Full House Resorts, Inc. Aktie

Greetings and welcome to the Full House Resorts second quarter 2026 earnings call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. If anyone requires operator assistance during the conference, please press star zero on your telephone keypad. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to your host, Adam Campbell. You may begin.

Thank you, and 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 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 reconciliation of those measures, please see our website as well as the 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, Louis.

Good afternoon, everyone. We had a strong quarter of growth led by our two newest properties, American Place and Chamonix. On a consolidated basis, revenues grew 5.6% in the second quarter and adjusted EBITDA increased 19.5%. That growth was led by American Place. which once again had its best quarter ever. I feel like a broken record when I say that since we've said it so many times, but get used to it because we expect to say it quite a few more times in the future. Revenues at American Place rose 13.4% to $34.8 million. That compares to revenues of $30.7 million in last year's second quarter. Adjusted property EBITDA at American Place rose by 13.8% to $10.1 million, up from $8.9 million in last year's second quarter. quarter.

Prior to the second quarter, we had never crossed $11 million in monthly gaming revenue, much less $12 million. In May of 2026, we crossed both of those thresholds, reaching $12.7 million. Our temporary American facility has seen consistent growth since it opened, and we fully expect that growth to continue even in the temporary facility. In the month of July, we continued to grow. While I don't believe the monthly gaming revenue reports are out quite yet, it was our second best gaming revenue month ever. Historically, the second half of the year is even better than the first half. At Chamonix, you may recall that we changed marketing agencies late in the fourth quarter and onboarded them in the first quarter.

In the second quarter of 2026, with that new ad agency, we launched new, more targeted marketing strategies, made changes to the offers that we send to our guests, and revamped our overall branding, especially on social platforms. channels. Those efforts helped revenues rise almost 12% in the quarter. Adjusted property EBITDA was approximately break-even for the quarter. We augmented our casino host team recently, adding two more people to that group. And a few weeks ago, we added a new casino director with experience at higher quality casinos and having worked at Fontainebleau for two and a half years and at Wynn in Las Vegas for almost 15 years. As we continue to refine our casino host program and build our high-end business, his experience will be useful to our Colorado team. One stat that I think continues to show the available opportunity in Colorado is win per position per day.

For Blackhawk as a whole, that statistic was about $330. We estimate that Monarch, the other high-quality casino in the – only other high-quality casino in the entire state, is maybe twice as high. or north of $600. At Chamonix, we're currently at about half the Blackhawk average. And so in the near term, our goal is to improve our win per position per day figure of about $175. If we can hit the Blackhawk average and get 70% EBITDA flow through, that results in roughly $30,000. million of annual EBITDA. If we can get a 15% premium to the Blackhawk average, which would still be a massive discount to Monarch, you approach $40 million of EBITDA. We're not there yet. We don't expect to be there this year or even fully there next year, but we do expect to make massive improvement over the next year. the coming 18 months.

You get there by filling the hotel, which still has significant capacity midweek, and continuing to add names to the database. As an example, we define a VIP guest as someone that generates more than $150 of gaming win in a visit. In the month of June, the strongest part of our database was that VIP group. Leading the growth for all of our rated play was our top segment that spent $750. or more on our gaming floor in a single trip. Our second best growth segment was the $350 to $749 group. And our third best performing segment in our rated database was the $150 to $349 group. We are seeing better guests visit Chamonix, and we're seeing them return, in part due to to our evolving marketing efforts and expanding database, increasing awareness, and a high-quality product that we built.

At our other properties, just a few quick notes. Rising Star was impacted during the quarter by a 42-hour power outage due to a downed power line. As we said last quarter, we tried to move that gaming license to the Fort Wayne area. weren't successful with those efforts, which was disappointing, but we are pretty busy anyway with the construction of our permanent casino in Waukegan. Rising Star does make several million dollars a year of EBITDA, and we will continue to operate it at its full potential. At Silver Slipper, revenues declined slightly as we continue to eliminate unprofitable business and adjusted property EBITDA slightly improved. We think there's room to improve operating profits at Silver Slipper, including related to controlling food waste at our high-volume buffet, and we're studying things like that in real time. In Lake Tahoe, our Grand Lodge Casino is located within the Hyatt Lake Tahoe.

The renovation of that Hyatt continues to disrupt our casino business in the near term, but the resort should be spectacular once complete. Work on the cottages and the restaurant across the street, as well as access to the resort's beach, is expected to be complete in late 2020. regarding our financing we completed several important items since our last call all of which were necessary prior to completing a new debt transaction. The first was the passage of a legislative bill allowing for temporary casinos to operate for a longer period of time. As this bill involved the state legislature, It was a once a year process that could only be done when the legislature was in session. That bill was passed in May, 2026. Though the bill also required approval or actually required us to request and receive approval of an extension from the gaming board. We were granted that gaming board approval in June, 2026.

