thoughtful and efficient and effective. And it doesn't happen overnight, but it is happening. And frankly, the April numbers are pretty encouraging because I kind of feel like we've got our footing on the marketing stuff, and we're starting to show really strong numbers. And April was a good month. The first part of May looks pretty good so far. And hopefully, we just continue to build on that going into the summer. So we are controlling costs. But ultimately, it's about growing the revenues.

And those incremental revenues, that you probably heard me say this before. At this point, the cost structure is pretty fully baked. And so the flow-through from those incremental revenues is going to be -- should be pretty steep.

We did -- we had a Mexican restaurant that was called Baha Bill that went closed for a while, and we revamped it. We promoted from within a new food and beverage manager who's a very talented chef, and he did a phenomenal job on new menus and recipes and so on. I'd argue we probably have the best Mexican restaurant in Colorado at this point. And we renamed it Don Juan, which is kind of a fun name. And we also tied it into the elevator to get to it. And so we did that.

We're going to start offering a brunch on Saturdays and Sundays in 980 Prime, which is a wonderful venue for a brunch. So -- and -- but we're doing it in ways where we know on Fridays and on Saturdays and Sundays, there's demand for that brunch. And we're not doing it every day of the week, so.

Great. And on the follow-up, good to hear in Waukegan and that's going to get going here in the next couple of weeks. Just curious your view on the casino and the proposal up in Kenosha and kind of where that stands and kind of how you guys underwrite that property in relation to yours.

First off, our customers primarily come from Lake County. And to the extent they come from outside of Lake County, it tilts towards the south. If you drive north from us to Kenosha, there's some farmland out there. So there's kind of a gap. They would have a much bigger impact on the Potawatomi in Downtown Minneapolis than they would -- or Downtown Milwaukee than they would to us. And that tribe is pretty powerful.

So I think -- which brings up the second question, do they ever get there? They've been working on this for 20 years. This is not an Indian tribe from Kenosha. This is an Indian tribe of Ho-Chink, we have a small casino, a couple of hundred miles away from that in the middle of Wisconsin. So they're trying to create a whole new piece of land and reservation trust that is strictly for commercial purposes to really cut into the Potawatomi business.

So it's more of a tribal war than it is for us. And I don't think it would have much impact on us. And I think if they get there, it's going to take them a long time. Like if everything went smoothly for them, it'd be a few years before they got open. And even when they did get open, I don't think it has much impact on us.

My first guess is they never get there because what they're trying to do is not easy, where you're not -- it's one thing if you're a poor Indian tribe trying to get a casino on your reservation, you're somebody that deserves empathy, if you will. This is not a poor Indian tribe trying to get a casino on their reservation. This is reservation shopping and trying to get a casino in a commercially better spot than where their existing casino is. I think they have 2 or 3 up in the middle of Wisconsin. And so it takes a lot of different regulatory approvals and state approvals, and there are a long ways from having it.

Yes. I will tell you that the legal hurdles preventing that are still -- it's still a very, very long list.

You know where this really gets us news. There is an analyst out there who is negative on us, and he brings us up every time. And it's like if you didn't have this, he'd have something else. And I heard yesterday that he was telling -- I remember 6 months ago, he was telling everybody to invest in the Affinity bonds instead of us. And it was with great pleasure to tell you that Affinity is shutting everything down they have on prem. So he's got some mud on his face, and that mud is getting thicker by the day.

Our next question comes from the line of Ryan Sigdahl with Craig-Hallum Capital Group.

On the financing for American Place, good to hear the progress. I should hear something in the next couple of weeks is fantastic. On the last call, Q4 call, Dan, you referred to it as acceptable terms. Lewis, you referred to it as attractive terms. Curious if you could give an update on anything on how it's trending at the moment.

We're not a AAA credit. So we're not borrowing money at 5%, but it's also not 15%. We think we can get our existing debt refinanced and the incremental money and all be not a little bit higher than where our debt is today, but not much.

Yes. I was going to say I don't have anything to add other than what we said. I mean, I don't think -- knock on wood, I don't think you're going to have to wait too much longer. But we -- I will tell you that the amount of work that's happened behind the scenes has been extensive. And so we continue to push forward and certainly feel better about where we are today than we did that last earnings call.

Yes. And listen, it's understandable the firm on the other side of this doesn't want us to disclose their name or details until we have the final doc signed. And so we're working to try to do that. And that's understandable. And then that will be done.

And look, on the positive side, I mean, the world has been such s*** show lately with everything going on in the Middle East and everything and the high-yield market is hung in there. It's been pretty stable through all this, which is somewhat remarkable. And that's encouraging.

The high-yield markets have held up. American Place has continued to display pretty strong numbers. Chamonix is starting to hit its stride. I mean there's a lot of good that's happening. So it's -- all in, I think we're sitting in a good spot.

Good. Chamonix is a transition. So good to see kind of the scrappy nature of finding cost efficiencies across that entire property. But ultimately, to go from going from losing a couple of million in EBITDA to making a couple of million, but we kind of want to get to tens of millions, you probably have to really start to ramp the revenue as well. Have you had any, I guess, renewed thoughts around kind of how to drive that new customer to try the property and really start to build the base of business there on the revenue?

Yes. We have a -- kind of on all cylinders here. I mean, we now have a 4-person sales force, and we're looking for another person who are just focused on meetings and conventions. And they are putting quite a bit on the books, but that stuff is ahead of time. So it really starts to bear fruit in 2027, 2028.

We have a new advertising agency. We have a Chief Marketing Officer here. We have a new Director of Marketing at the property. We have an advertising person here that we've added. So there's a lot of stuff, and we've subscribed to some third-party, what do I call, research firms, I guess, who are giving us much more detail on not only who our customers are, but who's out there. So we're getting a lot more sophisticated in our targeting and how we go.

And we started -- April was the first month where we say, okay, this is starting to bear fruit. And hopefully, we will continue to show good results every month going forward. And some months, you're going to have off win percentage or something, but I think we have a base to build on.

And listen, we lost only a little bit of money through the worst part of the year seasonally. And so we will end up making money this year, not as much as we'd like, given our investment, but I think it forms a good base this year and then better results next year.

We've also -- even on the other side, we've been working with the city of Cripple Creek to get them more focused on how to build it as a destination. If you pull up Telluride, Colorado, which, believe it or not, the population of Telluride is not that much more than Cripple Creek. And of course, they have a famous ski area, but they are 4.5 hours many metropolitan area, closest metropolitan area to Telluride is Albuquerque. They have like a festival every weekend all year long. And everything from country music festival to film festival.

Actually, the one that's kind of intriguing is they have a mushroom festival. In Colorado, what do they do at a mushroom festival, but they have one. And our single biggest weekend of the year is Ice Festival, where the city buys blocks of ice, puts spot on the street and people carve them with chainsaws and stuff. And I know it sounds kind of hokey, but it gives people the excuse to come up. And so our biggest weekend of the year is in the middle of the winter when normally we are summer seasonal. And so we're now working with the city who's hired a new Director of Marketing to let's have more of these festivals.

So let's have dream up everything. And so we just celebrated Cinco de Mayo. How do we do more of that? And so we're doing a lot of this, and the city is starting to get smarter about it. And because this little town has the potential of being a pretty significant destination for people from Colorado Springs and Denver. But you've got to get them up there, so.

People do forget sometimes and not on them. A lot of you guys haven't been around as long as we have, not to make myself sound old. But I mean, if you go back to when Ameristar opened, Ameristar took over their property in Black Hawk back in 2006 or I should say -- I take it back a step. They launched and rebranded and expanded a much nicer Black Hawk casino in 2006. They opened up their hotel tower in 2009. It was a multiyear.

It's a failed Hyatt casino what they took over.

100%. Yes. And if you compare their revenues from 2005 to 2010 over those 5 years, the growth in gaming revenues was -- the CAGR, the 5-year CAGR was like 24%. It's phenomenal. But what people forget is they were the ones that kind of reinvented that market and said, look, guys, there is actually something nice in Colorado to go and gamble at.

And what Monarch has benefited from was that 20 years ago, someone changed the mentality in Denver and said, guys, there's something nice. And so when Monarch opened, he already had people accustomed to a nicer building walking through -- walking up and down the streets of Black Hawk. We didn't have that. We're only starting to get that. And when we look at the penetration, when I say it's massively low, like some of the ZIP codes that I mentioned, we have like 8% penetration. There's no reason why it should be that low. And so why are we focusing the digital effort, that's exactly the reason why. We're not talking about finding hundreds of thousands of new people. We're talking about finding 20,000 new people to bring into the building on a regular basis. That's what moves the needle to a very good investment.

So stay tuned. I feel very, very good. We feel very good about where the marketing sits right now. The marketing team, as Dan mentioned, we brought in a new Director of Marketing, but we brought in a new ad agency as well. They started late in the fourth quarter. It took them a few months to get kind of their hands around things. So their true efforts didn't really launch until March. There's a lot there, but we're showing very, very good signs in April. May is off to a good start. And again, look at the punt penetration stats and the win per day stats that I mentioned earlier in the call. I think it's harder to think that we can't achieve those than we can.

Actually, the -- sometimes we're so used to the numbers. The American Gaming Association has a survey that shows that 30% of American adults visited a casino within the past 12 months. Now that's the U.S. average, 30%. And Colorado Springs is less than 1/3 of that.

Very good. Dan, well, you never fail to have me learn something new in Mushroom Festival is what -- well done. I look forward to a 24% CAGR over the next 5 years, Lewis.

Our next question comes from the line of John DeCree with CBRE.

This is Max Marsh on for John. Still clearly in the early innings of GGR penetration in Colorado Springs, but is there any difference in what you guys are seeing on the database side? Any insight into the database sign-up trends would be helpful.

Yes. I mean the database trends are good. If you look in the month of April, as an example, new sign-ups were up 12%, rated visits up 19%. Win per rated visit is up like 14%. So short answer is that the trends are good. We continue to grow the database pretty meaningfully, but we're also bringing in a higher volume or higher rated guests into the door, so.

So by the way, I'm kind of smiling here because he's reading that off a daily operating report. We hired a new Finance Director from outside of the casino business. He got a lot of experience in the hotel business. And he's gotten it organized pretty fast.

And a year ago, we wouldn't have had those April numbers by this point in May. And if we had them, they were probably not reliable. And now we're getting them on a daily basis, and they are quite reliable. And that's one of the first steps in getting this thing going well, so.

Great. And could you give us a little bit more detail about what's driving the growth at Silver Slipper? I know we have a new management team there as well. Is that coming from better OpEx management? Or could there be some broader tailwinds there?

A little bit of both.

Yes. I was going to say it's probably a little more on the OpEx side versus the revenue side, but it's a little bit of both. On the OpEx side, look, we just have a new GM there. She's not a surprise looking at things differently than the prior GM and is finding more efficient ways to do some of what we're doing. So I think a big part of it has been on the marketing side and just trying to be smarter about the marketing dollars that go out the door.

Spend -- it's an example I've used with a few of you, so you may have heard it. But as an example, we used to have a weekly Seniors Day where we would give you a breakfast buffet for $0.99. And what we found out was that a nearby senior center was bringing people in for their weekly free or close to free breakfast. And when we ran the numbers as to how many of those people were actually in the database and gambling in the casino, the answer was very, very few. And so it's just taking a fresh look at different marketing ideas and making sure that the return is there.

Our next question comes from the line of Chad Beynon with Macquarie.

This is Sam on for Chad. Switching over to Waukegan. Now that you guys have made more progress towards the permanent construction of that property, any updated thoughts on the earnings power of that property? I know in the past, $90 million EBITDA was put out there. Any update or color on the time line to get to that point and what's needed to get to that level?

Even the temporary continues to progress. I mean the run rate today is in the ballpark of $40 million per year of [ EBDIT ], which is -- if you start thinking about -- we've kind of indicated that it takes about $300 million to build the permanent and that the cost of that money is probably a little higher than our existing bonds, but use 10% for a big round number, right? 10% on $300 million is $30 million a year.

Well, the permanent casino is twice the size of the temporary in terms of square footage. It has more restaurants, it's a much better street appeal, much better decor. In terms of slots and tables, it's not quite double, but it's up significantly. And so we expect the permanent to do much more business than the temporary.

And there are a lot of examples like the Hard Rock in Rockford, which also went from a temporary to a permanent and their revenues doubled. You see it in the Hollywood in Joliette that moved from an old boat to a permanent building. You see it in New Orleans with Treasure Chest, what's South Carolina? No, Virginia, there's one. There's a few around that where people went from temporary to permanent. And in every case, it has shown a big increase in revenues and profitability. So we do think it gets to $100 million. You said $90 million. I actually think it's $100 million. It doesn't happen overnight. It might take 3 years or something. So if it takes us 2 years to build, it gets open 2 years from now, then 5 years from now, it's doing $100 million.

We see it. It doesn't happen overnight, although all the examples we just threw out, if it happen overnight. But nonetheless, we assume that it does not happen over.

Well, I think even in the temporary continues to grow. At some point, you start to -- I mean, our win per slot machine per day is pretty high in the temporary casino. So at some point, you start to kind of max out on weekends. And -- but I think we'll continue to show growth even when we build the permanent and then you'll have a step to a new plateau in the permanent and then it will grow from there.

Appreciate that. And then switching over to your guys' sports games. Wondering on the outlook for those, if you guys see upside or downside to the current run rate EBITDA related to those sports contracts over the next few years?

At this point, we only have 2 -- the one in Indian -- in that industry, we used to have agreements with Wynn and Churchill downs and some markets. But DraftKings and FanDuel and to a lesser extent, MGM have moved in and so dominated the market that a lot of these other guys have pulled away. So we have one, which is markets in Indiana. They paid us in advance because for a while, they had not been paying us. And so we said, well, if you want to extend the contract, fine, but you got to pay us in advance. So the accountants will let us book it all at once, but we already have the money. So we're going to get that income over time for 3 years.

7 years, 7 years.

Oh my God, you're stretching that over 7 years.

That was the initial access fee.

The other one is with Circa, who is a niche player. I mean their sportsbook here in Las Vegas is probably the biggest single sportsbook in the country, and they have a good forte with that. And in Illinois, you only get 1 license. We had 3 skins for our license in Indiana, and we also had 3 skins in Colorado. We only have 1 in Illinois. And of course, the population of Illinois is much bigger. And so that is by far the most valuable skin, and that's with Circa, and I think they're doing okay. They know that business probably better than anybody, and they're good at it.

And we'll have a beautiful sportsbook, permanent sports book in our new facility, which I think they're quite excited for.

And we continue to look for people who want to get into the sports business. And quite frankly, at this point, there aren't a lot of new companies looking to get in and so dominated by DraftKings and FanDuel.

Yes. I will say on the flip side, not that I expect this to happen anytime soon, but our agreements only include sports betting. They don't include anything for true online casinos. And so to the extent that, that were to ever happen, there is the potential for more upside as we monetize on that bit. That -- anyway, so.

Actually, having said that, I've forgotten. In Tahoe, we had a tiny sportsbook that had been run for a long time by William Hill. And there's a guy who used to be CEO of William Hill, who started as a new company. His is name is?

[ Boomers ]

Boomers. And he came to us and made us an offer and he's paying us significantly more in rent than we were getting. It's still not a big number, but it's, what, 3x what it used to be.

2x, 2x I think.

2x and he's promoting it much more than William Hill was. And so you do sometimes have new entrants. Now he's not online. He's just -- and then it's interesting in the sports betting companies, including DraftKings and FanDuel, are having to deal with the competition from the -- what do you call those Kalshi and...

