Well, son, when a mommy casino and a daddy casino love each other very much…oh, that’s not it. Basically, they come from gamblers, who graciously leave more than they take in bill validators and drop boxes in casinos across Nevada.
But where exactly does most of this gambling take place? It seems obvious that a lot of it happens in Las Vegas–but how much? Each month, you can see that the totals for the Las Vegas Strip are over half the total for the entire state, but I wanted a more solid quantatative analysis than that. So I fired up the latest Gaming Revenue Report and, one giant spreadsheet later, had some real answers to the question.
I decided to digest that spreadsheet into two handy tables, one giving the absolute numbers for the past year’s gaming revenues, the other the percentages. The results are illuminating. To no one’s surprise, Clark County is vital to the state’s gaming industry: more than 85% of all revenue come from there. Washoe County, number two, had about 7.5% of those revenues–just slightly more than the Boulder Strip’s total.
Hopefully, this reinforces the knowledge that Clark County’s gaming industry is a vital part of the state’s economy, and that it might be a good idea to consider this when thinking about where our state budget dollars are expended.
You can read the report here: 2010 Nevada Casino Gaming Market (pdf).