As a result, we are now permitted to operate our temporary facility until February of 2029. As February of 2029 is beyond the date that we expect to complete, at a permanent casino, there should be minimal downtime when we transition operations from our temporary to our permanent facility. With a new timeline and more refined construction plans in place, we approached the City of Waukegan for approval of an amendment to our development agreement. As one example, our original development agreement required us to tear down our temporary facility shortly after opening. Rather than do that, we wanted to maintain the sprung structure for trade shows and use as an entertainment facility. It has bathrooms, bars, and an expansive footprint, so it is well-suited to the task. And so amongst other things, the approved amendment with the city us retain our temporary facility for five years to see if it makes sense to eventually add a permanent mixed-use facility to our footprint.

We also adjusted the dates in our development agreement. Lastly, we know everyone is eager for us to complete the refinancing. We are obviously as well. It's a pretty complicated transaction because we are simultaneously refinancing our existing bonds, financing the construction of a permanent casino, and closing on a new revolving credit facility. While we are not completely through the legal paperwork for that financing, we are still we moved through a large portion of it. The new revolver is more or less complete at this point with commitments from four different banks and the paperwork is largely done. All parties continue to work diligently on the balance of the rest of the documentation and we'll give you more detail once we can. We hope and believe we can get this done in the third quarter. what I missed, Dan.

I think you did a good job. I'm going to address a couple of things because I address it a little differently than most did. Um, You know, we used to report on each property, and a few years ago we switched to be like most casino companies where we group them together together. And sometimes that masks how well results actually are. And so in this case, you'll see the Midwest segment up 4.7 percent and even American Place on its own was up almost 14 percent. But Rising Star had a storm that took down the power line. We're kind of at the end of the power grid.

And it took them 42 hours to get us back up. And so Rising Star, instead of making half a million like it did last year, actually lost 100,000 in the quarter, right? And that masked how good the quarter was for American Place. And Silver Slipper, which is still our number two property, I mean, it's really the third leg of the stool. It's a cash cow. It did $3.4 million in the same quarter of both years. but because it's in that segment and doesn't grow. And we think we can grow it, but it's basically a cash cow. it brings down the percentage. But, you know, the most important one is American Place. It's our number one property. It's the one where we're building a new one, and it did really well. and a flat silver slipper and a down rising star.

Camouflage that a little bit. A little bit of the same in the West segment. While we improved results by $1.2 million at American Place, we improved results by $1.1 million at Chamonix. Now, that was going from a loss last year of $1.2 million to just under break-even in the West segment. If we hadn't had some headhunter fees and so on, we probably would have made a little And all the trends are positive. And so we think that will continue. Now, Grand Lodge, Lewis mentioned the renovation. It's kind of hard to recognize this hotel is a high rise and inclined village, which will never be repeated.

The codes have changed. You wouldn't be allowed to build it today, but, it had a beachfront community that had about a dozen high-end suites and a restaurant called the Lone Eagle, which was the number one grossing restaurant in the entire Hyatt chain or so I've been told. All that's been torn down. And Larry Ellison, who's the owner, is building something new there, which will include a big restaurant and new high-end suites and a whole new beach complex. At the moment, it's kind of a beach resort on Lake Tahoe without a beach. and without the high-end sweets that our customers liked, and without the Lone Eagle restaurant, which they liked to eat at. It has other restaurants, but that was by far their biggest and best restaurant. And so we're doing okay there, but earnings are off. But all of this is supposed to be open next year. They slipped a little bit. They used to say in the first half of next year.

Now it is saying the second half of next year. And and knowing what Larry Ellison has built on the island of Lanai in Hawaii and what he's built in Palm Springs, even at the hotel he owns in Palo Alto. I expect it to be spectacular when it's done, and we think ultimately that'll be a positive for the casino. But at the moment, it's pretty small relative to the rest of our company, probably will remain small relative to the rest of the company. But the fact that it's off a little, and understandably, is... masks a little bit how well we're doing in Colorado. And we have a long ways to go in Colorado, but we are trending in the right direction. On the financing, look, we wanna get this done as fast as anyone else.

I think it's 1,500 pages of documents, and I have this bad habit of wanting to make sure read every page because any sentence can s**** y**. And so we've been working our way through it. It's a very complex thing we're trying to do, but we've made some really good progress. We needed the extension before, because otherwise you had to make the assumption that you were going to close the temporary and then you'd either have to pay people for not working for a while or you'd have to lay them off and try to hire them back. It was going to be a real mess. So the extension was important. That took state legislature approval. These things always happen in the last day of the legislature. legislature.