Prediction markets.

Prediction markets, right? And so they have started branches where they're going into the prediction markets because under the auspices of being commodities trading firms, these companies are offering sports betting in places like Texas and California, where it's not been legal, and they're doing it without paying any state income taxes.

Well, from DraftKings and FanDuel, that's like, well, if they could do it, why can't we do it? Well, Nevada came out and said, well, if you do, do that, then you can't operate in Nevada. So they both backed away from operating in Nevada. And that opened the opportunity for Boomers and who is not going to try to operate elsewhere.

You said income taxes. I think, my gaming taxes.

I meant gaming taxes.

I don't know if they pay income or not. Yes.

Yes. So there's a little turmoil there with -- and we'll see where it goes because from the gaming industry's perspective, the idea that somebody can start taking bets on the Super Bowl in Texas without any approval of the Texas legislature and the fact that in the Texas constitution, it forbids gambling, and it's very hard to change that in the constitution. But these people are offering Super Bowl bets in places like Texas and unregulated, untaxed. And not surprisingly, they're probably making pretty good money with it.

There are no further questions at this time. I would like to turn the floor back over to Full House Resorts CEO, Daniel Lee, for any closing remarks.

Well, just we're making progress, making good progress. And I think it's going to be an exciting quarter because we're going to get under construction, we're going to get this financing done.

And by the way, we don't take this lightly, but the starting construction will cost us a couple of million bucks. And you don't normally want to do that unless you're certain you have the money to finish. And we're confident enough that this financing is going to come through that we are going to start because otherwise, the opening date keeps lighting. And the initial stages of construction are guys driving bulldozers around. It's not a lot of money. And so we're going to go ahead and start because we're pretty confident that it's all going to come together here. Thank you.

Thank you. This concludes today's teleconference. You may disconnect your lines at this time. Thank you for your participation, and have a wonderful day.

Greetings, and welcome to the Full House Resorts Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2025 Earnings Call. [Operator Instructions]. It is now my pleasure to introduce your host, Adam Campbell. Thank you. You may begin.

Thank you, and good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to our fourth quarter earnings call. As always, before we begin, we remind you that today's conference call may contain forward-looking statements that we're making under the safe harbor provision of federal security laws. I would also like to remind you that the company's actual results could differ materially from the anticipated results in these forward-looking statements. Please see today's press release under the caption forward-looking statements for the discussion of risks that may affect our results.

Also, we may reference -- we may make reference to non-GAAP measures such as adjusted EBITDA. For a reconciliation of those measures, please see our website as well as previous press releases that we issue. Lastly, we are also broadcasting this conference at fullhouseresorts.com, where you can find today's earnings release as well as our SEC filings.

And with that said, we're ready to go Lewis.

Well, good afternoon, everyone. It was a very good fourth quarter, but the comparisons versus last year aren't very straightforward. So we'll take you through those really quick. Revenues rose to $75.4 million, up from $73 million in the fourth quarter of 2024. Keep in mind that the fourth quarter of 2024 included $1.5 million of revenue from Stockman'’s, which was sold in April of 2025. So revenue growth on an apples-to-apples basis was 5.6%. Adjusted EBITDA in the fourth quarter of 2025 rose to $10.7 million. Adjusted EBITDA for the fourth quarter of 2024 was $10.4 million that included quite a bit of noise, including the benefit of a $1.2 million recovery settlement and the reversal of about $0.5 million of accruals at corporate. Those two figures increased the fourth quarter of 2024 as adjusted EBITDA by $1.7 million. Backing those two items out of the prior year's fourth quarter, the increase was about 23%.

At American Place, our Temporary Casino continues to show significant growth. Revenues increased by 11% to $32 million in the fourth quarter of 2025. Adjusted property EBITDA rose 29% to $8.7 million. For the full year, revenues and adjusted property EBITDA rose to $124 million and $34.3 million, increases of 13% and 17%, respectively. Interestingly, the pace of growth actually increased as the year progressed. We fully expect adjusted property EBITDA at American Place to continue to climb in 2026 and the year is off to a good start. We have long said that the Temporary American Place facility on its own should eventually be able to achieve about $50 million of run rate EBITDA and that it's much larger Permanent facility should be able to earn double that amount or about $100 million.

We continue to believe that our market remains under-penetrated, some quick facts. Our Permanent Casino will not only be nicer, but in terms of square footage, it will be about twice the size of our Temporary. We are the closest casino to more than 1 million people. We are located in one of the wealthiest counties in the entire country. Our closest casino competitor is 45 minutes to the south and they make $0.5 billion a year in gaming revenue. Our second closest casino competitor is about an hour to the north, and they make more than $400 million a year in gaming revenue. And we're sandwiched not just midway between those two very successful casinos, but also between two of the major North-South traffic arteries in Northern Chicago land. Those facts, combined with our 3 years of operating experience in the market, or what gives us so much conviction in what we think American Place can achieve in the long term?

Turning to Chamonix. For the first time in recent memory, we have a fully formed management team. That began with a new General Manager in March of 2025, new Directors of marketing and group sales in July and August of 2025. The promotion of a talented Pastry Chef to lead the food and beverage department in January of 2026. And a new Finance Director last month and a new Assistant General Manager this week. Here's an interesting stat to look at. If you look at just the second half of 2025 under new management team and compare it to the second half of 2024, revenues increased by $1.2 million or about 5%. Adjusted property EBITDA in those 6 months jumped by $4.2 million. The new team is making great strides and we believe our Colorado operations will be a significant positive contributor to adjusted EBITDA in 2026.

Specifically for the fourth quarter of 2025 we had a small adjusted property EBITDA loss in the seasonally weaker winter season, but that was a significant improvement versus the much larger loss in the fourth quarter of 2024. After several quarters focusing on the cost side, the new team has redoubled its marketing and awareness efforts. If you look at any of our marketing collateral, it has been completely reenergized after transitioning to a new marketing agency during the fourth quarter of 2025.

In January and February of 2026, we had a modest amount of construction, disruption as we replaced the carpet and installed new ceilings Bronco Billy’s. The incremental spend was extremely modest in the low 6 figures, but the result was outsized. It used to be quite [indiscernible] to walk from Chamonix into the Bronco Billy's Casino. Today, while Chamonix is certainly more elevated, the two casinos now complement each other quite nicely. We also just opened our Mexican restaurant at Bronco Billy's with an inspired new menu as we prepared to head into the busy summer season.

Looking at our database, we've been especially focused on driving loyalty and growth in the top 2 segments of our database. For the first 2 months of 2026, our top segment has seen unique guest counts increased by almost 20% and the total number of visits from that segment is up 36%. For the segment under that, unique guests are up 12%, and total visits are up 24%. Awareness is expanding and loyalty is expanding, which both bode well in our efforts to continue growing revenue and improve profitability. Regarding our group business at Chamonix, that continues to pick up steam. At this point, we have a couple of thousand room nights on the books with a couple of thousand more that are close to commitment or with decent prospects. As we mentioned last quarter, our ideal group size is between 100 and 150 attendees within 500 miles of us, we estimate that there are up to 4,000 conferences that fit that profile. Groups of this size tend to book years ahead of time. When we have a fully ramped group business in a couple of years, we think it will consist of about 55 events per year or about 1 per week, that is the key to improving our midweek occupancy.

Among our smaller properties, Silver Slipper and Rising Star declined slightly for the quarter. Similar to Chamonix, we've upgraded most of the management team at Silver Slipper, and they are gearing up for growth in 2026. Grand Lodge, which is a pretty small part of the company at this point, continues to be adversely affected by renovation disruption at the Hyatt Lake Tahoe that houses our casino. The Hyatt Resort will be beautiful when that renovation is complete, but in the meantime, we're trying to manage through the disruption. That includes proactive efforts to find new casino guests in advance of completion of the renovated amenities in 2027.

On the balance sheet side, we had about $51 million of liquidity at the end of the quarter, including the undrawn portion of our revolver and we're about to enter that part of the year where we generate meaningful cash flow. We amended our revolving credit facility a few days ago. That was a simple amendment to extend the maturity date of our revolver to August 15, 2027, and we've said this several times, but our Illinois operations alone pay for the interest expense on our current debt. And of course, Illinois continues to ramp as does Colorado.

Lastly, an update on our on our continuing progress for our permanent American Place Casino. In real time, our architects are putting the finishing touches on our foundation drawings. Those drawings should be done imminently. With those drawings in hand, we'll be able to officially break ground on the casino's foundations. We expect that to occur sometime in the coming weeks. The foundation work does not take a lot of money, but it does take several months to complete. By getting it done now, we can accelerate our time line to construct the permanent facility. Meanwhile, we are making good progress with respect to the financing of the American Place facility. We have received several proposals for the construction of the permanent facility at attractive rates including proposals that fully fund its construction without the issuance of equity. We're not quite able to provide details just yet, but we hope to do so in the next several weeks.

As we have noted previously, we are currently allowed to operate our Temporary casino until August of 2027. In conjunction with our anticipated financing, a bill was recently introduced into the Illinois legislature to extend that operations stay by 18 months. Typically, items in the legislature don't get voted on until the end of the session, so we expect it to pass in April or May. Passage of the bill will allow us to transition smoothly from the temporary casino in 18 to 20 [indiscernible] as a similar bill in front of the legislature for the same reason. I covered a lot there, Dan, what I forgot?

You got it all, and we'll get to questions. So if we forgot something it will almost certainly come out in the questions.

Very true.

[Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from the line of Ryan Singdahl with Craig-Hallum Capital Group.

I want to start with Chamoni though, for the first question. So I appreciate the improvement kind of on a full year basis, especially on the cost side. If I look at revenue 19% growth in the first half of the year, year-over-year, 7% in Q3, 2% in Q4, flipped to a loss. I get the seasonal aspect of that. But I guess, just walk through, I guess, what's going on there specifically just given kind of a decel from a trend standpoint and considering it's still very subscale or early stage in its maturity?

Well, Ryan, if you recall last year, when we reported the third quarter, we pretty bluntly said we had run some marketing programs in -- I think it was principally September of 2024, which were non-economical, in other words, we induce people to come down, gave them free rooms and they didn't gamble, and it actually cost us at the bottom line quite a bit. But it did pop up the top line. Then in the fourth quarter, we had a big grand opening party, and it was a very expensive parter to have, we had [indiscernible], et cetera, et cetera. And remember, looking around and realizing that the people who were there were the same people we'd always had when it was a golden opportunity to try to get new customers and people down from Denver and so on.

And it was about that time, I realized that we had the wrong management team, and we had to make a bunch of changes. And we have now. But the prior year numbers were kind of artificially inflated by inefficient marketing in those two quarters. And -- but now we have a new advertising agency, we have a Chief Marketing Officer here. We have new marketing people at the property. They've been getting organized and all that stuff is coming into play now, and Lewis gave you some of those numbers. And so I think you'll see revenue growth pick up going forward. But the reason it looks like such a small year-over-year growth was the promotional stuff we did last year that kind of boosted revenue but not income.

Quick follow-up on that, and then I do have another question. Have you seen any re-acceleration thus far in Q1 of '26?

We have, with the caveat that it was pretty torn up back in January, we renovated the west part of Bronco Billy's and putting down the carpet and ceilings. And frankly, I was surprised it didn't have more disruption than it did because we are showing better revenue numbers. I think if we hadn't had that disruption, we'd be doing even better than that.

I mean at the end of the day, this is one of those where you open it, it's not performing as well as you thought it would. And you start looking at it and saying, first, did we make a mistake? And I've gone back several times now and gone through the numbers again of how many people live in Colorado Springs and Denver and competition and everything else. And I'm absolutely convinced we did not make a mistake. And in fact, I can underline that by the fact that Monarch's EBDIT for the year was $199 million. Now they only have 2 casinos. They don't break out the 1 from the other. But the smaller one, which is in Reno made $40 million to $50 million a year for a long time before they open up Black Hawk. And so Black Hawk has only been around 3 years, I think, in their portfolio. So -- so they must be making significantly north of $100 million a year in Black Hawk. And it's a good property and frankly, a well-managed company, and they opened far more smoothly than we did.

And I look at it and say, "Well, they're there with 500 rooms, we are equivalent in quality, we have 300 rooms. There are aspects of ours that are nicer than theirs. Now they are, an hour from Denver, we're an hour from Colorado Springs, but from Southern Denver, we're about equal distance. But they also have significant competitors there. I mean they not only make a lot of money, but so does [indiscernible], The Horseshoe and The Lodge and then there's a bunch of smaller ones. There's a lot less competition in Cripple Creek and the competitors are not anywhere near as good as the quality of ours. So I think we are in the right place. I think we've built the right product. I think fixing up Bronco Billy's makes it quite a bit nice. So we didn't spend a whole lot of money, but it really made a pretty big difference, just changing the carpet and drop -- putting in a drop ceiling. And now we have the right management team all put together, and there's a lot of blocking and tackling that we need to do.

I mean there's simple stuff like the housekeeping department there, cleans 9 rooms a day. At our other properties, they clean 14 rooms a day. 9 rooms a day is pretty ridiculous. We have a new Assistant GM, who has a strong background in hospitality, and that's one of the first tasks, he'll try to figure out. And we do it through an outside company, and we probably need to adjust that. And that factors in all the way down because if you're only cleaning 9 rooms a day, the cost to turn a room is like $50 or $60 when it should be $30 or $35. In other words, the cost of renting a room that would otherwise sit empty, when I say the cost of turning around. So that factors into who you're willing to comp a room for.

And if we can get the cost of turning the room down, then we could be a little more generous with who we have [indiscernible] rooms for. And so there's a lot of blocking and tackling, which we are doing. We had a Mexican restaurant, for example, that had terrible food, to be honest. And it's been closed for about 6 months. We promoted a very talented Chef to be the food and beverage manager, and it was kind of funny to persuade him to take the job because he was hesitant. He came back and said, I really want to promote some people and then get rid of some deadwood. And I said, "Well, that's exactly why I want you to take the job. I too want to promote good people and get rid of deadwood. And so he stepped up and the quality of the food in the reopened Mexican restaurant is 10x what it used to be. And it was just last weekend it opened.

And that's important going into the summer. So there's a lot of little blocking and tackling that we are doing at that property. And if you get into the minutia, just about every parameter is trending the right way. No, I wish that we're trending faster, but at least it's going the right way. And I'm convinced it will eventually be a very significant profit generator for us. And even this year, it will be significant, but significant like 10% to 15%, and it might be significantly above that next year and then the year after. I mean -- we built the rate property. We're there for the long haul. And it's a little more -- it's a different marketing task than we have at American Place.

At American Place, we are in the middle of 1 million people they drive by us all the time, but we're in a strong structure. And so it looks like where the Department of Motor Vehicle store salt for the winner. I mean it has absolutely no curve repeal, but a lot of people driving by. And if you go up to Colorado Springs, we have fantastic curb appeal to the building, looks fantastic, but nobody is just driving by. So we have to persuade people from Colorado Springs to drive up there. It's just under an hour, but to come up and see it. And once they do come up and see it, we get very good repeat visitation and that's how you build the business, but it doesn't happen overnight.

Yes. I mean the most promising thing that we're seeing behind the scenes is that those upper segments which this property was built for. And when I say upper segments, I don't mean someone that's gambling $10,000 a day. I'm talking about some of that might go in and gamble a couple of hundred dollars a day. That is a very ripe customer that's an abundance that is our biggest group. It's a customer that's finding the building now for the first time. And as I kind of hinted at, or said actually -- didn't hint that in my opening comments, that group is where we're seeing significant growth and loyalty.

