Today’s post looks at payback for non-tribal gaming casinos in Iowa, such as riverboat gambling and pari-mutuel facilities. The Iowa Racing and Gaming Commission therefore has reporting for 19 such facilities.
For slot machines, the data is broken down for each property by month and denomination, making the data more detailed than markets like Nevada or Delaware, and putting it in line with Connecticut.
Because of the number of properties, the layout of four years of payback data by denomination for four fiscal years, which would be my ideal, is a bit impractical. That data is on the commission website, but here we’ll review the last four years of overall payback data, and compare the last fiscal year by certain denominations for all 19 properties, so we’ll get a bit of both.
A fiscal year for Iowa is from July 1 of one year through June 30 of the following year; therefore fiscal year 2022 covers July 1, 2021 through June 30, 2022.
Overall Payback by Casino
Let’s start by comparing overall payback for the last four years:
| Year | 2022 | 2021 | 2020 | 2019 |
| Ameristar II | 90.44% | 90.51% | 90.02% | 90.05% |
| Casino Queen Marquette | 89.99% | 89.85% | 90.14% | 90.19% |
| Catfish Bend | 90.56% | 90.56% | 90.61% | 90.42% |
| Diamond Jo Dubuque | 90.16% | 90.22% | 90.26% | 90.49% |
| Diamond Jo Worth | 90.15% | 90.38% | 90.49% | 90.52% |
| Grand Falls | 90.57% | 90.74% | 90.66% | 90.36% |
| Hard Rock | 90.30% | 90.19% | 90.24% | 90.29% |
| Harrah’s Council Bluffs | 89.62% | 89.50% | 89.76% | 89.77% |
| Horseshoe Council Bluffs | 89.54% | 89.47% | 89.50% | 89.66% |
| Isle Waterloo | 89.72% | 89.90% | 89.94% | 90.04% |
| Isle of Capri Bettendorf | 89.93% | 89.89% | 89.76% | 89.72% |
| Lakeside | 88.76% | 88.91% | 88.92% | 88.91% |
| Prairie Meadows | 91.06% | 91.32% | 91.60% | 91.67% |
| Q Casino | 90.58% | 90.48% | 90.49% | 90.63% |
| Rhythm City | 90.05% | 90.14% | 90.19% | 90.26% |
| Riverside | 90.48% | 90.39% | 90.47% | 90.40% |
| Wild Rose Clinton | 90.66% | 90.55% | 90.28% | 90.56% |
| Wild Rose Emmetsburg | 90.37% | 90.37% | 90.42% | 90.61% |
| Wild Rose Jefferson | 90.74% | 90.57% | 90.70% | 90.52% |
Some observations:
- Prairie Meadows has the highest payback all four years, and is the only one to payback over 91% all four years.
- Conversely, Lakeside is the only one to pay back less than 89% all four years. All the Caesars-owned properties are right behind them, all paying below 90 percent in recent years. Just about everyone else is in a range of 90 to 91 percent.
- The numbers are solidly consistent across the board for all four years, so the casinos seem pretty stable in what they want to make from that perspective.
Fiscal Year 2022 Payback by Denomination
Here are the four most common denominations seen on casino floors; while reporting is available for other denominations, many properties don’t have any, so these are the most useful comparisons:
| Denomination | 1 cent | 5 cent | 25 cent | $1 |
| Ameristar II | 89.23% | 93.51% | 94.02% | 93.28% |
| Casino Queen Marquette | 89.19% | 92.73% | 93.01% | 93.24% |
| Catfish Bend | 88.75% | 90.61% | 92.85% | 94.39% |
| Diamond Jo Dubuque | 89.30% | 94.78% | 92.87% | 92.87% |
| Diamond Jo Worth | 89.25% | 94.34% | 93.49% | 92.12% |
| Grand Falls | 90.25% | 92.45% | 92.26% | 91.78% |
| Hard Rock | 89.22% | 92.67% | 93.59% | 93.45% |
| Harrah’s Council Bluffs | 88.44% | 93.70% | 93.26% | 91.62% |
| Horseshoe Council Bluffs | 88.03% | 93.00% | 93.45% | 90.71% |
| Isle Waterloo | 88.75% | 90.91% | 92.36% | 92.16% |
| Isle of Capri Bettendorf | 88.72% | 93.70% | 93.30% | 91.66% |
| Lakeside | 88.20% | 94.29% | 91.20% | 90.62% |
| Prairie Meadows | 89.30% | 93.89% | 94.22% | 94.29% |
| Q Casino | 89.47% | 93.94% | 94.18% | 94.26% |
| Rhythm City | 89.15% | 93.49% | 92.67% | 93.31% |
| Riverside | 89.31% | 93.61% | 92.51% | 92.21% |
| Wild Rose Clinton | 90.13% | 94.12% | 93.57% | 91.83% |
| Wild Rose Emmetsburg | 89.68% | 92.08% | 93.09% | 92.16% |
| Wild Rose Jefferson | 89.78% | 91.94% | 92.99% | 93.35% |
Some observations around the individual denomination paybacks:
- The delta between the penny and nickel slots at many of these casinos is 4-5%, especially at the Caesars-owned properties, which for most of their properties have particularly low penny slot payback and a 5 percent higher nickel payback percentage. It really indicates in these markets potentially seeking out those higher denominations to get better paybacks.
- Because nickel denomination paybacks jump so much, there’s many properties here that see a slide in quarter or dollar denomination paybacks, enough so that they may not always be a better bet in terms of long term payback.
- It’s likely based on the data presented that multi-denomination machines are being reported with the lowest denomination on the game, and that could be swaying the nickel denomination data. But if so, penny denomination games could be even lower because they’d be averaging in higher denominations from multi-denomination machines as well.