This year was absolutely the last day, almost the last hour. but they gave us the extension we needed. Well, technically that had to be signed by the governor. He doesn't do that immediately, so that took a little while. and then and technically it authorized the gaming board to approve the extension so we had to request that and then the gaming board quite promptly gave it to us uh And so that was important. Well, that was one of the factors we had to change in the city and the development agreement we have with the city where it had certain dates in it we had to get the permanent done by. And we needed those dates to mirror the state dates. Well, you kind of needed to fix the state first, then we went to the city and there's a list of things. And Lewis mentioned probably the most important commercial. is trying to use the temporary casino as an event center.

We think we can do that in very creative ways. And because it's a temporary building, the city had, under the building code, can't just approve it to be there forever. but they changed the requirement from, we were supposed to tear it down when the permanent opened. Now they've said we can keep it open for five years after the permanent opens. And that gives us plenty of time to see if we can put things into it that will drive business to the property. Then none of that's been in any of our projections. It was kind of a late minute thought of, wait a minute, And it was really Bill Richardson, who's developed a lot of casinos, who said to me, why are you tearing this down? What a great place for a boat show or all sorts of concerts and everything. And he's right. So it's. It's not attached to our casino, but it's maybe 100, 150 feet away.

And so we will use it and see if we can make it work as a profit center and as a source of business driving to the casino. And the city accommodated that by extending it for five years. Okay. I'll bet if we make it a successful part of the community, it's by far the biggest event center like this anywhere between Chicago and Milwaukee. It might even be bigger than anything in Milwaukee. It's bigger than a football field inside. And so there's a lot of things we can do in this area. But of course, it only makes sense if you find the right things to put in it.

And so we will spend a couple of years while we're building to see what we can put in it. Then we'll have five years to show that it's successful. And my guess is if we need a further extension, we could ask the city and we'd probably get it. Or we decide that gives us the confidence to build a project. permanent exhibit center that's attached to our casino. So, you know, when getting the state extension was important, getting the city development agreement to be in accord with that state agreement. extension was important that only happened a few weeks ago those were very important steps when you do this sort of financing one of the things that happens is a bunch of lawyers pour over everything and make sure the T's are crossed and the I's are dotted and now they are and I think you mentioned the credit agreement. We have commitments from four banks to provide a significant credit agreement going forward. Thank you. We are working diligently on the source of capital to build up the American place.

And then there'll be a third component, which is the refinancing of the existing bonds. And we intend for that to all happen simultaneously, which sounds complicated. It is legally complicated, but in a business sense, it's kind of not. You know, the source of capital, any source of capital for building the permanent is going to want to know that the bonds don't mature in the middle of construction. And, of course, people refinancing the bonds want to know that you have the money to build the permanent. everybody wants to make sure we have adequate liquidity and so the credit facility which is one that we anticipate not actually having to use but it's an important source of liquidity if needed in cases, God knows, another pandemic or something. And so in some sense, that's sometimes the most complicated piece. And yet we have the commitments for that at this point.

And that's all documented. It's just kind of waiting for the other two pieces. and we expect to get it all done this quarter. And I realize I just repeated a lot of what Louis said, but it's a lot of stuff. Sometimes you have to hear it twice.

we can take questions. Thank you. We will now be conducting a question and answer session. If you'd like to ask a question, please press star 1 on your telephone keypad. A confirmation tone will indicate your line is in the question queue. You may press star 2 if you would like to remove your question from the queue. using speaker equipment and may be necessary to pick up your handset before pressing the star keys. Thank you. Our first question comes from the line of Jordan Bender with Citizens Bank. Please go ahead.

Hey, everyone, and good afternoon. Thanks for the question. Louis, Dan, it's obvious It's obviously been a number of years since you kind of unveiled what the permanent casino will actually look like in terms of size and scope. And I guess my question is, you know, over the years of operating the temporary and just kind of understanding the market, has your thinking at all changed around what you want to offer there? I guess the size, the scope, I mean, you have a tent. now for a couple of years, does that change the dynamic of what ultimately goes into the permanent casino?.

It's refined it. The size is somewhat dictated by the law. We're anticipating opening with a little less than the total number of gaming units that were allowed to have, but we have a way to expand the casino if it's needed. I mean, the machines don't gamble, people gamble. So we looked at what we expect the revenues to be and how many machines we need for those revenues. And if it's higher than that, we can add machines later. Um, restaurants we have and the type of restaurants. But frankly, the temporary has done very much what we expected it to do.