In my experience, I remember [indiscernible] Mississippi opened slowly. We went through the same sort of things. And then eventually, it found its stride, and it's led Mississippi now for 20 years, and similar in Las Vegas, Luxor opened slowly and then found its stride, and it's been very successful for a long time now and so on. And thinking back, there's things we should have been smarter about. We should have hired a sales [indiscernible] while we were under construction, we didn't. But we're fixing those things now. So...

Well worth the visit, I can personally attest to that. For my second question, and maybe I'll try and ask this in a shorter way. Indiana bill, it originally included a fair value payment to you guys if you were not the winning bid for relocation. Now it appears like it's just a new license that you can apply for. Just give us an update there on the future of Rising Sun? If you guys are interested kind of under the current structure.

Listen, this is a long process and a rapidly evolving one. I mean, that bill get changed many times in the last week that it was in the legislature. We'll continue to watch it and see. We make money in Rising Sun. We always have, not a lot of money, but we make money. We're the ones who said to the state, we think we -- the state would be much better off if it relocated to an urban center. When they legalized casinos along the Ohio River, you didn't have casinos in Ohio and Kentucky and you do now. And so the original locations where they are legalized were the wrong locations, and the independent study that the legislature called for that was done underneath the Gaming Commission said exactly that, that there would be significantly higher revenues to the state with the casino in Indianapolis and in Fort Wayne.

Now they chose to widen it out. It's not just Fort Wayne. It's 3 different counties. They're all going to have a referendum in November. I think it's going to be a challenging referendum because the way they did it, there's 3 different counties that are going to have a referendum. And let's say, all 3 pass it then the Gaming Commission is supposed to choose from the 3 and then run a process to figure out a development. So you actually have like it would be problematic for us or anyone else to try to fund the pro side of [indiscernible] County. And yet there's very clearly well-funded opposition. Just look at the website, savefw.com. It's clearly well funded by somebody. And I'm guessing it's an Indian tribe in Southern Michigan or something along those lines, somebody who might be hurt by this. So you're going to have 3 referendums where the opposition is probably well funded. And the Pro side probably isn't. And so will it pass or not? I don't know.

I think normally, these things do pass because it produces jobs and tax revenues and so on. But the way the legislature has set this up, and I think it's [indiscernible], but I think the way they've set it up. Those are going to be very challenging referendums. And we will watch the process and see what happens -- and legislature meets again next year. We know where it meets. Meanwhile, we continue to make raising money in Rising Sun. And we will continue that for the good for our shareholders as well as good for the state. And that's about it.

Our next question comes from the line of David Bain with Texas Capital Bank.

Great. First, congratulations on the progress on the American Place financing and I understand you're not giving a ton of detail, but one, I think you reiterated [indiscernible] will be sold. And I'm sure you looked at multiple options from whatever asset sales to high yield to REITs as the financing environment involved. If you could help us process that balancing -- your thoughts as you went through that process, that could be very helpful for us. And then does that financing come in tandem or include the refinancing or extension of the existing debt?

David, as I'm sure you'll appreciate, when you're going through one of these processes, you reach out for a lot of people and you find people who are most interested in working with us. And then there's a point where you say, okay, fine, we want you to invest in the due diligence to start working on the legal documents, and we will keep it confidential. And I would argue that's about where we are.

And until we have a real deal to announce, I really can't go into any of the details, but we are pretty comfortable that we are going to have a deal that will allow us to be open there in 2 years. And we've always said that we're not going to issue equity at anywhere close to these prices, and we're confident that we could get there. But anything further than that, I can't tell you yet. I wish I could, David. Obviously, it's all encompassing. I mean it's -- it does involve refinancing the existing bonds.

Yes. We're looking at an all-encompassing solution. And I think the only thing to add to what Dan said is, again, not only no equity, but also -- we view the financing cost is attractive as well. So we're excited to give you more details, I guess, I wish we could. Just can't quite yet.

Attractive, I think, I would say, acceptable. Attractive would be 5%. We're not 5%, right? But it's also not 15%. And I think it's acceptable. And just on refinancing the existing months, they mature in February '28. They become a current liability on February '27. So you pretty much have to refinance them. I think anybody would look at it and say, of course, you have to do that. And so -- but we're -- we've had some really good proposals and we've kind of zeroed in on one formula that we think works and we're trying to nail that down.

And then I guess my other question, I guess I would go with the Chamonix. You gave some encouraging data points on penetration. I think the last call, you mentioned of Colorado Springs visits Cripple Creek once a year, something you intended to tackle. It sounds like the biggest feeder lever. If you could speak to some of the progress specific to the penetration of that market? I know you have a marketing group, but anything, whether it be buses or new forms of amortizing and any thing that we can look for in terms of impact that's been fruitful so far would be helpful.

Yes. Well, you mentioned buses. We've looked at buses. We've looked at working with the one company that's in Cripple Creek. We've looked at working with other bus companies. We've even looked at buying our own buses. But at the end of the day, it's not one of the bigger levers. Most people drive themselves, and that's true even in the markets like Atlantic City, that traditionally has had a lot of busing, the bus customers, still drive themselves. And so -- but there's -- it's a very complicated algorithm because at the same time, we're trying to figure out how to attack these different markets. The whole world of advertising is changing, right? And so like far more people watch TV shows now through YouTube than on the networks.

And ultimately, that's good because we can target it. Like we don't have to be buying ads for all of the Denver metropolitan area. We can target those who live on the south side, which is closer to us. We're much less likely to get somebody from Fort Collins because they're quite a bit closer to Black Hawk than to us. But Castle Rock is pretty much equal distance. And so it's about targeting the people in Castle Rock. And then if you can go further and target those people who might have a proclivity to gamble. And so we're getting -- we've hired a bunch of good people who have experience in this and a new advertising agency that is experienced in this, to try to make our dollars be most efficient in in different markets.

Now in Colorado Springs, you can be in more general advertising, right, because anybody in Colorado Springs is a potential customer. And whereas in Denver, if you bought a Denver wide ad, probably the people who live on the north side of Denver, half the people whose eyeballs you're paying for are less -- not likely to come to us. Whereas in Colorado Springs, everybody is a potential customer. So there's a lot of that parsing and trying to understand it. And even like trying to reduce direct mail, we send and trying to do more e-mails, because its so much more cost effective. Like we don't send any direct mail anymore out of American Place, and we want to get to that point in Chamonix.

And so David, honestly, I've got a Chief Marketing guy who could spend all afternoon answering this question for you. But I guess from our point of view, it's like we've hired people who we think are very confident in this area, and they are working on it full time, and we're seeing some results, and we're confident we're going to get there.

Yes. I mean, look, the penetration in the Colorado Springs is creeping up. The percentage coming out of Denver is still an extremely high number. And ultimately, I think those are that's a good setup because I think as more and more people that are closer to us experience our brand. We're finding up they're enjoying it. And -- but to have the reach as far as Denver was never, never in the original model. It was always viewed as overflow. And so to the extent that, that number continues to flourish, it's all to the better as well. So we're set up well.

And there's some other little blocking and tackling, like Cripple Creek is in the middle of some of the best fly fishing in the world. I mean, that's fantastic, fly fishing around it. And there's fly fishing guides, fly fishing camps and everything. So it's like, okay, we need to have a high roller weekend where everybody gets to go fly fishing, and we have a fly fishing tournament and people will gamble in the evening. And in the same way the hotels in Las Vegas have golf tournaments. The fly fishing around Las Vegas isn't so good. So you have golf tournaments, right? And there's no golf, of course, in Cripple Creek, so we can have flyfish tournaments, right? And so there's a lot of stuff like that, that we're looking at. And frankly, for a fly fishing tournament in, say, July, we can get gamblers to fly in from Texas for that. I mean there are [indiscernible] from Dallas and Houston into Colorado Springs. It's a pretty easy trip actually. And though for the right high roller that we have to find the high roller in Dallas who likes to fly fish. But there are ways to find those people.

Our next question comes from the line of Jordan Bender with Citizens.

Afternoon. I think you kind of characterized Chamonix as the investment thesis there was to focus more on the higher end customer, the luxury customer. Is there a point, maybe this year where if you're not starting to see the revenue start to tick up, that you could start to shift some of your focus into that middle or lower end given that the cost structure is fully baked?

And apologies. My -- I didn't mean for you to think that we're not focused on the other tiers. We certainly are. I'm looking at my list for January and February, and I'll tell you, we have meaningful growth across every segment. the most growth is in that top tier, but down the line, we're seeing pretty meaningful growth. If you think of the product that we have, it's certainly -- if you bring an upper tier customer into town, they are extremely likely to go to us and only us, if you bring in a lower tier customer, you have the potential and likelihood of sharing that customer around another place or two. So all things to keep in mind. But ultimately, we've got half of the room product in town. And so long as we see people adding to the bottom line, we will market to them. what naturally happens in these processes is kind of year 1, year 2, you focus on getting customers in general and finding customers that are additive to the bottom line.

And fast forward a year after that, then you start cycling and you say, "All right, this customer used to get a Friday, free Friday room. Now he does not -- now we've got more customers in the database. We know what people spend. That person doesn't warrant a Friday room, but they might get a Wednesday room. And so -- and then a year after that, you continue to cycle that database and just optimize it. So we're early in the optimization process, and we're kind of taking people up and down the line.

Perfect. And then just switching to Silver Slipper. It's a property that, I guess, we don't really talk about all that much on these calls anymore. But -- just curious how you view maybe the '26 outlook there? And then just in general, how does that property maybe fit into the overall portfolio as we move forward?

Year-over-year, the EBITDA there was about -- it was off a little bit, almost flat. And it was -- in '24, it's a bit above 12%, and then '25, it was a bit below 12%. It should be in the high teens. I mean if you look at the margins, it did $70 million of revenue, and if you take $70 million and apply a normal regional gaming margin, you'd be in the high teens, maybe even in the low 20s. And so we've made quite a few management changes there as well, including a new GM and a new food beverage manager, a new table games manager, a new HR Director, new Finance Director, and whereas it had had the same management team since it opened 15 years ago. And so we've made a lot of changes in the past year.

And the intent is to get it up to the sort of income it should be having. Now we're not ignoring revenue either, but this is a pretty saturated market. The people in this part of the country gamble more per capita than most areas, and it's not a particularly wealthy region. So I think the upside will be being more efficient on stuff, and we'll get some revenue upside as well. It's a good property. It's kind of a cash cow for us, but it's a cash cow that should make a little more money than it's making. And I think we'll get there in 2026.

Not to the high teens in 2026, but I think...

I'd be disappointed if we don't get to 15%, but -- that's not 19%, but is not out of the question. When you look at what you should be bringing to the bottom line with $70 million of revenue and in a state where the gaming taxes aren't particularly high. And we're on the same page.

Our next question comes from the line of Chad Beynor with Macquarie Asset Management.

Wanted to ask about your Sports Wagering business supporting over around $7 million of EBITDA this year. I guess, talk about a cash cow, that's certainly a good one with pretty high margins there. Can you talk about how that contract looks if there's any risk to that in '26 or if we should continue to assume the same amount for the year?

Most of that is with circa in Illinois, and I think they're pretty happy with what they have. They also operate the Sports book in the temporary casino and well in the permanent. Illinois has a big population and a limited number of licenses. So that's by far the most valuable license we have. Now we have other licenses that are available. And one of them was markets who paid us upfront for several years. So there's an amortization of deferred revenue which is why you get a little bigger than $5 million.

We did do a little change that got approved by the Gaming Commission last week. We've had a sports book in the Grand Lodge Casino up at Tahoe for many years. And it was pretty small and the guys were -- it was leased to an outside operator. And the guys who are running it never really did much, right? And it was pretty insignificant for us. And there's a new start-up company that came to us and said, "Hey, we'd like to take that over and put some money on and try to make it something meaningful. And there it's not material to the whole company, but they're paying us significantly more rent than we were getting. And perhaps more importantly, they're paying attention to it better.

So it's one of those -- not material to the company as a whole, but I think it's a step in the right direction of changing that to a different operator. We tend not to operate these ourselves because we're not diverse enough to spread the risk. In other words, I think we have a sports book at the Silver Slipper, the [indiscernible] get into the Super Bowl, our customers are all going to be betting on the [indiscernible] and we won't have bets on the other side. And so it's better to leave it to somebody who's in that business, and we tend to just get license fees for it.

If you're thinking about what the number should be on an ongoing basis because there's always -- there has been a lot of noise in that line over the last year or 2. The right number for EBITDA is roughly -- it's like $5.9 million if you're assuming the minimums on the existing contracts.

No, there's always risk. I mean, if circa decides to cancel and leave the business. There's some limitations in the contract and then their ability to do that. But it's not like a treasury bond, I mean, it could happen.

Yes. I will say, though, Circa is more than most companies, circa has sports in their DNA. They love that sports book, Illinois, you'll see that they really -- I mean, look, I'm looking at them as I say this. I think there's still the patch on the Chicago hockey team, the Black Hawks and so they continue to fully embrace the sports side. I'd be surprised if there are any changes anytime soon there.

And frankly, the permanent casino has sports book that's kind of modeled after the one of Durango station, and that should be good for both us and Circa.

Excellent. And then Lewis, yes, looking forward to some of the financing details, hopefully in the next couple. In the next several weeks. You talked about an 18- to 24-month construction period for the permanent if that deal is executed and you do decide to kind of push forward on some of the heavier lifting, heavier spending parts of the project. I mean, will there be a meaningful amount of CapEx in '26? Maybe some of that comes in the fourth quarter? Or is it safe to assume that a lot of the permanent spending, kind of the real outflows will come in '27? Just any parameters around that would be helpful.

Well, it's '27.

Yes. I mean some may even spill into 28, at some of the construction payments are made in over year, for example, a big portion will be made in years. But how much is falls in this year. It depends a lot on exactly when we get going. The foundation isn't a big number, but it does take time. So you literally have a guy moving a bulldozer around and then they dig trenches and or some concrete, which is the foundations for the building that will go up. If you had the pause after doing that, like let's say, the debt markets just weren't cooperating and we had to pause for several months. It's okay. The concrete doesn't go bad. Its still there, right? And you can come back and finish. Now hopefully, we don't have to.

Hopefully, we have the financing range. And so by the time we're done with the foundations, we can move into the other stuff. But but you don't really want to go into the heavier spending until you know you have the money to finish it. And so we're willing to start on the foundation so that we that can speed up the opening date and that we can fund with our existing resources, and while we try to nail down the financing.

I will say that we talk about -- Dan and I talked about this at lunch day. We talk about an 18- to 24-month build. But one thing to keep in mind is the build itself is on the simpler side. In terms of there's nothing subterranean there's no parking garages. It's kind of a basic -- no high-rise exactly. It's a basic 2-story building. And it's the basic rectangular building. On the inside, the fit-out is quite fanciful, but -- but in terms of getting that actual structure up and close and then starting work on the inside, it's relatively -- it's one of the easier pads that we've seen in our lifetimes. And so...

Actually, only a small part of it is two story. Most of it's one story.

Exactly right. So we talk about 18 to 24 months, but it's we'll keep you in the loop, but we feel good -- it is an easier project to build as maybe the right thing to say.

We'll go as fast as we can, but we don't want to incur a lot of overtime.

