Online drives Churchill Downs' Q2 profits
Racing website Twinspires.com contributes to 21% rise in profits " operator plans for online gaming expansion.
Churchill Downs’ (CD) online betting arm contributed to a 21% rise in profits for the three months ended 30 June 2012, as the operator confirms plans to launch a real-money gaming site later this year.
Net revenues for the racetrack operator’s betting site Twinspires.com increased by 13% (US$29.7m) to $52.7m compared to the same quarter last year, driven primarily by new customer growth and an increase in average daily wagering, it said in a call late last night.
The company launched Twinspires.com in 2007 and it has since become the largest online horseracing business in the US. Its current platform only offers horseracing, but the operator’s chief strategy officer Ted Gay told eGR NA in June that the company was “spending lots of time focusing on poker and egaming”.
CD chairman and CEO Robert L. Evans confirmed on Monday that the operator plans to launch real-money gaming site Luckity.com later in 2012. The site, however, is understood to be based on the ‘sweepstakes’ model, rather than fully regulated online casino and poker gambling.
The model would likely be similar to the World Poker Tour’s Club WPT Poker, which allows players to pay a monthly membership fee to compete for points, rather than with cash buy-ins. Players then accumulate points and cash prizes are awarded to those with the highest tally.
eGR NA revealed in June that CD is in talks with potential software partners to become both a major B2B and B2C player in the US online poker market. The operator plans to join forces with a series of partners in order to pool liquidity on its own poker network on which it will also launch its own poker product. It is one of more than 30 companies to apply for an interactive poker licence in Nevada.
Elsewhere in its results for Q2 2012, the Louisville-based company posted an overall year-on-year increase in revenues of 8% to $270.8m.