And notice, you know, we're doing 12 million a month of revenues roughly, and we've had very little, if any, competitive impact on rivers, on the Pottawatomie Casino up in Milwaukee, or even on the BGTs in Lake County, which are pretty significant competitors. all approximately flat and we and so we've increased the gambling per capita by people who um live in our area, which is what we expected. And so, you know, are there little refinements? Of course there are. little things like we found quite a few people don't want to have to go through the casino to get to the restaurants. They might have people under 21 with them. So we've designed into it ways for people to go to some of our restaurants in what I'd call a family dining room where you can go with people under 21, enjoy the food, and not be in the casino environment. And so we've done that a little bit. I think it's as much of looking around and probably Durango stations had a bigger impact on this design than anything else because stations did a very good job with it. They did a wonderful food court and we didn't have a food court in the project in the first place. substituted one of the restaurants is now a food court and the city approved that change in the development agreement. and Food Hall, Food Hall, yes, not Food Court.

It's a Food Hall, it's slightly different. A Food Court has Burger King and McDonald's in it, a Food Hall doesn't. Ours is we're not as big as Durango station. They were, they were much bigger than we're allowed to build in Colorado or in, in Illinois. Um, nor do we have their budget, but the quality would be very similar to them. They have a very compact back of house. The Cisco truck has to make several stops to get to their restaurants.

And that's pretty common to a lot of shopping malls. But in the casino business, that it evolved into, and I was part of that at Bellagio, evolved into these massive back of houses that are underneath the casino and tunnels everywhere. So you can get everywhere without crossing the casino and it's like you know what makes us go make a couple of stops just have a couple different loading docks and you can save a lot of money in construction and that was a learning from Durango Station that we copied, the food hall we copied. We think they have a great sports book, and ours is somewhat similar. I don't want to say we copied, they'll sue me for trademark copying or whatever that would be, because they probably have a trademark on their plants. We didn't exactly copy it, but we learned from it. It's legal to learn from it.

And then there have been four places built in Northern Illinois in the last three or four years. And we've walked through all of them, studied all of them. The first was the hard rock in Rockford, They shifted from a temporary into the permanent and their revenues doubled. We did a good job and we went and looked at it very carefully. They don't have a hotel, they don't have a parking garage, but they do have an event center. And part of our thinking of, well, maybe we should have a place to have events is drawn from that. and they do quite well. They were, I think it was $350 million.

We will be similar in size, similar in quality without the event center, and our number's 302. Then there was the Wind Creek, a new tribal casino on the south side of Chicago. They have a hotel, a high rise hotel. They have a big parking garage, and they did not have a temporary casino. So their budget was like $500 million, but that includes about $50 million in upfront fees to the gaming commission, which we paid that as part of the temporary, um, And so if you adjust their budget for, um, the upfront fees, the hotel and the parking garage, you also get to about $300 million. And they've done quite well. I've heard from the bankers that they were a little disappointed in their results, but they are dead on with what we had in our econometric model for what they would do at that location. and I think ultimately they'll be pleased with their results and they're, they do, they're doing pretty well. They there are a lot of competition in South of Chicago, much less competition where we are in North of Chicago.

Um,.

I think they ramped a little slow, but they're doing just fine now. Yes, they're doing just fine. did two projects. They had these old river boats that were not near the freeways and getting pretty tired, and they replaced both of them in the last year. The one in Joliet They replaced several months ago now, and it's doing much better than it was on the boat. I joked with the guy who oversaw that, actually both of the guys who oversaw it used to work for us. And I joked to them, they value engineered out the port-a-cochet, which I think is kind of stupid in a place where it rains. But otherwise, they did a pretty good job.

And... It also has a parking garage. If you have enough land, we have 40 acres, so we don't have to build a parking garage. It's much cheaper to have surface parking. Even if you have a shuttle bus running around the surface parking to help people get to the facility, it's much cheaper than building a garage. And in a lot of markets, including here, people prefer to be in the surface lot. The garage fills last, not first. unless it's a snowstorm or something. And so anyway, they were about a little less than $300 million. but they value engineered a lot of stuff out.

Then the most recent one is Hollywood Aurora. They did a good job there. They have a nice food hall. Actually, they do in Juliet too. They have a 229-room hotel. They have a 1,300-car parking garage. If you adjust for that, they're right about $300 million. and did a good job. And the numbers are pretty early, but I think we're going to see a pretty big lift from what they were doing in the old riverboat there as well.

So, you know, we've obviously... to the people who work for me, joke with me that I'm going to get in trouble because I walk through their back of the house and take pictures of it and everything. I know some of these places better than the CEOs of their own companies because we go to town learning what we can do and what's smart, what they did right, what they did wrong. And so, yes, does it evolve? The basic project is the same, but there's a lot of evolution in small ways.

Awesome. I appreciate that answer. And just to follow up, I know I KNOW IT'S SMALL, BUT WILL YOU GET ANY BUSINESS INTERRUPTION INSURANCE OR PROCEEDS FROM THE DALLEN POWER LINES DURING THE.

