You won’t believe how drastically winning big in Las Vegas has decreased!

According to the Wall Street Journalthe industry believes that there are so many players who come to the Strip to lose their money that they can afford to weed out the unwanted players by lowering the odds and shrinking the payout.

“They throw out the bottom end,” he explained Caesar’s Entertainment CEO Tom Reeg during a call with analysts this month. “I see no reason why this has to stop or would stop.”

Casinos in the city generated a record $8.3 billion in revenue from card games, slots and other forms of table betting like roulette last year, even though attendance didn’t reach pre-pandemic levels of 2019.

Las Vegas is awash with revenue enough to fund a major league ballpark, according to official figures closed a deal with John Fisher, owner of Oakland Athletics. It would be the second time the Bay Area city across from San Francisco has lost a professional sports team to Las Vegas.

With the allure of stars like Taylor Swift and K-pop sensation BTS playing at Allegiant Stadium, that is new home of the Raiders Apparently, since casinos have been playing with the NFL football team since 2020, they can afford to be selective about the kind of players they want.

“Reeg believes these events attract a higher-tier clientele, if you will, that might replace the lower or mid-tier, and that’s what’s helping to sustain these gaming revenue numbers,” said Michael Lawton, a senior business analyst with the Nevada Gaming Control Board earlier this month.

New normal as Nevada’s monthly gaming revenue surpasses $1 billion

According to the WSJ, analysts at Vegas Advantage estimate that more than two-thirds of all blackjack tables on the Strip now only offer 6:5 payouts, as opposed to a more favorable 3:2 ratio they historically offered have when a player has reached 21 on the first two cards.

This means that a $10 bet only yields an extra win of two dollars instead of five – and it’s not just card games like blackjack where players’ odds of winning are getting worse.

Vegas Advantage also estimates that the number of so-called “triple zero” roulette tables, which have an extra slot and thereby mathematically lower the chance of winning, has skyrocketed. While these harder tables were a rarity in 2016 and few were operational, last year they hit 78 and are quickly making their way onto the 111 double zero tables that are slightly more affordable for participants.

Finally, casinos are also phasing out table games, citing the rising cost of paying their dealers in favor of more automated electronic games.

However, the good times may be over, at least temporarily. Fitch Ratings forecast in January a drop in demand in the US after an “exceptionally strong performance” for the industry last year, traditionally led by Nevada and the Strip in particular.

Going forward, monthly comparisons will become more difficult as gaming revenue either hit an all-time high or marked the second-best result ever. Data for March, the recent period reported that Nevada gaming revenue fell three-tenths of a percent due to lower baccarat revenue.

Lawton remains upbeat thanks to convention attendance, special events, and sports teams relocating to Las Vegas, which accounted for 95% of Nevada’s gaming revenue growth in 2022.

“A year ago we had managed 13 consecutive months [of $1 billion dollars in state-wide revenue] and I was worried about sustainability,” he said. “And now we’re at 25, and that’s no coincidence, it looks like that’s the new baseline.”

One of those high rollers the Strip wants to cater to might be LeBron James: earlier this year The basketball star expressed interest in owning an NBA team in Las Vegas.