Our next question comes from the line of John DeCree with CBRE.

Dan. I have just one from me on Waukegan. I think if I'm not mistaken, just kind of hit the 3-year anniversary couple of weeks ago and 11% growth in the fourth quarter, so still growing double digits. I know you talked a little bit about it in your prepared remarks, but I don't know, Lewis or Dan, if you could give us a little bit more insight as to kind of -- what's driving the growth there? Is it bigger database? Are you still growing the database? Or is it more spend per the existing database? I'm guessing that double-digit growth, it's probably a little bit of both. But 3 years in still growing double digits is pretty great. So if you could give us a little more color on what's going on there, that would be helpful.

Well, actually, I want to give credit to the team we have there. I mean we but we kind of stubbed their toe in Colorado and had to put together a new team. We had a great team from day 1 in Illinois and that they've just every month, every quarter figured out a way to increase our penetration, increase our -- not only our number of customers, but the satisfaction levels of the customers. We have the only casino in the whole region that made the list of the Chicago Tribune's best employers. I mean they list, I think, 50 employers and who are the best employers in the region, there's 50 of them. And 2 years in a row now, we've been the only casino on that list -- and that trades into very low turnover, which helps. I mean -- and so the team has done a very good job and very month, they're trying to figure out, okay, how do we do better? How do we do better?

And had we had an equivalent team in Colorado, we would be much better in Colorado, people matter. And we've had a great team in Illinois and now we also have the right demographics. I mean we're the closest casino to 1 million people. We have [indiscernible] easy to see, while the outside of the building looks like Department of Motor Vehicle storage place, once you're inside, it feels like a real casino. And even though we did it without spending a lot of money, when you go in, people are like, wow, we didn't expect this. It's wonderful. And so I think we have the right product and the right market year. I mean it was very fast and -- but equally important, we had the right team, and they've done a great job.

And I think to answer to this, it's a little bit of both, John. It's -- the database in terms of adding new names to it, it continues to grow at a pace meaningfully similar to what it was 3, 6, 9 months ago. It really hasn't slowed down in terms of the number of people that going into that database. We've crossed 121,000 names or closing in on 125,000 names in the database and not showing signs of slowing down. So -- but it's a little of both.

And we've done it without hurting the competition. I mean most of it is increase gambling by people in Lake County, and which is what we expected. And I guess I should also give a tip of the hat to Alex who forecasted that this is exactly what would happen, and he's been right

We have reached the end of the question-and-answer session. I would like to turn the floor back over to President and Chief Financial Officer, Lewis Fanger, for closing remarks.

I'll turn it over to Dan. Any last word?

No. Listen, it's been kind of a challenging year fixing Colorado while we try to figure out how to finance the permanent American Place. But I think we now have the team in place, and this stuff is trending the right way in Colorado, and I think we're on the cusp of having the financing arranged for American Place. So it doesn't happen overnight. I mean I think the financing would be in place in May or June, which is approximately when we would also have the extension that we mentioned and the legislature. But hopefully, by the time we're having this call for the next quarter, where we have a lot more concrete stuff we can talk about. So thank you very much, everybody.

This concludes today's conference, and you may disconnect your lines at this time. We thank you for your participation.

Greetings. Welcome to Full House Resorts Third Quarter 2025 Earnings Call. Please note this conference is being recorded. I will now turn the conference over to Adam Campbell, Corporate Controller. Thank you. You may begin.

Thank you. Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to our third quarter earnings call. As always, before we begin, we remind you that today's conference call may contain forward-looking statements that we're making under the safe harbor provision of federal security laws. I would also like to remind you that the company's actual results could differ materially from the anticipated results in these forward-looking statements. Please see today's press release under the caption Forward-Looking Statements for the discussion of risks that may affect our results.

Also, we may make reference to non-GAAP measures such as adjusted EBITDA. For a reconciliation of these measures, please see our website as well as the various press releases that we issue. Lastly, we are also broadcasting this conference call at fullhouseresorts.com, where you can find today's earnings release as well as all of our SEC filings.

That said, we're ready to go, Lewis.

Thank you, Adam. We had a very strong quarter. Revenues rose to $78 million from $75.7 million in last year's third quarter. Keep in mind that last year's financials include $1.5 million of revenue from Stockman's, which was sold in April of this year, so revenue growth on an apples-to-apples basis was 5%.

Adjusted EBITDA rose 26% to $14.8 million. That number would have been closer to $15.2 million, except for several unusual items. Our strong growth in the quarter was led by American Place in Illinois and Chamonix in Colorado, both of which are still in their ramp-up phases and should continue to see their profits grow.

Specifically at American Place, our Temporary Casino continues to fire on all cylinders. We had record revenue and record profitability at -- revenues there increased by 14% to $32 million in the third quarter. Adjusted property EBITDA rose 16% to $9 million. We continue to have large numbers of guests discover American Place for the first time, and that's helped our database grow to more than 115,000 people. The pace of new database sign-ups really hasn't slowed down in recent memory, which is great to see. That broadening awareness should continue to propel our Temporary American Place facility to new levels of profitability in 2026.

We have long said that the temporary American Place should be able to achieve $50 million of run rate EBITDA and that its much larger permanent facility to earn double that amount or $100 million. Our conviction in those figures remains as high as ever. Regarding the permanent American Place facility, we continue to make progress. We recently received unanimous site approval from the Waukegan City Council. Behind the scenes, we also continue to refine the project, resulting in a reduction of the project's total budget, down from $325 million to $302 million, excluding capitalized interest.

Our permanent casino project is an exciting one with total square footage more than doubling, the number of slots increasing by about 40% and the number of table games increasing by about 90%, it's the closest casino to more than 1 million people, sandwiched between 2 of the major north-south traffic arteries in Northern Chicagoland. To put that in perspective, the equivalent would be like if the Las Vegas Locals market only had 2 casinos and think about how much those 2 casinos would earn.

Within Lake County alone, American Place will be the only full-service casino to more than 700,000 people. Lake County is one of the wealthiest counties in the entire country, so we have great demographics. Our permanent American Place project is a phenomenal opportunity that should earn a very high ROI, and so we look forward to when we can begin its construction.

Tangentially related, we've seen some uninformed opinions recently about the potential for a new casino in Kenosha, Wisconsin. To be clear, these efforts go back some 30 years to the 1990s. The principal opponent is the large Native American casino in downtown Milwaukee, which would be much closer to it than us. That project is far from certain with several hurdles. It still requires federal approval as well as state approval, and we believe there will likely be lengthy legal challenges to the project along the way.

Beyond that, the project, which has gotten significantly smaller over the years and at this point, we believe is sized for the local Kenosha market still needs to be built. Even assuming full approvals today, the project still has several years before it would ever open. The reality is, assuming it ever receives all of the necessary approvals, it is likely many years down the line.

More importantly, the vast, vast majority of our guests at American Place aren't coming from Wisconsin. They're coming from immediately around our site. Our target markets follow the population density around us. That's to the south, going towards O'Hare Airport, to the East, going towards the Lake and certainly going to the West where there is no nearby full-service casino. As you head up north to the Wisconsin, population density thins out until you have Milwaukee, so as a result, most of our guests aren't coming from the Wisconsin area. They're typically coming from locations that would require passing by our casino before they ever reach Kenosha. Our geography in a very wealthy county is an extremely large benefit. When you have proximity and quality on your side, as we will with our permanent American Place casino, you win that competitive battle nearly every time.

Turning to Chamonix. We made great strides under our still new management team, which began arriving in April. Revenues rose by more than 7%. Adjusted property EBITDA rose by $2.8 million from last year's third quarter, rising to positive $2.1 million from negative $0.7 million last year. Our table games business is starting to thrive. Table game revenues were up 53% versus last year's third quarter and up 296% versus the third quarter of 2023. Helping drive that growth is our highest tier of rated players. Slot revenues were up 6% and 161% over those same time periods.

Our marketing programs also continue to improve as we use more targeted ways to advertise and improve the way we test various promotions for their effectiveness. We also have a large ballroom that we can use for entertainment, a new amenity to Cripple Creek, and we continue to discover what types of entertainment works best in attracting our ideal guests.

Those efforts are helping us achieve new property records, including a new property record that we hit in September for slot coin-in in a single day. Our high-frequency guests are coming more often. In the month of September, the number of visits from high-frequency guests were up more than 33% from the prior year. Slot revenues from those high-frequency guests more than doubled. Rated slot play as a whole was up 4.5%. The database is also showing decent growth. In a typical month, we're adding about 3,000 new customers into our database. Chamonix is a property that Colorado players are slowly discovering and are returning to enjoy.

Regarding our group business, that's starting to pick up steam, too. We have a verbal agreement for a group in the state. We're in the process of inking it now, so we won't give you the name of it quite yet. They hold an annual event every year around this time. This would be for next year's conference. In their ideal scenario, that group would take up 1,200 room nights over 3 days or every single room in our hotel plus spillover into the rest of the city. Their guarantee will be for a smaller figure than that, but it's still a very important group for us to host. The group is made up of important political and business leaders from throughout the region, and we're, of course, thrilled to welcome them in a year.

Our ideal group size is smaller than that, between 100 and 150 attendees. Within 500 miles of us, we estimate there are up to 4,000 conferences that fit that profile. We are starting small with our expectations, targeting 25 events of that size next year. Over the next 3 years, we think we can have a pretty full group business of about 55 events per year or about 1 per week.

On the cost side, we meaningfully improved efficiency in the building. We reduced the average number of FTEs from 373 in the first quarter of this year to 325 during the third quarter. That's a reduction of 13% despite being in the busier summer season in the third quarter. We have targeted additional areas for efficiency and expect to see those benefits in the upcoming winter season.

Ultimately, our greatest opportunity remains underpenetrated Colorado Springs market. We estimate that between 12% and 15% of Colorado Springs residents visited us or any casino at all in Cripple Creek in the last year. That is an extremely low number. In the last year, we had about 51,000 unique guests at our own property. That is a number that can easily double.

A pleasant surprise to us is the number of guests coming from the Denver market. 30% of our guests in the last year are coming from the Denver area. When we originally underwrote the investment in Chamonix, we focused largely on the 1 million people that live in Colorado Springs, Pueblo and Canyon City. We view Denver largely as gravy. The reality is that Douglas County in South Denver is as close or closer to us than Black Hawk. It's one of the fastest-growing counties in the state. It's quite wealthy with median household incomes of about $145,000, and it has 400,000 people. With Douglas County, our feeder market is effectively 40% larger than what we underwrote to.

15% of our guests aren't coming from Colorado Springs or Denver at all. They're coming from places like Texas, which has nonstop flights and is viewed as the Texas heat. Chamonix is the 13th project that we've worked on in our careers, and every single one has exceeded the run rate EBITDA that we promised investors. Casino ramps are always difficult to predict. Casino run rates tend to not be. We believe that Chamonix will continue our streak of successful projects. It's been -- it's only been fully open for about a year, and we're beginning to make great strides. The green shoots are pretty abundant.

Looking at the other properties, Rising Star and Silver Slipper were essentially flat on a combined basis. Grand Lodge, which is a pretty small part of the company at this point, was affected by renovation disruption at the Hyatt Lake Tahoe that houses our casino. Then on the balance sheet side, we had about $40 million of liquidity at the end of the quarter. At this point, there's extremely little CapEx for us until we start construction on our permanent American Place Casino. Our Illinois operations alone pay for the interest expense on our current debt. Of course, those Illinois operations continue to ramp.

I went through a lot. Dan, do you want to add anything else there?

I think you covered it pretty well. Let's take questions.

All right. Let's do Q&A.

[Operator Instructions] Our first question is from David Bain with Texas Capital Securities.

I know you mentioned, Lewis, and in the press release, you all mentioned 15% of the Colorado households visited Cripple Creek last year. Kind of wondering what the number should be in a normal scenario as the primary feeder and given the distance, what that math would look like if you were to get there? I mean, if we get a 30%, looking at the mix that Lewis mentioned, is that like 60% up in revenue? Or is there anything that you can give us there? I know there's a lot of variables, but trying to big picture that comment.

Yes. Well, there's a lot of things. I mean we know the gaming per capita, which is another way to get to it, is about half of what it should be for that sort of market. That would suggest it should be 30%, but even that is on the low side. Harrah's used to provide an annual data book every year that had a lot of data. In there, they said about 1/3 of Americans aren't interested in gambling because they were math majors in high school or something, right? But 2/3 do view gaming as a normal entertainment venue.

If you take that as the outside number that maybe 2/3 of people would visit once a year, certainly half is a possibility. I mean if I look at Las Vegas and say what percentage of the people here walk through a casino over the course of a year, it's got to be 95%, right? I know that, that number is low. I'm going to do some work and try to back into what it is at the Silver Slipper, for example, like what percentage of Slidell visits we could probably get there. We get to that number because we're a significant chunk of the market.

We know how many unique people we have. We know how many times they come per year. Using that as a proxy for the market, we end up with actually less than 15%. You get about 12% or 13% of the adults in Colorado Springs are visiting Cripple Creek over the course of the year. Now some people are going to Black Hawk, some people are flying to Las Vegas. When you say what percentage of adults are actually gambling, it's probably in the high teens.

Just as a quick follow-up to that one. The flow-through on additional revenue at this point.

Everything is open. We don't have any amenities not yet opened. In fact, we're going the opposite way. We've sharply curtailed unemployment -- not unemployment, overtime, which is Lewis forgot to mention, but overtime is down pretty dramatically from what it used to be. We're focusing on ways to be more efficient and with the payroll and try to rightsize the payroll for the revenues we have, not the revenues we think we will have. At the same time, we're growing revenues.

I think our expense structure is going down going into the off-season, and I think it will continue. Our revenues are continuing to grow. We're trying to size the payroll for what we have and then continue to grow the revenues. Those 2 factors will result in improvements in profitability, obviously. Frankly, we have very easy comparisons in the fourth and first quarters. I think I almost don't even want to look at the historic numbers. I want to get to comfortable profitability in 2026 and then build from there.

Yes. You probably know this, David. When you think about the flow-through, there's obviously gaming taxes. It's a graduated tax rate there, so figure low to mid-teens. Then there's some marketing reinvestment in the players, but maybe some incremental labor depending on whether it's slots or tables. Outside of that, it's pretty meaningful flow-through. I mean you're talking -- you're easily -- you could easily be talking 70%, 80%.

I will say this is -- in this industry, you tend to have pretty high turnover. In that market, it's higher than normal because it's such an isolated town in the mountains. A situation like this, that's actually helpful because we don't necessarily have to lay off people who are relying on the job. Now if somebody isn't pulling their way, of course, we'll lay them off, but we're able to reduce the payroll by just not replacing people who leave, and that's a lot of what we've been doing.

Then my final question on -- in order to stay on track for the August '27 American Place permanent, I believe you alluded to you'd like to complete financing by 1Q of next year at the latest. Does that timing change the phasing versus closing something this quarter? If you end up needing an extension for Illinois, I think most at least would agree that you'll get it. How does that process technically work and get message back to investors?

Well, I mean, the -- we've been talking with our principal bondholders and other potential investors and sources of capital to try to figure out the best way to do it. Obviously, I mean, legally, ethically and otherwise, we represent the shareholders and we want to figure out the most effective way to finance it to the benefit of the shareholders. Of course, we also want to be for your bondholders and everyone else.