No, and the way business interruption works is you only get it if you have property damage claim. And we were not damaged at all. There was a tornado some distance away, took out the power line to the whole town of Rising Sun, and it took them quite a while to get it back up. Must have been a pretty high powered power line. And you know, You only get business interruption insurance if you have a property claim and we don't. Perfect. Thank you, guys.

Your next question comes from the line of Ryan Sigdall with Craig Hallam. Please go ahead.

Hey, good afternoon. This is Will on for Ryan. Thanks for taking our questions. First, I wanted to ask on the financing. I know I think it was last call. You guys were still sort of working through the legal paperwork and it sounds like that's still going on. Curious, you were talking about the foundation. as well, perhaps laying that, maybe doing other little bits of construction. I guess what we'd like to know is what's your confidence in getting this done within the next quarter or so.

Well, we are doing some stuff. We've been testing the dirt because, you know, there used to be a mall on this site. You don't want to start moving the dirt around and then find out that you took a pile. of bad dirt and spread it all over the property, now you've got a real problem. So the guys have been out there testing the dirt. We think it's all clean, but we want to verify that before we start moving it. to fix up the fence around it. But the biggest thing is not what you see. We authorized the architects to go ahead and complete a big project chunk of the plans so we will have full schematic drawings we were at 75% before That's like a million three.

And we can afford to do some stuff. before we have the financing in place. And that was one of the things we went ahead on. We've also approved the civil drawings. And that's all to allow us to move ahead more quickly once we have the... full financing. And so things are happening. Most of it behind the scenes. But, you know, some pretty significant numbers. Between those two, it's probably a million and a half dollars, and that'll be spent in the next two months or three months.

The civil stuff takes a little longer. Now, listen, all the paperwork, like nobody is saying this can't get done. Everybody wants to get it done. It's just complicated. You have inter-creditor issues between the three issues that that all has to be worked out and you know and sometimes lawyers like to play ping-pong and it goes back and forth and back and forth and tell either Lewis or I say hey cut it out just let's the ball in the middle and let's move on. And that's been kind of the process. We have one analyst who wrote me kind of an email complaining about how long this was taking. When we're done, I want to send them a set of the documents in paper because it's like eight inches deep.

And And it's like when you're done reading this, you'll appreciate what this takes. And you find things in there that you look at and say, well, that doesn't look right. And in fact, one of these things, I found something, doesn't affect anything currently, but affects stuff way down the road. And when the people on the other side of the transaction, I said, you know, it probably isn't material and it's way down the road, it's intellectually wrong and they said yes we think we might agree with you on that but you're the first company out of 30 who's brought that up and And maybe we're too careful. And frankly, we were trying to get everything done before August because we know a lot of Wall Street goes away on vacation over August. And once it was obvious, we probably missed that. It was like, okay, well, let's work through August on the details and be ready to go in September.

So.

So, you know, some of the – when you have a revolver, those details, when you – if they're slightly off, you can always go back and fix those later. when you have a longer piece of the paper, like five-year bonds or something, changing that is not easy at all. And so to Dan's point, there are a lot of potential conflicts that we're just trying to make sure all, everything's in agreement between the three different sets of docs. It's, and as Dan mentioned, this is thousands of pages. It's not like you're reading.

through 50. And to be quite honest, I mean, we have a track that we're on that we've been working on for a while. But we get phone calls all the time from other people saying, hey, you know, we take a look at this and we're kind of like, I think the car has left the garage here and we're moving down the way and we're 95% sure we're going to get there. But if we ran into a big pothole, we do have other people standing by. Okay.

That's fair. Let's hope for no potholes. Shama Nee wanted to switch over to there. I know you were talking about last quarter, Dan, about doing a bit of blocking and tackling in terms of Bronco Billies. Maybe just talk about the improvements at both of those properties, given, you know, profit.

improved sequentially throughout the quarter? Well, it's a little bit on all counts. I mean, we're holding the line on expenses. We're growing revenues. We're trying to make our – we're trying to grow our revenues – in an efficient way, so we're not, we're also making the marketing more efficient. You know, it's one of the nice things we did this quarter, we have a new our food and beverage manager, the only person in the management team from before, he was our pastry chef, and he's a very well-known pastry chef. He's written some books and won a bunch of awards. And I went to him and basically said, we need a food and beverage manager. We can't afford you as a pastry chef.

And he was hesitant, I don't know, you know, and I said, you're smart, you clearly know how to cook, you clearly know, you clearly care. And he said, well, would I be allowed to get rid of some dead wood around here? I said, absolutely, that's why I want you to take the job. he took the job. And we had a Mexican restaurant that wasn't very good. And in fact, it was that had effectively closed last winter. We weren't even using it. Food was so bad, uh, Lewis and I would joke about how bad it was when we went up there. And, uh, and I sent this guy to, um, cookbooks I got from Amazon of, you know, great Mexican cooking. And damned if he didn't cook his way through both books.

