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JANUARY SUGGESTS A STRONG REBOUND THIS YEAR FOR PENNSYLVANIA GAMING, WHICH COULD REACH $4 BILLION BY PENNBETS' GARY ROTSTEIN

PennBets

The start of 2020 suggested heady days ahead for Pennsylvania’s gaming industry, which was flush with cash streams.

The industry’s $302.8 million in January 2020 revenue was up 16.9% over January 2019. There was all this new gambling taking place online, whether through sports betting or casino games, and even the industry’s brick-and-mortar slots revenue — its longtime bread and butter — was up 5.8% from the year before.

The trend continued in February, which saw revenue spike 13.8% year over year to $304.3 million. It seemed a given that the state’s record $3.41 billion in collective gaming revenue from 2019 would be shattered by year’s end, with state and local governments far surpassing the $1.42 billion in tax revenue they received that prior year.

And then March brought the start of the COVID-19 pandemic with devastating results to what gaming operators collected — with a harsh side-effect on government budgets in a state that taxes the various forms of gambling at an unusually high rate.

Casinos were closed a collective 1,473 days in 2020, or one-third of the year. The sports calendar, and the betting industry tied to it, were upended. On a proportionally smaller scale, operators tied to fantasy sports contests and truck stop video gaming terminals similarly suffered.

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