To be clear, there is not a deadline of having this open by August of 2027. The deadline is how long you can operate the temporary. We're not going to run into pay user rates in order to meet that deadline. If you had to, you'll end up paying the employees for a month or 2 without working or -- but you won't have to. We pay over $25 million a year in state gaming taxes, we employ over 500 people. We already did get an extension once. The process to get an extension is it has to go through the legislature. We could do that in the first quarter. We could do that a year from now in the first quarter.

The reason they have that law there, the way they structured it is I call it, the Jack Cleveland, where they had proposed a big permanent and the Temporary was in an old department store and 15, 20 years later, the Temporary is still in an old department store. They want to hold their feet to the fire to make sure we're actually going to build the permanent. We fully intend to build the permanent.

In fact, last week, I went to Wyn Creek, and I went to the new Hollywood and a notch better than either of those. They're nice, by the way, and they're both doing quite well. We have a very fansful building. We committed to invest a total of $500 million. We've put $170 million into the temporary. With the $302 million cost of the permanent plus capitalized interest, we will satisfy the $500 million requirement. We fully intend to build the permanent. It'd be nice if we could be open by August of 2027, but if we're not, it's okay. We will get an extension, and we will be open when we're open.

You're right about it. If we can get the money in the next few months, we can be open by August ‘27. There's no high rise. There's no base. It's -- while it's a complex building, it's not that -- and -- but if the financial markets aren't cooperating, we might be a little late, and it's not the end of the world.

Our next question is from Jordan Bender with Citizens.

Maybe to just continue on the prior conversation. If I look at your bonds and kind of how they're trading right now, it's telling us something. Have you kind of thought any differently? Or can you maybe just update us your thinking in terms of if you had to go look for financing, potentially using a REIT. There's been a couple of transactions in the last couple of weeks. Just if those look any more favorable than they have historically or I think maybe land leases could be on the table or historically have been on the table as well. Is there any change to how you're thinking about potentially financing the permanent at all?

Well, 2 issues. In terms of bonds, we're pretty sure somebody shorted the bonds. We know there's at least one analyst who is bad mouthing us every chance it gets. That was the reason for Lewis focusing on Kenosha. That Kenosha deal has been around for decades, and it's not getting any more traction now than it was then. Those 2 Indian tribes are from Central Wisconsin. They've been fighting for centuries, and that's far from done. It has very little impact on us.

A sell-side analyst talking about it has an impact on the bonds in the short term, and it's kind of ridiculous. When you really look at the trading price of the bonds, it's on a fairly small volume. I'm not sure that, that is representative of anything. Yes, we would rather the bonds be trading better that would make this whole thing better. Now at the same time, we have and are looking at land leases. We have and are looking at REITs. Something that we found in the last months and years is the competition amongst the REITs is making them more competitive than it was before.

It's still our preference to go to the bond market. We tend to keep things pretty simple and that keeps it pretty simple, but we do look at everything, and it's getting more attractive. I looked at the Blake Sartini thing this morning, and I'm a little bit jealous. I wouldn't be having this earnings call if we take the company private, right? That's pretty brilliant. I'm looking forward to seeing what the details are. In effect, he's got a -- he's one of the few companies that still owns the real estate as are we, and he's selling the real estate to a REIT, becoming an opco and then he's got a financial commitment from a big bank to pay a cash part and then he goes private. Boy, that sounds nice. I don't know if we can get there. But boy, that sounds nice.

We look at everything. By the way, we have no active look at going private. I don't want to nerve everybody. I saw the news this morning, preparing for this earnings call with all of you and all the tough questions you're going to ask about Kenosha, I thought I'm a little jealous of Blake Sartini at the moment. Anyway, we look at everything.

Yes. Look, I think there's certainly an eagerness from some of the sources that you mentioned, Jordan. I think those are 2 of several options that are in front of us. Stay tuned. Ultimately want to do something that's cost effective, but we've got a pretty big menu of potential items in front of us.

One of the other things I'd add is I think our second quarter, which wasn't a good quarter, we weren't happy with it either, unnerved a lot of people, and it caused us to really start blocking and tackling on just simple things like what's the payroll, what's the cost of goods sold? What's the little, little things like our cost of goods sold in Colorado was inordinately high. We created a warehouse space where the more expensive alcohol and so on are kept on lock and key and so on. There's a lot of stuff we're doing that is really just blocking and tackling casino operating management, and you're seeing those results in this quarter, and you'll continue to see it in future quarters.

I think that will get people more comfortable, like on a trailing 12-month basis, Colorado lost money. On a prospective 12-month basis, Colorado will make money. That changes the leverage profile quite a bit. Although, it's a little. People look at it and say, well, on a trailing 12-month basis compared to the amount of debt you're going to have, guys, we are somewhat of a development company. You really have to look at what we will be when we open American Place because otherwise, you're ignoring the use of proceeds of the new debt. The conversation gets easier when you have better earnings, and we're pretty happy with the earnings we just reported.

Lewis, I just want to follow-up. You said there was maybe several one-time unusual items in the quarter. Is there anything major to call out there? I guess, are those just truly one-time and won't kind of happen again looking forward?

Well, the biggest part of it is -- we highlighted the last call as well as we changed over the Chamonix management team pretty meaningfully. Between headhunters, bringing in new people, relocation, that sort of stuff, that was probably half of the number that I -- half of the delta on the call. Then we had some and severance fee, yes. We had some additional smaller stuff at the properties. The big thing is really kind of change in leadership at Chamonix.

Like our new Marketing Director there, I think, is 2 months into the job, so still relatively new. There's still a lot of good to come there.

Our next question is from Ryan Sigdahl with Craig-Hallum Capital Group.

I want to stay on Chamonix. New general manager, a lot of new personnel you just mentioned. It seems like a lot of the focus has been on, call it, operational improvements, cost efficiencies, the cost side of the business. Curious how you feel about the people, the infrastructure, just where things are at from the fixed cost side of the business, where the focus can potentially shift more to revenue growth initiatives there?

Actually, the focus is on both controlling costs and building revenues, but the building of revenues takes time, right? To build the revenues, it's like hire smart marketing people. We're changing advertising agency, for example, modify how you're approaching people, do more digital, less and so be more focused. That will pay off over time, but we've done a lot of that. We've hired more casino hosts. We've gone -- our sales and marketing team has gone from half a person to 3 people. They will bring in benefits in future quarters, whereas rightsizing the payroll is something that you can do very quickly.

I don't want you to be left with them -- we will not get to where we expect to get to with Chamonix just cutting costs. We know we have to grow revenues. We are focused on both. It's just the cost cutting has more immediate benefits.

Just maybe on the marketing, etc., but you mentioned conference pipeline, you mentioned one potentially next year kind of building that. Do you have the personnel infrastructure? I guess what really goes into building a conference business as you look forward? Is it the people? Is it relationships? Is it just boots on the ground takes time? Can you walk through exactly what you guys are doing and why you have confidence you can grow that besides just kind of putting a radius around with the number of conferences?

Yes. There are a lot of different levers. The most important one is getting more day trip people from Colorado Springs. I mean, the market is a little bit like Atlantic City, where every casino in Atlantic City has a hotel because they have to by regulations, and they do their best to fill those hotels, and they do a pretty good job of it. The day trip people from Philadelphia always outnumber it. The day trip business is the vast majority of their revenue. The same will be true with us. We have 1 million people at the foot of the hill, and that's important.

For example, there's a very simple little thing, but it could be important when we do -- and we've been doing focus groups and people say, while the drive isn't that long, it's a little bit scary because you're along this road that has a cliff on it. Well, there's a back door that we've always known about. A little stretch of it had not been paved until about a year or 2 ago, and now it's paved. You drive up to Divide and instead of turning left to Divide, you go straight 1.5 miles and you go left, and it's a wide, nicely paved 2-lane road that goes up a valley and comes in the back door of Cripple Creek, not the back door. It's the other right?

Whereas the way that kind of follows an is carved into the side of the hill, so it weaves in and out of the hill. When you're driving away from Cripple Creek, you're hug in the hill, not so bad. When you're driving towards Cripple Creek, the road drops off on the right side, and it's a little bit, I suppose. I'm used to driving in the mountain, so it's never bothered me much. By comparison, Lewis is not. He made -- when I showed him the other way, he now goes up the back way and then he'll come down the other way.

If you Google it, they're almost exactly the same time and the same miles. We're getting the road signs changed. You also have better self-service if you take the fluorescent Valley route. They're both routes very pretty. There's a little detail the Golden Nugget property, their whole strategy seems to have been to be the first one as you come into town, and they're kind of removed from everyone else and they're up on the hill. As you come down, you see them first, then you drive 3 blocks by them to get to everyone else.

Sometimes that strategy works, sometimes it doesn't. The E Resort had that same strategy in Las Vegas, get people before they get to the strip. Well, guess what, people still want to go to the strip. You have a little bit of that in Cripple Creek. But boy, if you come in the other way, we're the first casino you come to, not the Golden Nugget. They're the last one you get to, right? It's like, wow, so we're actually changing it on our website to say, Hey, take the more pleasant back road, especially if the weather is not good. It's a much more pleasant drive. It's even kind of interesting.

One evening, I was driving on and I almost hit a Lama. I thought it was a dear it first, and I realize, oh, there's a Lama farm and so one of the Lama has gotten out of the Lama farm. In terms of building that day trip business from Colorado Springs, it's a lot of that and saying, Hey, this is a nice, pleasant drive. It's a nice place to go, come up and see it, experience it. That's the most important lever to push.

Now, the convention and meeting space lever is also especially because that helps fill midweek. I mean we fill up on weekends. It's midweek, we need to fill up. We built very nice meeting room space, the nicest of any casino in the state. Ameristar has pretty good meeting room space. Monarch does not. Nobody else in Cripple Creek has anything anywhere close to what we have. We've hired 3 people who are experienced in this, and they are reaching out and they know how to do it, but meetings are booked months and years in advance. Like right now, we're inking this deal Lewis referenced for a year from now. It's actually kind of a citywide convention, but we're most of the room, so it's really us and some spillover.

There's a lot of these, and they are already starting to put stuff on the books, but this takes time. Honestly, we should have been doing this 3 years ago. We're doing it now and better late than ever, and it will build over time. If you look at, say, Monarch, who is a milepost we look at because I think we've built a pretty similar place. They're a little bigger than us. They have 500 rooms. We have 300 rooms, but the casinos are about the same size and so on.

They're doing about -- they're doing north of $300 million a year in revenue, which is 6x what we're doing, 5x what we're doing. If you assume that all 500 of their rooms are filled every night and they get $500 in the casino in each occupied room, then their revenue is still 75% from day trip business. I think the same will be true with us. It's important to fill the rooms. It's important to fill the rooms midweek. It's one of the important levers. The day trip business is an important lever. The high-end business, very important lever, figure out who the high rollers are from different places.

Some blocking and tackling, like 15% of our play is coming from the town of Pueblo, which is about 200,000 people. It's kind of, that's kind of interesting. It's south of Colorado Springs. It's a pretty good penetration. Now we're looking to have a host who's dedicated to Pueblo, and we will host cocktail parties in Pueblo for our customers to find out who their friends are because often friends of high rollers are also high rollers. You find these little nuggets that just takes time.

The Colorado State Fairs in Pueblo. Well, next year at the Colorado State Fair, we will have a booth, passing out and free play, whatever it is to try to get people to come and visit us. It's learning and modifying and blocking and tackling. If we can keep expenses flat to down and revenues growing 5% to 10% a quarter, we will get to be pretty significantly profitable pretty quickly.

Our next question is from Chad Beynon with Macquarie.

I wanted to ask about Indiana. There was a gaming market study recently. Kind of going back to the age-old question that you and the team have talked about in terms of is the state of Indiana maximizing or properly offering casinos in the right locations. I know you've always talked about improving the value of that asset. Can you talk about if the parties that be on the other side are maybe a little bit more receptive at this time to potentially moving an asset to a higher population area and if you guys could still potentially have exposure to that opportunity.

Yes. Well, it takes a state laws. You have to go through the legislature and get the governor sign off on it. When Indiana legalized 30 years ago, it intentionally put the casinos around the borders to try to draw revenue from Illinois, Ohio and Kentucky. Illinois, Ohio and Kentucky now all have their own casinos. The original locations are not the best locations in terms of maximizing the jobs or the tax revenues for the state. They do have that precedent. They allowed 2 riverboats on Lake Michigan to relocate.

One went as the Hard Rock Casino just off the freeway in Gary, and it's the #1 casino in the state now, doing $25 million, $30 million a month. The second one is in Terre Haute, and it's doing very, very well in Southwestern Indiana. The legislature approved a gaming study undertaken under the Gaming Commission to investigate what would be the impact on the state tax revenues as well as on the horse tracks and the existing casinos of allowing a casino to move to any 2 locations, one of the 2 best locations.

Not surprisingly, #1 is in Indianapolis. I mean half the population of Indiana is in Indianapolis, which is in the middle of the state and has no casino. Now Caesars has a racetrack 30 miles northeast of it and another one 35 miles southeast of it, and Terra Haute is 50 miles to the west of it. A casino in Indianapolis would have some impact on those, but the state still comes out way ahead. Then the other location I noticed is Fort Wayne and kind of specifically Northwest of Fort Wayne. Up there, you'd have -- there isn't any casino in Fort Wayne. That's the second largest city in the state. The MSA is 600,000 people, if I remember correctly.

You might have some impact on the tribal casino in Battle Creek that ironically, this company created 12 years ago. There's another tribal casino up that way. It might have some impact on it, but most of the revenue would come from increased gambling by people in Fort Wayne. That study is out, and it's available. We have the lowest revenue-producing casino in the state by [Widemark]. There is actually a special tax tier for low-revenue casinos. I think we're the only casino in it at the moment.

In terms of who could move, we would be the most beneficial to the state because we go from a very low tax rate to a more normal tax rate in a different location. Ironically, we actually have the support of the community we're in because we pay, as I recall, about $1 million a year in taxes to Rising Sun, and we've told them that we would pay them 2x if we're allowed to relocate. The same with our employees, we've said we would -- if we're allowed to relocate and they choose not to relocate with us, we would pay them 1 year's severance. We wanted to make sure that we weren't fighting opposition from the community we're in. In fact, I think the community we're in understands the situation and would welcome it.

Great, Dan. Very comprehensive. Then Lewis, you talked about the 16% growth in the quarter at the temp. That puts trailing 12-month EBITDA for the property a little over $32 million. You talked about growing this to $50 million run rate. Is that just kind of running the revenue at the same rate you're running right now, getting the flow-through? Or are there any other strategies that you'd be willing to share in terms of getting closer to that $50 million run rate?

Yes. No, no, you're thinking of it the right way. It's just the continued natural ramp. We're not going to hit $50 million -- well, maybe we will. I'm not expecting us to hit $50 million in 2026 for what it's worth, but I do think we have a good shot to be in the 40s next year. I think by the time you get ready to open the permanent casino, the expectation is hopefully on a looking-forward basis in the [tent], we can be run rating somewhere close to that $50 million mark. So that's the thinking.

If you look at -- look, the database growth hasn't slowed down, as I mentioned. Revenue growth, we continue to grow revenues pretty meaningfully. September was a little bit of an anomaly, but I fully expect us to see a very good and continuing growth as we go out from here. The sheer fact is when we run around that market locally, people still don't know that there is a casino in Waukegan and the number of people that discover that casino on a daily basis is very high. That's ultimately great news for us.