He showed me the books. They're just dog-eared and posted it and worked his way through it. And he introduced a new menu with new recipes. We came up with a new name. It's Don Juan's now. It's in the same place. And it's very popular. And it's small. It's big. if you go there on a Friday night, you're going to wait more than an hour to get in. And now the food is really good.

I'd be willing to say it's probably the best Mexican restaurant in the state of Colorado. And and watch out for the margaritas, they're pretty d*** good too. And so, that's the blocking and tackling. Taking a Mexican restaurant with very little CapEx and giving it a new menu, new recipes, new name, new staff, And in fact, you can tell when you're there, you can tell this guy cares. We make all the salsas ourselves. There's nothing from Cisco. We make our own nachos. We make our own tortillas. Everything's done homemade, if you will.

And the staff who works there is very proud of the quality of what they're producing. And, you know, as a CEO, you look around and say, okay, promoting this kind of food and beverage match was the right move because now we've taken a restaurant that wasn't doing much and now you can't get in. And that's great. And so we need to do more of that. And that was kind of a first little trial. We have a basic coffee shop we need to upgrade as well. We're making some changes in 980 Prime that I think will be better. We're now looking to use it as a brush. lunch on weekends.

So that's just the food service. Little things you wake up to, we have a little speakeasy that is only open on Fridays and Saturday evenings. And it's got a bunch of slot machines and the bar taps. we're looking at it and say, wait a minute, we pay a fee to the city for on a monthly basis for every slot machine we have. Why does it make sense for us to have slot machines in this bar top? a bar that's only open two nights a week. It doesn't make sense. And when you run the math, it really doesn't make sense. And so we're taking those slot machines out and run it as an interesting bar. It is a very interesting bar, but it's stupid for us to have slot machines in it.

It's one of those things like, why do we do this? And then once you understand, you know, Somebody pointed it out to me. I'm like, wow, yes, that really was dumb. We shouldn't have done that. And so we're fixing that. Oh, probably the biggest thing. We have a sales and marketing team. When I say sales and marketing, this is different than the casino posts and sales and marketing. We have a team of people whose job it is to fill the hotel. It's about meetings and conventions. And we have seven people there now.

And they are... You know, they're attending meetings. There are conventions and meeting planners. There are associations. There are cold calls. And they're all working their b*** off to bring in business. And we're starting to put, you know, significant business on the books. But that stuff is booked way in advance. So that's to help us in 2026. and 2028.

If somebody's getting ready to get married, they're not booking their wedding tomorrow. And so we now have an active sales team who will see the dividends in the years ahead. Now, along those same lines, when we had a very competent director of casino operations, And we also had a very competent fellow down in Mississippi. And the guy in Mississippi retired. He was retirement age, and he'd been with us a long time. We were sorry to see him go, but he was younger than me. I told him he couldn't leave, but he went anyway.

And... And so the guy from Colorado wanted to move down there. He had worked with ANSI before. It was okay, that's fine. Then I thought, he was pretty good, but let's see if we can find somebody who really knows the high end, who has experience at high end gamblers. We do have experience with the high end in gambling. Illinois, we'll let people gamble $25,000 a hand in Illinois. In fact, the The quarter's results were achieved despite one guy beating us for a million dollars one night. some of that back. So, you know, we do get high end play in our strong structure in Illinois.

But in Colorado, we built a high end property and we don't have that much high end play. And so we reached out to all the people we knew and found a guy, got a little lucky. His in-laws live in Canyon City, which is right near Cripple Creek. And His wife wanted to get back closer to her parents. And so he has moved from Las Vegas. He joined us just a couple weeks ago. And he knows how to deal with that high end.

He knows how to hire hosts and cater to people who are going to come in and gamble large numbers per hand. Whereas if you look at all of our other people, all these people we've hired, they're all very competent people, but they came from Ameristar, they came from Isla Capri or Valleys, and those are all fine companies, and they're all fine companies in the regional market, but none of them are really catering to the high end. So I wanted to add somebody to the team who has that high end experience. He had been at Wynn for a long time. That's always great background that Wynn is great at training people. And then he was at Fontainebleau. which is also an educational experience, perhaps in a different way. And so we were fortunate to get them, and I think that's going to pay off in the long term because that's one of the things.

If you compare us with Monarch, one of the biggest differences is that high end. They are very good at dealing to the high end, and to date we have not been. Thanks for the color. Yes, you got it. Probably have time for two more questions, Dan. Sorry, that was a long question.

