Hollywood Casino Perryville in Regional Context

Maryland officially joined the mid-Atlantic gaming club this week, with the Hollywood Perryville opening. Yesterday’s grand opening drew prominent officials and others, and was a big day for the legions of state residents who would rather not travel too far to gamble on slot machines.

As I mentioned for a Baltimore Sun piece last week, Penn National gets a big boost by being the first state operator to open. And, it could hold a basic monopoly in central Maryland gaming (i.e. the Baltimore-Washington market) for a while given the delays in getting the two other sites on the I-95 corridor up and running (Baltimore & Anne Arundel).

Given this present reality of Maryland gaming, I’m turning towards the impact of Hollywood Perryville on the regional gaming market that consists of a tri-state area: southeastern Pennsylvania, Delaware and northern Maryland. I’ll call it the tri-Atlantic cluster and it will include the following casinos and racinos, for now:

• Harrah’s Chester (Chester, PA)
• Hollywood Casino at Penn National (Grantville, PA)
• Delaware Park (Wilmington, DE)
• Dover Downs (Dover, DE)
• Harrington Racetrack (Harrington, DE)
• Hollywood Casino – Perryville (Perryville, MD)

In the coming weeks, the gaming atlantic blog will look at how the new Maryland casino impacts this cluster and also analyze the impact of table games in the region. Right now at least, the competition is regional and Maryland hopes are that Hollywood Perryville can peel off some portion of gaming traffic otherwise headed to PA or DE (perhaps 10%) in addition to opening up a small new local market: will it happen? Hopefully, Maryland revenue data will be as easily available as it currently is for PA, DE, NJ and NY via the designated regulatory agencies.