If you think back to when that -- when they talked about opening new casinos in that market, all the local news media focused on the downtown casino, not in Waukegan. So it's when we opened, I think the natural assumption from a new casino when downtown finally opened. That's okay. It means that the awareness is still kind of growing as it would do in a normal ramp.

We also added a poker room in August. Lewis mentioned that September was a bit of an anomaly. Recognize September this year did not have Labor Day weekend, whereas last year, it had a good chunk of the weekend. Otherwise, that property has been up in revenues and EBITDA every single quarter since it opened 2.5 years ago. Trailing 12 months might be $32 million, but the run rate today is clearly in the $35 million, $36 million. I mean it was $9 million in the quarter. It's not a very seasonal market. I think the run rate today is higher than 32.

We probably hit something with a 4 on the front of it in 2026, and we'll be at a run rate of 50 by the time we get to August of 2027, I guess, is what Lewis is saying.

Our next question is from Colin Mansfield with CBRE Group.

I wanted to drill in a little bit on the table game strategy up at Chamonix. Maybe help us bridge a little bit the nice numbers that you gave us earlier and what you're seeing in terms of table revenue growth with sort of what the state data is telling us? Because it seems like you guys are growing share. just based on kind of what the data is telling us and what you guys are reporting. Maybe what's working there? Maybe what's the status on the go-forward strategy here for the table games?

Well, we have the prettiest table games pit in the state. Of course, the 300 guestrooms kind of help feed into that. So much so that Century is across the street from us has thrown in the towel and closed their table games, which also helped us. The other night, we had I guess, about 3 weeks ago, we had an entertainment event, and our table games were just bustling. I walked up the street to the Brass, which is triple crowns table games just to see if any of that was spilling over. There were a few very lonely looking players up there. I think we've sucked up a lot of the table game business.

Then the Golden Nuggets is our principal competitor for table games, and they do a good job where they are. There's a few things. There's a pretty big place called the Double Eagle privately owned, I think the second of the 2 owners has passed away, the things in probate and it's a fair chunk of capacity and pretty dead-looking place. When you look at the market more-and-more, we're kind of the dominant, and I think that will continue. The Golden Nugget is a good competitor, well-run property. Triple Crown is a well-run company. The other ones are pretty small and pretty -- not very meaningful.

I think we will continue to gain share, and I think we will grow the market. I mean, the Cripple Creek is most of the growth in the state's revenues this year, and we're most of that. I think it's a little bit masked perhaps by Double Eagle being soft, if you will. In other words, it's kind of -- they're -- I don't know quite where they're going, but they're not doing much marketing or much of anything. That is causing us to gain share. Eventually, Double Eagle probably gets bought by somebody who fixes it up and that would actually be good for the market and good for us. I mean they have 170 guest rooms, but they're the second largest hotel in town, 158 guestrooms, I think. They're sorely in need of refurbishment. That will happen someday in a 5-year time horizon.

Yes. We've got. I mean, if you look at the table games business for us, it's still only about 11% of total gaming revenues. A year ago at this -- third quarter of last year, it was sitting around 8%. We've grown that table games business some. I think that table games business can be double what it is today for what it's worth. I think part of it is we're putting in new games. I think we have the only mini box pit in town still at this point.

We introduced the first Broad table in town, and we're the only ones with it. We did just put in one of the electronic -- it used to be and now it's owned by Interblock. We put it in just a few weeks ago. It looks and feels like a craft table, but I think legally, it's a slot machine, so that might destroy the numbers a little. It allows you to run a craft game with just one person or even no person. It's a pretty popular game. You see it in the stations casinos here in Las Vegas.

We also added table games in Bronco Billy's that's only open on weekends, but with a little lower table limits. We have quite a bit of table capacity now. I think we'll continue to grow that. I mean recognize, we're -- our table game business is still a fraction of what they do at Monarch or Ameristar or the Lodge. We have a lot of growth to go.

Then maybe for my follow-up, if we can stay on Chamonix for a second. Lewis, if you can indulge me because I know you said estimating ramps is difficult, but now that you guys feel like there's probably a good fully baked cost structure at Chamonix with a lot of the changes that Brandon and the team have enacted. What should we expect in terms of EBITDA over the next few quarters, knowing that we are kind of going into the seasonally slower period and a lot of the good flow-through that you guys can expect will really probably shine during the big busier season as we get through the winter? Maybe help us think through what we should be looking for from an EBITDA trajectory there over the next few quarters?

Strong year-over-year growth and better results, but I'm hesitant to put a number on it. We're doing the best we can to grow revenues and control costs and confident that it will be comfortably profitable in 2026. It's going to take us -- I think our total investment, including acquiring Bronco Billy's is approaching $300 million. For us to get a reasonable return on that's going to take us 3 years, 2, 3, 4 years. Then I think you don't build these things for 3 years. I mean it will be a strong asset for the next 25 years.

Yes. I was going to say what Dan said. Look, given how difficult those ramps are and given that we still have a new team there that continues to season by the day, including a bunch of new hires in the last 2 months, I won't give you a number. To be extreme, well, I'll flip it around on you a different way.

On a trailing 12-month basis in the building, EBITDA was negative $4.8 million. I think what's lost on people sometimes is that if you can flip that negative $4.8 million to plus $10 million plus $15 million, plus $20 million in the nearer term, that's a $15 million to $25 million swing in total EBITDA. That's not a small move. Even though -- so it's a long-winded way of saying even smaller numbers have an outsized delta effect in terms of overall growth. Keep that in mind as well.

Look, we are extremely optimistic on that project, and I do think we'll see some pretty nice numbers in 2026.

Yes. Even in given direction of the property, we don't go to them and say, look, this is the number we need you to meet. It's like we need you to make progress and grow the revenues, control the costs, and we'll get there. Because if you say, oh, we want you to make $15 million or $20 million right away. You probably could by closing valet parking, by closing the spa and just clamping down on all costs, but you'd be giving up the opportunity to get it to making $30 million or $40 million someday.

There's still a lot of costs we incur to try to get to a higher place. The strategy is to keep making progress and exactly what that falls out to as long as we are up year-over-year comfortably, we're making progress.

I will say this, Colin, we had an investor that wanted to see the property on a weekend recently. We were there on a Saturday. He walked in the door and he said, I've heard all sorts of things like, Oh my gosh, the road is difficult. He took the backways, like this road is easy. Then he walked in the door and he said, I've heard that you built a place that's too nice. You can't get a good customer in here, and he said, this is exactly the kind of customer you want in here. By the way, the place is bustling.

I think what people forget sometimes is what happens when these casinos ramp is you start by building the business for that Friday, Saturday, you slowly expand that into Sunday, you expand it into the Thursdays. Eventually, you have the database to effectively fill that whole week. We have not yet filled the whole week, but man, oh man, we've made great progress in getting there. A year from now, we'll be talking about even more progress, and 2 years from now, it will be even better. Stay tuned, but it is -- we're feeling very, very good about where we sit right now.

We probably have time for maybe 2 questions, Dan, if we're quick.

Our next question is from John DeCree with CBRE.

Just one for me. Talked a lot about Chamonix and Waukegan, but you've made some management changes not that long ago at Silver Slipper. Dan, I think I recall, you were kind of hoping for some improvements there. I think maybe hopefully EBITDA trough last year. Can you just give us an update on kind of what you're seeing at Silver Slipper and how progress is going there?

Silver Slipper is making progress. I mean, the numbers get a little distorted because there was some inefficient marketing. We were giving away buffets and rooms to people who don't gamble enough. We've cut that back. It's not showing the revenue growth, but it's had decent trends in profitability. I think that we're pretty happy with that.

Rising Star was a little more challenged. We said the 2 were about flat. The one was carrying the other a little bit. Listen, the Silver Slipper can grow from below $15 million to about $15 million a year in EBITDA. It's not going to suddenly jump to $30 million. Again, blocking and tackling and doing basic stuff. Rising Sun is more complicated. It's a difficult market, very competitive. We have a big footprint there. The fact that we are looking to relocate it makes people question it. It's a challenged place to run, but it has a loyal clientele and it's making progress, too. We have our niche and it does okay.

Then at Tahoe, the owner, Larry Ellison, who acquired the Hyatt a couple of years ago, has started a refurbishment. The first thing they did was ripped down everything along the beach, which was about dozen or 15 high-end villas that were right along the beach and the largest restaurant in the entire Hyatt chain and their meeting room space. Now we're in the high-rise that's across the street. Without easy beach access and without those villa suites, there were gamblers who we would normally invite up in the summer and would want to stay in those suites, and they're not as prone to come when those suites aren't available.

That affected us a bit in the quarter. It's not a very meaningful part of the company at this point, but he is replacing them with new suites and a new restaurant, and I think it's going to be way nicer than it even was. It was already nice, but the location is spectacular. Now there's going to be a spectacular building mirroring the location, and that should be good for us in the long term.

We had a good Silver Slipper October is off to -- was off -- we started the quarter well there. We'll see if it continues, but to Dan's point, I'm expecting knock on wood, some EBITDA growth there in the fourth quarter. Good news. It's doing what we expect it to do.

We've hired some good new members of the team. We have a new Head of table games who's introducing some things that are creative and good. We have a new food and beverage manager who we hired from Treasure Chest, who's very confident and doing well. It is a new team forming together and I think it will have good results in the future, but this is a cash cow for us.

Our final question is from Ricardo Chinchilla with Deutsche Bank.

I was hoping if you could give us a little bit of a sense of how the seasonality of the market is going to impact the ramp-up? I know that you guys have made very important progress on the cost cutting side. What should we expect for the fourth quarter and maybe in the first quarter, given that the market is very seasonal?

Well, last year, we lost money in both the fourth quarter and first quarter. I hope is to not lose money in those quarters this year. Now, the third quarter is always going to be the seasonally strongest quarter. We made $2.1 million in this quarter, but next summer, it should be much stronger than that. I would expect longer term, the third quarter would always be 40% or 50% of the earnings in the year.

The year-over-year comparisons will be easy. We are cutting the cost going into the off-season. Our revenues in November will not be what they were in July, and so our costs can't be either nor do they need to be. I mean, you staff your restaurants and your table games in particular, based on the amounts of play, and so there is a natural tendency to have less people in the winter than there is in the summer.

I'll add in case it helps you. The fourth quarter of last year, which is an extremely easy comp, EBITDA was minus $3.4 million. You should look for meaningful improvement off of that. The first quarter of 2025 EBITDA was minus $2.3 million. That was under the old management team, and you should expect improvement from that as well.

Yes. Look, I'm trying to make it profitable in those quarters. I don't think it's going to make a lot of money in those quarters, but we'd like it to stay in the black, and that sets a foundation for a good 2026.

If I might squeeze one last one, and this would be. Can you just share -- and I know that you guys have already talked about Kenosha, but do you guys -- given your knowledge in the industry, do you guys think that an approval of the process is even likely at this point? Given that, do you anticipate that the project would even keep its original size given all the issues that the trial had with the approval of the contract? Any comment would be very appreciated.

Well, look, at any given time, there's always somebody trying to develop a casino somewhere, right? If you just look at -- and it seems like everybody who ever had a native American in their family historically is trying to put a casino somewhere. Most of those don't happen. There's a lot of hurdles. In this, you have to get the Bureau of Indian Affairs to bless the concept. The tribe is actually doesn't live there. The tribe lives 200 miles north of there, where they have a small casino up near Green Bay. The tribe itself didn't want to spend all the money you need on the lobbyists and so on. They got the seminals involved or the seminals involved in a lot of different places as kind of a management company.

They're trying to figure out how to get through the Bureau of Indian Affairs under the Trump administration. The Bureau of Indian Affairs has been much less friendly towards travel gaming than it was under Biden. I think under Biden, the Secretary of the Interior was a member of an Indian tribe in New Mexico, and they approved all sorts of things and much less -- much more difficult to do under the Trump administration. I think Trump himself is not a very fond of tribal casinos, he had to compete with them.

I used to hate the fact that we had to compete with them because they pay less in taxes. Now they're often the highest bidder when there's a casino for sale. The Palms get sold to the San Manuel tribe, the Mirage gets sold to the Seminal tribe, Sand to the Porch Creek tribe -- compounding wealth tax-free and often they're willing to pay the highest price. Now I'm looking at it and saying, well, we're not looking to sell the company today. If we were someday, that it would be an Indian track.

A little bit mixed, but on this, I think it's very difficult to get through Bureau of Indian Affairs, -- then they have to go to the governor's office, get the governor to sign off on it. It's not at all clear that he would. Of course, the Pottawatomie are sitting there making $200 million a year for their casino in Milwaukee. They're forces in the. EBITDA just. EBITDA, yes.

I think they have lobbyists and lawyers and in fact, we dealt with that, they held us up by a year with lawsuits. I think what they're likely to do to -- I mean that Kenosha is almost kind of an extended suburban Milwaukee. They're going to fight that tooth and nail. I think it's -- I would say it's actually unlikely to happen. If it does happen, it's years away. If it does happen, it's still not that meaningful to us because it's quite a distance from us.

I'm going to take it a step further. I think inflation between now and the time that casino happens, if it were to happen, is more than overshadows what we would lose to that casino. When somebody is looking to short the stock or short the bonds and create a negative story, they'll go find out that Joe Blow wants to put a casino in Libertyville and they'll say, Hey, Joe Blow, he was native American 35 years ago, he might get the sign. They're not. I think it's unlikely. There you go.

That will conclude our question-and-answer session. I would like to turn the floor back over to Lewis for closing remarks.

Dan, you want?

No, I would like -- I hate to leave it on that note because Kenosha really is insignificant to our future. We just had a good quarter. I think it's forming a base. We have easy comparisons going forward. We're going to have future good quarters, and we're building a base, and we continue to look for the right ways to finance the permanent casino, but our backs are not to the wall. When we can find the stars that align in a way that makes sense, then we will move ahead. Hopefully, that's in the near future. If it takes a little bit longer, that's okay, too. At the end of the day, we're here trying to build long-term shareholder value. It's astounding to me that our stock is as low as it is, but this too will pass. I remember in the middle of the pandemic, our stock was down less than $1 and it turned out to be a great buying opportunity. I kind of feel like we're going to be fine and more than fine. I'll leave it at that.

Thank you. Thank you, everyone.

Thank you. This will conclude today's conference. You may disconnect at this time, and thank you for your participation.

Greetings, and welcome to the Full House Resorts Second Quarter 2025 Earnings Call. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, this conference is being recorded.

I would now like to turn the conference over to your host, Lewis Fanger, President of Full House. You may begin.

Actually, go ahead and kick it off, Adam. Sorry.

Thank you. Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to our second quarter earnings call.

As always, before we begin, we remind you that today's conference call may contain forward-looking statements that we're making under the safe harbor provision of federal security laws. I would also like to remind you that the company's actual results could differ materially from the anticipated results in these forward-looking statements. Please see today's press release under the captions Forward-Looking Statements for the discussion of risks that may affect our results.

Also, we make reference to non-GAAP measures such as adjusted EBITDA. For a reconciliation of those measures, please see our website as well as various press releases that we issue. Lastly, we also are broadcasting this conference call at fullhouseresorts.com, where you can find today's earnings release as well as our SEC filings.

And with that, back to you, Lewis.

Good afternoon, everyone. I know it's a busy day for many of you today, so we'll keep our prepared remarks on the brief side, and then we'll head quickly into questions. We're actually sitting here at American Place today, so we'll start there.