That's a long answer. Simple question. Your next question comes from the line of Chad Bainan with Macquarie. Please go ahead. Hi, Dan Lewis. Thanks for taking my question.

Congrats and good luck on the progress and the final stages of the financing. I'm sure within that stack of legal documents, there's probably some language around M&A but I wanted to ask about it as well. Uh, it seems like there's a lot of chatter around single properties and, you know, multi-properties that could hit the market here. Um, Just wanted to test your temperature on your appetite for those. Thanks.

Well, we're a small company. We're pretty busy. I mean, we're trying to fix Colorado and build American Place permanent. so it's not high on our list to go take on a third challenge at the same time. Um, Now, if something were offered to us that was very cheap, you'd try to figure it out, but then you look at the other side and say, okay, how are we going to pay for this? We're pretty heavily levered. You're right in the financing would probably limit us and our existing debt limits us as to additional debt. Our new debt would also limit us as to additional debt. And, you know, we certainly don't want to issue equity at these prices. We think our equity will ultimately be worth much more than it is today.

So either organizationally or financially, I don't know. I'm not sure how we could do an acquisition. You know, you could always merge with somebody, but you're effectively using your equity again, and again, our equity is cheap. So never say never. If something was given to us that was just so cheap, you'd try to find, you know, a REIT to buy it, and we get the operating company or something. You know, you'd try to find some creative way if it were REIT. really cheap, but a lot of times when stuff is being offered, it's got hair on it. Right. And, and I was told that there was a lawyer we worked with for a long time at Pinnacle who's retired now, who told me we'd probably never make an acquisition. Right. I said, why do you say that? He says, because you guys read the documents and you run the numbers and you look at the tax ramifications and everything.

He says, the buyers are almost always the dumbest buyer willing to pay the highest price. And you're not the dumbest buyer. And he's not wrong. In our career, with very little things we've bought. On occasion, we look at a lot of stuff. When you look down the list of what we bought, it's a pretty small list. And that goes from way back when I worked with Steve Wynn to Pinnacle to here. And so we look at things, you always learn something.

I mean, somebody did show me something the other day we could acquire without any capital, any equity, without any debt, just kind of assume it's some of the debt that's on it and not even guarantee that debt. And it's had me scratch my head, but then you get into organizationally, is that really what we want to do? So...

If this conversation were three years later, Chad, I think it'd be a different answer from us. Yes, three years from now. Pro forma for the opening of the permanent casino, the leverage profile is going to be on the lighter side. Uh, and, uh, but you know, that's okay. And if now is not the time, I'm sure there will be things for sale in three years too. That may or may not make sense. Yes.

Yep, makes a lot of sense, thank you. And then on American Place, the strong, just kind of looking at the strong May results that you talked about with gross gaming revenue close to 13 million and July the second best, how should we think about flow through or margin opportunities opportunity if the property continues to grow at GGR levels, you know, certainly well above maybe not at these current levels, but yes, just help us think about flow through in general. Thanks.

I think July was similar, if not stronger. July was not as good as May. We're pretty similar. If you go back and look at every month since we opened, just about every month showed growth over the same month of the previous year. And if it didn't, it was probably because some guy beat us for a million dollars like I did. I mentioned a minute ago. It's shown very, very steady growth. Now, it can't do that forever. At some point, you're so busy on a Saturday night, people can't find a slot machine.

And that is part of why you have to build the permanent. The permanent casino has much more capacity than the temporary. Remember the numbers up here? It was 35% more slot machines and 60% more tables, if I remember correctly. Yes, something like that. And so that at some point you kind of need the permanent to continue to show the growth. But we're not capped out yet. It continues to grow. In terms of the margin expansion, we're we're running 29% plus margins pretty consistently, which is a good thing. is pretty decent in a market with a pretty high tax rate. And that is after paying, um, rent to the city of $3 million a year, a little north of $3 million a year.

And we also rent the kitchens and the office space. The office space is in construction trailers, essentially. And the kitchens are from a company called Kitchens to Go. And between those two, it's almost $1.5 million a year. And so really, if you adjust for that, our margins are in the low 30s. Now, as the revenues grow, one of the issues here is you keep ending up in a higher tax tier. So to grow the revenues and keep margins flat is actually an accomplishment.

And so I don't expect our margins to get to 40%. You only get to 40% if you're an Indian tribe not paying much in taxes generally. But I think we can... Do mid-30s in the permanent. In the permanent. Once you're not paying... In the permanent, we won't have rented kitchens. We won't have rented construction trailers, etc. and we have the right to buy out the lease from the city and part of our part of the involved financing involves taking that out at some point and and so you won't have rent at which point the EBIT margins are probably in the.

