Kentucky-based Churchill Downs, Inc. is placing the ending touches on its $460 million gaming resort in Virginia’s Dumfries. In anticipation of its impending opening, Churchill Downs is aggressively advertising and marketing the on line casino to residents in prosperous Northern Virginia.
An aerial view of The Rose Gaming Resort, a $460 million growth from Churchill Downs. The on line casino, which can supply digital gaming machines based mostly on beforehand run horse races, opens in Virginia’s Dumfries in September 2024. (Picture: Prince William Instances)
The Rose Gaming Resort gained’t supply conventional on line casino slot machines or stay seller desk video games. As a substitute, the gaming ground will home digital gaming terminals that calculate profitable spins based mostly on beforehand run horse races.
Northern Virginia residents in Arlington, Fairfax, Prince William, Fauquier, and Stafford counties have not too long ago been inundated with tv commercials promoting The Rose.
The Rose Gaming Resort defies expectations as Virginia’s latest premier gaming vacation spot. With pleasure round each nook and over 50,000 sq. toes of gaming area, there’s multiple technique to win at The Rose,” a narrator says throughout one 15-second spot.
Throughout Churchill’s second-quarter earnings presentation, firm officers stated The Rose is on monitor to open subsequent month. A precise September opening date hasn’t but been confirmed.
Churchill hopes The Rose will poach some gaming {dollars} from Northern Virginia residents who’re at the moment touring throughout the Potomac River to MGM Nationwide Harbor in Maryland. The on line casino is taken into account MGM’s most worthwhile home gaming operation outdoors of Las Vegas.
Advertising Blitz
Final fall, Churchill Downs misplaced its bid to assemble a business on line casino in Richmond. The native referendum vote wasn’t a complete loss, nonetheless, because the state’s resolution to permit Petersburg to mull the business gaming alternative strikes the doable on line casino growth one other 25 miles south of Dumfries the place The Rose will function.
Churchill acquired The Rose growth via its $2.5 billion acquisition of Peninsula Pacific Leisure (P2E) and Colonial Downs Group.
The Virginia Basic Meeting legalized historic horse racing (HHR) machines in 2018 after a Chicago-based group of buyers agreed to buy the shuttered Colonial Downs Racetrack and return stay racing to the storied New Kent County facility. The sale was conditioned on the monitor being afforded HHR machines. The deal included off-track betting parlors that might additionally home HHR video games, with a cap of 5K HHR machines throughout the venues.
Revolutionary Racing, the Chicago entity that purchased Colonial Downs, later bought its Virginia enterprise to P2E. Churchill’s takeover of Peninsula Pacific, together with The Rose, delivered the HHR off-track gaming venues that function below the Rosie’s Gaming Emporium Model. The HHR venues are positioned in Collinsville, Dumfries, Emporia, Hampton, Richmond, and Vinton.
The Rose is by far the biggest HHR location within the Churchill secure. Together with 1,650 HHR gaming positions, the resort will open with a 102-room lodge, 2,540-space parking storage, eight bars and eating places, and greater than 80 acres of inexperienced area.
The Rose was constructed atop a former landfill simply east of Interstate 95.
HHR Defined
HHR gadgets use the outcomes of beforehand run horse races to approximate the gaming expertise of a slot machine although the video games are parimutuel of their performance. The worldwide gaming business’s main producers, together with Aristocrat, Mild & Surprise, Worldwide Recreation Expertise, AGS, Ainsworth, and Everi, produce and distribute HHR cupboards.
Churchill Downs Inc. CEO Invoice Carstanjen says the corporate’s willingness to take a position extra in The Rose than P2E reveals its optimism about Northern Virginia. The Rose funds has ballooned from $389 million in 2022 to $460 million, an 18% improve.
“We’re on time and on funds to what we advised you on the final earnings name as we improve the scale of the ability to 1,650 HHR machines. It’s a large website and it’s thrilling to see the outside and inside items come collectively as we method completion,” Carstanjen stated in the course of the firm’s earnings name on July 25.