We're very pleased with how our temporary American Place facility has ramped up. In the second quarter, we had record revenue. It was $30.7 million, up about 13%. And we also had record adjusted property EBITDA of $8.9 million, which was up 17%. I don't think the July gaming figures are out quite yet in Illinois, but rest assured, we had another very solid month of growth in the month of July. That growth is not by accident. Part of our continued growth is due to customer awareness, which continues to improve by the day. After all, we are still a relatively new casino and building awareness is a natural part of any casino ramp.

One encouraging sign is the number of new sign-ups into our database, which recently crossed 107,000 people. And new sign-ups into the database continue at the same pace that we saw several quarters ago, which is a great sign for us. We also continue to grow because we continue to fine-tune the amenities that we have here at American Place. As an example, one of our restaurants that we opened with originally had way too many seats. And so we put up some curtains, turned half of it into a comedy club, started bringing in comedians like Kevin Nealon, and it's helped increase our visibility as well as our overall operations.

Similarly, we've had customer inquiries for the longest time about why we don't have a poker room. Fast forward to today, when we took an underperforming corner of the casino and transformed it into a small poker room. We just concluded an operations play day for the new poker room, which went well, and we're prepared to open it as soon as we get the green light from regulators. If you think about EBITDA growth at American Place, we earned a little over $29 million in all of 2024. And so for 2025, we are expecting to have something like 20% growth for the full year.

Switching over to American -- I'm sorry, switching over to Chamonix. There are 3 major points that I want to make about Chamonix. First, our own gaming revenue continues to grow, and we have done that while having negligible impact on gaming revenues for the rest of the city. That's a very important point because it tells you that our gaming market continues to be undersaturated. Otherwise, our competitors as a whole would be down 20% or 30% or some big number, but they're not. What that in turn should tell you is that our gaming revenues at Chamonix are nowhere near done growing.

This is a market that has been starving for high-quality gaming product. We are the first and only high-quality product in Cripple Creek, and so we need to build awareness, which takes time. It is happening in real time. And as awareness continues to grow, we will be the beneficiary. Second, at this point, our cost structure is pretty much fully baked. That means as those revenues continue to grow, we will see meaningful flow-through down to EBITDA. And third, although preliminary, given that we haven't closed the books yet, it does appear that we will be EBITDA positive in July at Chamonix.

With that said, let's talk specifically about Chamonix's second quarter. Very late in the first quarter, we hired a new General Manager, followed by a new Chief Marketing Officer halfway into the current second quarter. Given the long lead time for the team to analyze the marketing database and to send out marketing mailers, there wasn't much impact that our new team could make here in the second quarter. We are seeing their effects in the third quarter with gaming revenue continuing to grow in July.

From a cost perspective, though, our new GM could and did have an immediate effect. If you compare sequential quarters, so comparing the second quarter of 2025 to the first quarter of 2025, what you'll see is revenue was virtually flat at $11.6 million. If you look at operating expenses, you'll see massive improvement. Operating expenses were $1.2 million lower versus the first quarter of 2025, implying nearly $5 million of annual cost synergies. It's made up of a collection of small things that don't impact the customer experience like new labor controls to improve scheduling and limit unnecessary overtime. We don't think we're done with those cost savings yet. Perhaps more importantly, though, we are not yet done growing revenues. Those 2 items in concert are what will propel Chamonix to the profitability levels that we believe it can achieve.

Our other properties are less important than the 2 that I just mentioned, but they're still important and they are holding their own. Silver Slipper is the lion's share of the remaining properties. Revenue there was down $1.6 million as we reined in some over-comping levels. Adjusted property EBITDA would have been flat except for a onetime noncash accounting item. We also had a parking garage issue that briefly closed our garage heading into a key holiday weekend. Stockman's Casino was sold on April 1, so that dropped out of our consolidated financials in this year's second quarter. And we also have a new General Manager at Grand Lodge up in Lake Tahoe. He came to us from a large native American casino near Sacramento. His work experience has been focused on player development and casino operations, and we think he's going to be a great addition up there.

Maybe a quick comment on the potential for us to refinance our existing debt, and then I'll turn it over to Dan. But we do continue to believe that the debt markets are the appropriate place for our financing of the permanent American Place facility. Accordingly, we, like probably many of you, watch the debt markets extremely closely. The debt markets hit a temporary blip when the tariff noise happened in April. Since then, we've been pleased to watch the high-yield markets rebound somewhat swiftly. The high-yield markets have become increasingly accommodative, though obviously, we have not yet launched -- publicly launched a deal.

That's all I had. Dan, do you want to take some clean up there?

Large deal publicly or privately.

Or privately, -- very true.

We keep watching for an opportunity, and I think that will come. As a practical matter, we're allowed to operate the temporary casino here at American Place until August of 2027. As long as we get underway with construction sometime this year, we can make that deadline. I think it's a practical matter if the bond market didn't cooperate and we had to delay that, we can probably get an extension of the period of time to operate the temporary. After all, we pay about $25 million a year in tax revenue and employ over 500 people. And we had to do that before with the Potawatomi lawsuit. I'm confident we could do it again.

First choice is for the bond market to cooperate and allow us to get the financing done and get going with construction. That would be the best for all worlds. But the high-yield market tends to have windows that open and close. And at the moment, it's open somewhat of a crack, a little more than a crack.

A little more than a crack, a lot more than a crack, actually.

And -- but it's kind of a summer doldrum. So we're looking for an opportunity. But if we don't get it done, it's not the end of the world, we'll just be a little bit later. And I think Lewis did a pretty good job on that. So I'm happy to go to questions.

Yes. I think you mentioned July being strong. I mean, you did mention we expect to be up about 20% this year at American Place. July alone, I think, is probably up about 30%. So it -- we're doing pretty well. And then in Colorado, you mentioned that it's cash flow positive in July. Pretty clear it will probably be cash flow positive for the third quarter. And the goal is to keep cash flow positive thereafter, although it obviously gets more challenging as you went into the off-season. But I think with the changes we've made, management changes, we really -- at that property, it's a little different than American Place because it has a hotel and American Place doesn't. And the hotel fills on weekends, but it doesn't fill during the week.

And in fact, sometimes during the week, the occupancy gets pretty low, and we end up losing money operating all these amenities in a hotel, it's not -- occupancy is low. The normal fix to that is to have a sales force that works for years in advance and helps fill it midweek with meetings and conventions and so on. Quite honestly, we've just hired that sales force. We had a salesperson who with hindsight, it was pretty ineffective, and we're hiring people now, and there's a lead time on that. And we'll eventually get there just like almost any casino hotel will fill midweek with meetings and groups and conventions and then the weekends are busy with gamblers.

That sales job, though, did get a lot easier. It's not easy to try and sell space or rooms before you ever open, before people can see what you've built. And I will say that at this point, it did get a lot easier.

And frankly, the icon I always look at is Monarch, who does very well in Black Hawk, which is a very similar market. And they do a very good job, and they have a nice property. I think our casino itself is actually nicer than theirs, and I think our hotel is pretty equivalent to theirs. They're bigger than us, but we're 60% their size. And they're a public company. They only have 2 casinos, that one and the one in Reno. They don't break it out, but the one in Reno has been around for a long time. So you can look back and see approximately what they make in Reno. And the bottom line is they make somewhere north of $100 million a year in Black Hawk. And it's like, wow, we're 2/3 their size. We're eventually going to be pretty profitable.

In terms of meeting room space, we actually have far better meeting room space than they do. They're in a very constrained site. They don't have much meeting room space. They really don't have a venue to have entertainment. We do. And so I think we will do much better, but we've had some growing pains out of the box, and we're fixing that.

That's, I guess it. I mean the Silver Slipper is doing well in a lot of ways, but Lewis mentioned the parking garage. We had a ramp in the parking garage that had developed a structural problem, and we had to close the parking garage to a key weekend while we fixed it. And most of the parking at that property is in the parking garage. So we were scrambling a bit to have valet parkers and everything. But we got through the weekend fine, and otherwise, the property is doing pretty well.

In Tahoe, we're off a little, but the Tahoe property, we're in the main tower on one side of the street, and there was a bunch of meeting room space, a restaurant and some high-end suites that were along the beach on the other side. The hotel was bought by Larry Ellison, who is in the process of upgrading the hotel significantly. And one of the first things he did was tear down the stuff all along the lake, and it's being replaced with much nicer stuff. That stuff won't be completed for another almost 2 years. And in the meantime, there's a lot less wedding business, meeting business, less high-end suites at the property, and that has an impact on the casino. Given that, we're actually doing pretty well.

And so -- and I think when it's all done, Ellison Group is going to make it into one of the leading resort hotels in the whole country, and we hope to be part of that. We're on kind of a short-term lease there, but it's been renewed many times in the past, we've actually operated that casino for about 12 or 13 years, and we hope to continue to do so as Mr. Ellison improves the property. [indiscernible] we continue to work on the possibility of relocating the license in Indiana.

As we mentioned, I think, on the last call, the state legislature approved a bill that funded a study commission that's being undertaken now by the Casino Control Commission to determine the benefits to the state from legalizing a new license or allowing one to move. We would be the logical one to move and where it might be best to move it and what the benefits of the state would be. We're pretty confident that, that study will show that there would be significant benefits, and we'll see where it goes from there.

Let's go into some Q&A.

[Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from the line of Jordan Bender from Citizens JMP.

This is Eric Ross. I'm on for Jordan. I was wondering what are some of the early factors we should be looking at to determine success and earnings ramp at the property in Colorado?

Well, we're already started by having the expense structure reduced and some of that was pretty easy -- just not really easy, but putting constraints on overtime. And we actually changed the pay week so that when we figure out that if you had the pay week ending on, say, a Sunday, well, the time where all of a sudden you need to pull people in to staff is on a weekend, and that's when you're busy. And we shifted it, I believe, to Thursday. And the idea is that if you pull somebody in on a Saturday or Sunday and it's the end of the pay week, you end up paying overtime.

If the pay week ends on Thursday and you end up having somebody work on a Saturday or Sunday, you can tell them to take Tuesday and Wednesday off, so you don't end up in overtime. So it's just a simple example. We did that. We've doing better with our laundry contract, doing better with staffing our housekeeping contract. Those are both done by outside parties, and we're saving quite a bit of money there. And so the cost reductions, as Lewis mentioned, are already running $5 million a year. In fact, had we put those in place a year ago, we would be profitable on a trailing 12-month basis. And so the cost savings has begun and is already showing benefits.

And there is some expenses of some of the people we've replaced get severance pay, and that's dragging us a little. But obviously, that ends at some point. And then now it's getting the marketing up. And just like at American Place, where we've built the mailing list and we target it properly and we work on it, it's a slow process. And there's -- but it's a steady process. It is an underserved market. There's a lot of business out there to get. We just have to go out and get it. And so we have actually about 5 people now. We have a Corporate Chief Marketing Officer. We have a Corporate Director of Advertising, and both of them are doing some of the roles that we had an outside advertising agency do before. And so we -- some of their cost is actually offset by the advertising agency stuff.

And -- but then at the property, we have a new Director of Marketing, who we hired, has a long history of being in that role at a number of successful properties. He joined us from the Hollywood in Toledo. And he used to work in Black Hawk and he and his wife wanted to get back to Colorado, and we were happy to facilitate that, a lot of experience. We have a new Director of Sales just starting. And the difference between marketing encompasses everything. Sales is really focused on getting meetings, conventions and so on in place.

In fact, not long ago, Lewis and I were having dinner with -- actually, I think it was your bankers at Citizens at the Durango Station and the GM of Durango Station came by and they only have 200 rooms. And we asked how they were doing. We couldn't get a room that night's fully booked. And he said, yes, they were doing very well with the Nevada Society of Tax Accountants. It's like who knew that they go to Durango Station for their thing. And the room rate was $800 that night because there were enough tax accountants who wanted to stay there. They've driven up the room rate. And the GM of Durango Station told us he had actually removed the rooms from the casino block because the tax accountants were paying so much money.

And I said, well, how many people do you have in sales and marketing? And he stopped and he thought for a moment, and he says 4 plus an assistant. And I said, well, we're trying to hire our first one, and we have 300 rooms. And so now we have a couple. But that shows you where -- that's something, honestly, we should have done 3 years ago. And now we're trying to play catch up, and that will pay dividends over the long term. And so we're there. And the normal marketing, we're looking at stuff.

There's different AI programs that we can use to improve our marketing where you go to the AI consultants who come in and say, okay, here we have this database. It's a very large database there because properties operated 25 years, but a lot of people in that database are dead. And it's like look through this database. Look who might just be a summer customer. Look who might -- we haven't seen for a while, but it's probably still around. And what do we go and tell them and what do we do with them? And so spending less money on network TV buys and more money on targeted Internet banner ads and so on, all sorts of stuff that we're trying to get more sophisticated. We're trying to be better and that will pay off over the long term.

So I think what -- we're already -- we are 100% of the growth in Cripple Creek. Cripple Creek as a town, the revenues are growing. We're all of that. Now we're not 200%, in other words, with the other guys netting us out are not down. And that's what we always thought. We thought we would grow the market, and we are growing the market. We just -- we need to grow the market more, and we need to continue growing it for some period of time, and I think we will. And in fact, if you look at the state of Colorado as a whole, we are 100% of the growth in the state of Colorado over the past 6 months, maybe the past 12 months. And I think that will continue to be the case.

There is nothing new being built anywhere in Colorado, right? And there's nothing anywhere in the horizon being new built in Cripple Creek. So we have no new competition to worry about. We're in the center of the state. So anything that happens in New Mexico or Kansas or Wyoming is irrelevant. The economies of both Denver and Colorado Springs are robust. The towns are growing. We're in a market with rising tide. And yes, out of the box, it's disappointing to me that we're not making more money than we have been. But we have a solid base. And I think going forward, we will grow revenues and we will keep costs down, and it will ultimately be a very successful property.

In fact, I was telling somebody we had dinner with last night, when we opened -- when I worked with Steve Wynn, we opened Beau Rivage in Mississippi. At first, we considered it kind of a disappointment because it struggled a little bit out of the box. And now 25 years later, it's still the leading casino in Mississippi, makes $100 million a year, costs $670 million to build. But boy, the first year or 2, we struggled. And we even almost bought an airline to run airline programs and so on. But eventually, if you build a quality product, it catches on and it grows and the customers learn it's there, and it will be fine. And we will be fine in Colorado.

I've said this maybe a few times in the past, but I think what people forget is we've been in Cripple Creek -- not we, sorry, residents of Colorado Springs have looked at Cripple Creek for the last 20-plus years, and they've seen it as a market where there's just really bad product, not simple product, maybe the right thing to say. There hasn't been elevated product ever. And so part of what we've been going against is we need to change 20-plus years of what I would call negative branding, and we need to get people to realize, well, wait a minute, this is a brand-new Cripple Creek. And that is happening.

I will tell you, when we look at our database, we, of course, look at all these different segments. The segment we're doing the best is the $750 and higher average daily theoretical win. That's our top-tier player. That player has embraced and continues to embrace the property. We've run quite a few focus groups just over the last few months and what we've heard overwhelmingly from people, and usually, you run these focus groups and people are quick to give you their complaints. It's been a little bit of the opposite for us where we run these focus groups and the feedback has been, yes, the offers you're giving me are as good as the offers I'm getting for Black Hawk. Your rooms are great, your property is great. I just haven't had a good player host that reaches out to me on a regular basis or whatever it is.

And so part of our challenge is we need to make sure that we're cultivating the higher-end player. But the ultimate good news for us is they have been coming. They like the place. We just need to do -- we need to do a little more fishing in that world. And so we'll get there as the brand continues to become more out there.