Yes, we if it helps you in the month of May, we did four point four million of EBITDA on that twelve point seven million of gaming revenue. Obviously, there's there's other food and beverage and some other revenue on top of that. But it was a very, very good month for us all in. Yes.

one of the little nuances is we're not allowed to comp alcohol. And that's a good thing because we make a profit on our alcohol in Illinois. Most other markets, if you... They may show a profit on the income statement because of the way accountants have some crazy ways of accounting for things, but in like Colorado and some of our other markets, most of our beverage sales are really given away and you know, You know, if it applies to all of the competition, I'd rather we have to charge because we can make money on it.

Thank you both very much. Appreciate it. Thanks, Chad. I really – we only have time for one last question now, Dan.

Your last question comes from the line of John D'Crie with CBRE. Please go ahead.

Hi, Louis, Dan, thanks for taking me here. Dan, maybe quickly, high level, I know earlier you talked about some of the site work, soil testing, drawings happening for the permanent, but assuming the financing is ready in 3Q, how quickly do you think you guys would be ready to start hard construction and then you know, broadly speaking, what's your latest thinking for timeline? If you know, we talked 18 to 24 months in the past, but but not sure if that's still kind of the right time frame until you get the permanent up and running. Yes.

It's still the right time frame. It's 18 to 24 months. It might not favor the 18 anymore. It might be more like two years. Like opening in the third quarter of 2028, probably a good guess. Now, some of this stuff, when you end up at that range, because... in the construction agreements is there's a lot of work that happens before the building's enclosed and that depends on weather and so uh in the subcontracts with the subcontractors, there's always something in there for expected number of rain days based on the historic weather patterns of Waukegan, Illinois. And if it rains more than you expect or rains more midweek than you expect, it takes a little longer. So But this is not a very complicated building.

It's almost all of it's one level. There's one small part in the back of the house that's got a second level. There's no basement. There's no high rise, um, no parking garage, no parking garage. Uh,.

and so it can be built pretty quickly but roughly you know we're in the third quarter now so two years now is probably a good guess yes and and and we I mean the way that things are working behind the scenes there's a lot of a lot of stuff that happens sequentially so so as Dan mentioned earlier we you know we've got the the earth moving We've got the foundation plans. And while, and that, both of those things will take several months just to get done. And so as that work is getting done, then they complete work on making up another plan, Dan. But, you know, they'll be working on electrical plans. And while the electrical is going on, going in, you've got people working on the, on the fit out on the interior. So it's all kind of sequential, and we have enough to truly be on the ground running pretty quickly. Look, to be honest, you know, our existing debt has limitations on additional debt until we refinance the,.

Those limitations are there. We'd like Colorado to be making some money. So far, it's achieved break-even in the quarter. So we're watching our spending pretty carefully, but we're confident enough that we have gone ahead and are spending a million and a half on the plans and some additional money on the site. Okay. so that the date stops slipping on when we can open. I mean, you obviously need to make... move the plans along. We have done the foundation plans. We've done the earth moving plans.

But the next step in the earth moving is a $3 million contract for for the guys to actually be there. We have to move a swale and all this stuff, $3 million. We probably will not release that because it's $3 million until we have the financing tied together.

Got it. Thanks, Dan. And, Louis, if I could sneak one more in, not sure if you'll touch this one, but not So cost of – all-in cost of financing where you sit today, I guess to ask as broadly as possible, is it within kind of the range you've expected to the extent you share a comment?.

It is, I think, yes. It's not six and it's not 12. It's, you know, look, we, I'm trying to think of what I can tell you. It's,.

It's what you would expect for a leverage company. We're a weird hybrid. We're not an Indian tribe building something from nothing, and we're not Boyd who could build the $300 million casino out of cash flow. And if you just look at other companies like us that are leveraged and doing a project, you would conclude that the cost of borrowing is in the high single digits. Some components of it might be in very low double digits, and that's a blue.

blended number is hopefully still in single digits. Yes, I was going to say, I think it still blends to a pretty decent spot. And there's other aspects like some of the financial.

we're looking at allows us to avoid construction period interest. That's a pretty big saver for us. If we can draw the money down as needed, then And so that's not, there's a lot of different levers here. Look, we own a lot of the equity. It's an important part of both of our net worths. So we're trying to get the best deal we can for our shareholders.

So we appreciate all the color today, guys. Thanks. Yes, thank you.

I think we're done. Yes, that's it, Dan. This now concludes our question and answer session.

I would like to turn the floor back over to Louis Fanger, President and Chief Financial Officer, for closing comments.

I'll turn it over to you, Dan. I think we covered everything. Hopefully next time we can talk openly about having refinanced everything. So thank you for your time and your patience.

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

This live transcript is auto-generated without human intervention or review.

[Call has ended.]

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.