Actually, the other comparison I just thought of is when I was part of the group that put together the Borgata in Atlantic City. And when it opened, the Atlantic City product at that time had gotten pretty dated and not particularly good. The Borgata was a completely different type of product. It took a little while for people to recognize that the Borgata was better than the product that had previously existed. And now 20 years later, the Borgata has been very successful. So sorry, long-winded answer to your question.

No, great. And just another follow-up on Colorado, if you guys could provide any color around convention mix or bookings and what the Chamonix is looking like heading into the summer, that would be great.

Summer for us really tends not to be the group business time. It's really heading into the winter months. I think Dan mentioned we just hired a brand-new group director, literally, I think today. So stay tuned. But look, the facility itself now is open. It's beautiful. People that are booking groups are not worried about if the place will be open on time. All this stuff, all the problems you have before opening have largely gone away. There's still some lead time because some of these groups will plan a year in advance or 6 months in advance. And so it doesn't necessarily happen overnight. But I will say we have people now in that group department that we're happy with, and I think they're going to do a very good job. So probably a better question to ask us in another quarter.

Yes. The summer, we're doing much better occupancy, but it is the summer in the mountains of Colorado. But back in the first and second quarter, there were some midweek days where occupancy was very anemic, and we're hoping to not have that as we go into the off-season this fall.

Our next question comes from the line of Connor Parks with CBRE.

I guess, first, popular discussion this earnings season has been around the Big beautiful Bill and the impact to gaming and around regional gaming. I guess can you provide an update or maybe thoughts overall on the potential impact to your customers in any market, any database, whether it be no tax on tips or senior impacts, that would be great.

I think to the extent that any of our customers have more money in their pockets, it's always a good thing. And so to the extent you have reduced taxes, whether it be on tips or tax rates that don't go up or whatever it is, that's ultimately beneficial around our seats. The one thing you might not be thinking of is we do have NOLs, net operating losses that we continue to build up on -- well, just try to continue to build, I should say. And part of the changes in that bill actually benefit us. The -- if you would have asked me 6 months ago when we expect to work through all of our NOLs, I would have told you maybe by the end of 2029. And these days, I think it's probably not until the end of 2030. So I think we have the ability to accumulate NOLs, even more NOLs than we would have under the old tax plan and fewer limitations on their use.

And I should mention, we get on a tax basis, we get accelerated depreciation on these new properties, which is part of what builds the NOLs. So it's a noncash charge that results in cash savings on taxes is kind of what it really is. And that's a good thing. And the other thing is no tax on tips to the extent a lot of our employees receive tips, it probably will put less pressure on us when people are seeking raises. And it's like, well, your income after tax is up quite a bit. So I think if people are feeling more money in their pocket, they're less like -- I say this, I'm sure I have employees listening, but like hardly a day goes by, I don't have somebody ask for a raise. And now I have something to push back on.

Helpful. Shifting gears to Waukegan and the plan there. Helpful color on how you're thinking about the time line and the update on financing. I guess working backwards from August 2027, I guess at what point must you go into the regulators for a request for an extension? Or what point might you start thinking about that more seriously? Should the debt capital markets not be receptive over the next couple of months?

In vague terms, I think if we can get a shovel in the ground by year-end, the very early stages don't take a whole lot of money. We actually just submitted to the city for a building permit of our foundations literally 2 days ago, I think. And so we've given them the foundation plan to try to get the permit. So we have that out of the way. And the initial stage is literally a guy driving a bulldozer pushing dirt around. And then following him, you have a handful of people putting the foundations and not a lot of money, but it does take time. And as long as we can get that started somewhere in the second half of this year, even if we didn't quite have the bond issue done, you might start that just so you buy some time.

At some point, you start looking at the bonds have a call premium that goes away in February. I hope we get this done well before that, and we'll end up paying a premium. But if you slipped into next year before you could get going, if you had a gap, let's say you had to close the temporary in August because the state didn't let you operate past August, but you're ready to open in September or October, you might just choose to pay everybody to keep the workforce together. And just like Wynn paid everybody during the pandemic. I mean -- and you can figure out the cost of that. That cost us some money, but it also costs money to disband the workforce and start a new one.

I don't think it gets to that because if you go to the state and say, look, we don't want to have to lay everybody off, and we want to continue to pay taxes. Is that okay with you? And I think the state is going to say yes, right? So I'm not really worried about whether we had it. Now if you had a very modest gap, you probably just pay people and keep it together because we have a great workforce here. In fact, we won all sorts of awards as being one of the top employers in Chicago, we'd like to be...

The only casino on that list.

Yes, the only casino on the list. And of course, we want to keep it all together. So I'm not actually worried about it. But obviously, in the 10-K, we have to disclose that our permission to operate the temporary only goes until August of 2027. We did once before, seek approval and received it to have that date extended by 2 years. So if the -- now we're saying all this, the bond market as of today looks like we can get this done. It just happens to be the August doldrums. And so if the bond market holds together several weeks, we can probably go get this done. We were pretty much ready to go get it done last March.

And then all the discussions of tariffs and Liberation Day, the bond market went away from us for a while. It's pretty much back to where it was, not quite back to where it was then, but pretty close.

Not quite, but it has pulled back extremely quickly. It's rebounded pretty quickly. I would say that.

And by the way, it didn't have to be the bond market. We have multiple ways to finance this. And you noticed Bally's went and used GLPI to finance their casino. That's always an option for us. We actually still have in place a backup financing with a private equity firm that's pretty expensive. So we hope not to use it, but we do have it, right? So we have other ways to do this and -- but we think the best route is bond market.

[Operator Instructions] Our next question comes from the line of Ryan Sigdahl with Craig-Hallum Capital Group.

This is Will on for Ryan. I wanted to hop back to Chamonix. You talked a lot about the cost savings kind of that you found and started to implement through the new GM and CMO. Obviously, it's pretty early. Curious what changes you're making to the marketing strategy and how you think about maybe balancing the current client base in Chamonix versus the one you're trying to attract?

Well, I mean, there's a lot of things. And frankly, the Marketing Director at the property just started work a couple of days ago, right? So he's still trying to drink from a fire hose. But the -- I'll give you one simple example is a big thick mailer every month. It was pretty expensive to print, pretty expensive to mail and had not done a very good job of getting e-mails of its customers. We've been avidly trying to get e-mails. And to put that in perspective, here at American Place, we stopped sending physical mail a year ago just, and we only send e-mail. It's way cheaper to only send e-mail.

And put that in perspective, if you're sending out a mailing piece with some promotion in it that cost you, let's say, $1 to print it and mail it, and that would be a pretty low number with the cost of postage these days. If you get a 5% take-up rate, which would be pretty normal for something like that, then it's costing you $20 for a customer to take up your offer. If you do it in e-mail, it costs you nothing, okay? And frankly, what we found at American Place is the...

The open rate.

The open rate and response on e-mail is just as good as it is with physical mail. And so making that transition and the person who was running the property was very old school. He would write a letter from him about the whole thing. And even though we said several times, we should get e-mails, we should migrate to e-mails, we really hadn't done it. We are now doing it. So that's just one example. There will -- I am confident that the new marketing team we hire, which has, frankly, amongst the group, a lot of experience. I mean, we have -- they're all new, but we have a stronger marketing team than any other casino company our size at this point. They're all new, given time, right? And with time, we will do very well.

In fact, a number of them came out of the early Harrah's days where Gary Loveman ran the property. He was a professor of marketing at Harvard Business School before he became CEO of Harrah's and really created the state-of-the-art marketing programs that Harrah's had and the whole industry has been learning from that ever since. And so we're getting up to speed, but it doesn't happen overnight.

I don't remember the stat Dan, you may. The current ad campaign, I believe, will touch 80% of Colorado Springs on average 4x?

Something like that.

Don't quote me on those exact numbers, but they're pretty much in that ballpark. It's -- I mean, keep in mind, I think a lot of people forget this, we weren't fully open. So effectively, we've only been open since October of last year. We've effectively only been open for whatever that is, 10 months or whatever it is. So...

And frankly, part of the issue we had going through the winter was when you say fully open, we have a spa that's open every day. We have a jewelry store that's open every day that wasn't a year ago at this time. And when your hotels very low occupancy midweek, you're losing money on that, okay? So as you improve occupancy, everything -- so it's like the lowest point in income was this past winter when you had all the expenses of operating all that stuff and not enough revenues. And now we're getting smarter about it in many ways. But it doesn't happen overnight, but it is happening.

The cost savings happened like started right away and it is getting better. We're actually in the market for a new Finance Director to help get better handle of our own results so we can focus in better on even more cost savings, okay? But -- so the cost savings are kind of easier to figure out to improve the marketing and get results takes longer.

We've got one other benefit. It's almost maybe a little fuzzier, but over the years, we've accumulated these different casinos in Colorado, and they're all adjoining and you never walk outside, but we have 3 different casino licenses throughout Chamonix and Bronco Billy's. And what we've been focused on for the last several months is effective -- where it's a customer hindrance is if you cash out in one of the licenses and then take that ticket up to another license, you can't use it. And we have people that do that. They think the machine is broken because the TITO ticket won't work from one machine up the stairs into another machine.

The other piece that -- where we don't benefit is because we have 3 different licenses, we have to have 3 different cages open. And so what we're expecting sometime in the fourth quarter, hopefully, at one point, we thought it was going to be mid-October. I don't know if we'll quite get all the approvals by then. But we do expect to be in beta testing here relatively shortly to effectively unify that TITO system where you can use that TITO ticket in any of our 3 licenses. We'll only have to have 1 casino cage open. And if you think about cost savings all over again by having 1 cage instead of 3 cages open 24 hours a day, it's something like $700,000 a year in savings on top of a much, much better customer experience. And think about it, if you're a high-end customer, especially, little hindrances like that are just a pain in the butt.

By the way, this is something our new GM, Brandon, had put the TITO tickets being usable in all 3 licenses. He at one point, ran the Bally's properties in Black Hawk, and he was able to get the regulators to approve that at their property. Now they use a different slot system than we do. We have the Konami system. So -- but Brandon earlier in his career had actually been a regulator with Ontario lotteries dealing with slot machines. So he knew how to talk regulates, if you will. And so he's working with Konami to get the system changes in place to satisfy. They're very focused on making sure the taxes are paid appropriately. Well, if you modify the systems right, you can make them comfortable about the taxes. The consolidating into one cage hasn't been done before. We think we can get there, but that's less certain than the TITO tickets. TITO tickets are a big thing for the customers, though.

And so the other thing I would tell you is anybody on the call, if you haven't been to Cripple Creek, you really should go and see it. It makes you feel a lot more comfortable when you see the property. But those who have been there and met with the new management, some of them had been there with the old management, and they get it. It's like, okay, this new management is pretty smart, and they're working the right way and so on. So not to overplay it. But if you go and visit the property, and we're happy to set it up for anybody, you'll understand better why we have confidence that this will be successful.

Sorry, I didn't mean -- if you have another question, feel free. I was going to say, Dan, we have time for maybe one more after you, but feel free if you have something else there.

I was just going to ask on the legacy properties. I think Rising Star, at least according to the state gaming data, had its first, I think, year-over-year growth in a little while. So curious if there's anything to note there on the legacy properties. That's all.

No, we have a GM there who's been with us almost a year now, and he's been making little improvements here and there. And yes, we did just show a little increase. And it's a challenging property because of the competition in every direction from us, most recently, the Churchill property in Northern Kentucky. And -- but we have our own little niche, and we're working on it. We're never going to make a lot of money at the property. We -- but it does make money.

If we could find a way to relocate it, it would be a much more profitable business for us. We've actually told the town we're in that we would pay them more in taxes than we pay them today, even if we relocated it. And we think it will be very positive for the state. But it's a long process to get state approval to relocate a license, and it's never a certain process, but it's something we're working diligently on, and we think it's a win-win. So if everybody was rational, it should happen. But sometimes in these cases, they're not rational.

But the property itself, I mean, it's a big footprint. It's a 300-room hotel, 18-hole golf course, traditional casino river boat, but one of the nicer ones that's out there, the boat is actually quite -- has some charm to it, has a nice decor to it and a pavilion with a restaurant and meeting room space. So it's a big footprint. It's just geographically challenged. When it opened, it was the only casino in the region, and it did very well. And today, it's the oldest casino in the region, and it's got newer competition every direction. I think our team is doing a good job in tough circumstances to keep it going.

Probably time for just one last question, Dan.

Yes.

Okay. Our last question comes from the line of Ricardo Chinchilla with Deutsche Bank.

I was hoping if you could comment a little bit on the cadence of the quarter in terms of revenues. And when thinking about July in terms of like sequential improvement, just give us like some sense of how business has been evolving.

Well, I mean, at American Place, it's just been rock solid up every single month for 2 years now in both revenue and EBDIT. And that's continued into July, as we said earlier. At Cripple Creek, we've been very focused on pulling together a new management team and helping them get going and cost savings initially, hiring people, still a couple of positions we need to fill and now focusing on building revenues because ultimately, we need to build the revenues to get a return on our investment there that would be acceptable.

And just to be very clear, and July improved from what we saw in the second quarter, just to be very clear at Cripple Creek.

Yes. And then as we mentioned at the Silver Slipper, we actually -- we've had a new GM there, too, also for 7 or 8 months. And she is very experienced from our Indiana property, and she said that there were a number of people who are basically being over-comped, and we weren't making money on them. So we expected revenues to be off and EBDIT would have been flat except for a noncash accounting charge we had to take. And -- but it's doing well. I think it will end up the year comfortably up. I think last year, EBDIT was like 12%, it will probably end up around 15% this year. And that's taken into consideration how we did in the first half. And if it's not quite 15%, it will be close.

And then we talked about the Hyatt, we're actually doing pretty well considering how much of the property has been closed for its refurbishment and we'll, I think, do fine. And then the new GM we have there is very much kind of a player development sort of personality. And that's quite a bit different than the management team we've had in the past who had their own strengths. But I expect Tony to be the sort of guy who goes out and finds high-end customers who want to come to Lake Tahoe and rather than just somebody checks into the hotel who might want to gamble. In other words, being a little more proactive to build their list. He's that sort of person, and I'm optimistic that, that will show results again, not immediately, but over time.

I think that address all of them. So listen, not a great quarter. We're working hard. Actually, a great quarter for American Place, which is the most important one.

Record quarter, Dan.

Yes. But that's the one where we're going to build the permanent next door. And of course, that's at this point, the biggest part of the company. Cripple Creek is a turnaround at this point. We're working on it. We'll get it turned around. We know how to do it. We have a team to do it. And the rest of the company overall is stable to -- I mean, I think we're going to continue to have our challenges at Tahoe because of what's closed, but it's pretty small in the grand scheme of things. And the Silver Slipper is actually trending up in general. This quarter didn't look that way because of the accounting charge. But in general, it's on a positive track as well.

And nobody asked whether we'd rather buy Maverick or Century. And the answer is we're pretty busy these days. Sorry, I just wanted to wake Lewis up there. But we're pretty busy with what we do. If we just accomplish what we're doing, we'll be fine. So thank you.

This now concludes our question-and-answer session. I would like to turn the floor back over to Lewis Fanger for closing comments.

Well, Dan just said it. So thank you, everyone. We'll -- we're excited to talk to you next quarter with some more progress and hopefully, more record quarters here at American Place.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for your participation. This does conclude today's teleconference. You may disconnect your lines, and have a wonderful day.