Greetings, welcome to the Full House Resorts, Inc. fourth quarter earnings call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A brief question-and-answer session will follow the formal presentation. If anyone should require operator assistance during the conference, please press star zero on your telephone keypad. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. It is now my pleasure to introduce your host, Lewis Fanger, Chief Financial Officer. Thank you. You may begin.
Thank you. Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to our fourth quarter earnings call. As always, before we begin, we remind you that today's conference call may contain forward-looking statements that we're making under the Safe Harbor provision of federal securities laws. I would also like to remind you that the company's actual results could differ materially from the anticipated results in these forward-looking statements. Please see today's press release under the caption Forward-looking Statements for the discussion of risks that may affect our results. Also, we may make reference to non-GAAP measures such as Adjusted EBITDA. For a reconciliation of those measures, please see our website as well as the various press releases that we issue. Lastly, we're broadcasting this conference call at fullhouseresorts.com, where you can find today's earnings release as well as all of our SEC filings. With that all.
With all that said, Dan, you ready to begin?
Yeah, that's great. Yeah, usually Lewis and I are not in the same place today, but we'll make it work. Obviously the big news on this call will be about the temporary casino that we opened at American Place in Waukegan, Illinois. It opened at 8:00 P.M. on February 17th. It took us longer to get it open than we had hoped, but we did finally open at 8:00 P.M. Now ignoring the partial day of that day, we had 15 days of operations through Saturday. So half a month. The Sunday numbers I should have shortly, but I didn't have when I did this.
The win for that half a month was $4.1 million, which is a run rate of $8.2 million a month or about $100 million a year. Just to put that in perspective, our whole company last year had $114 million of gaming revenue. The Temporary's run rate is about the same as the rest of the company combined. The trends also have been pretty positive. Now the first week when you get a lot of tourists coming in to see the place, we had 23,000 admissions. The second week we had 20,000 admissions. The win per person in that first week was $80, and the win per person in the second week was $97, almost $98.
That's pretty typical of new places that the tourists all come in at first and then gradually you build a base of people who are really there to play the slot machines. If you work those numbers out, you'll see it was $1.7 million of win in the first week of operation. That's just the slot one. Recognize that the place is only partly open. You know, there was an uncertainty. The opening date made us kind of reticent to promote and to hire people. The process there is a little bit unusual, at least different than what I'm used to. You know, you start hiring people.
You have to staff certain areas and you train and you train. At some point, the Illinois Gaming Board approves practice days. In our case, we had two of them. We had had about 10 other ones, but formal practice days where you're being overseen by the Illinois Gaming Board. If you perform well enough during those practice days, and we did, then you can open, like, literally the next day. But if not, there's more training and more practice days, as happened to the casino that opened in Rockford a year and a half ago. Meanwhile, you're paying people and you've got no revenue and it's hard to promote exactly when you're gonna open because you don't really know when you're actually gonna open.
Of course it's also harder to hire people before you're really open because people are wondering what's it like inside, is this a place I wanna work, and so on. To put it in perspective, our full compendium is about 800 people. That's about how many people we expect to employ at full capacity in the temporary. Today we have about 400. There's about 200 in the pipeline, meaning that they've applied, we've made them offers, and they're going through background checks and filling out the IGB gaming employee and non-gaming employee forms. Some of those 200 are gonna fall out, so maybe it results in 100 new employees.
You can see if you're trying to get to 800 and you have 400, it's gonna take a few weeks to get there. We will get there. As a result, there's a few things. One is we're not operating 24 hours a day. We're only operating from 8:00 A.M. till 4:00 A.M. That's not actually an issue with the staffing. That's our cage has to get faster at the closing processes from one day to the next. It's pretty complicated to roll the accounting day over from today to tomorrow when the casino is operating. You know, somebody shows up to cash out their chips in the middle of it, and which state is that going to, and so on.
You want them to be able to go pretty fast. For the moment, we and the IGB agreed that we would not operate from four in the morning until eight in the morning, which gives them time to make sure they've done all the accounting processes they need to do and close out one day before we start the next. Obviously, lots of casinos operate 24 hours a day, so we'll eventually get to where we can do that as well. That, and that's the wee hours of the morning, so we're not really losing a lot of revenues at that point anyway. We are allowed to have 50 table games. At the moment, we only have 28 on the floor because we don't have enough dealers.
Even then, we only operate the table games from 2:00 P.M. to 2:00 A.M. Again, it's a staffing issue. Now we'll eventually be open 24 hours a day with the table games, and we will eventually have all 50 games open at peak periods. You know, it's tricky to find dealers 'cause there was no casino in Lake County before. The casino to our south, which is Rivers, and the casino to our north, which is Potawatomi, they're 45 minutes or 40 minutes each direction. Frankly, they're very successful casinos. The dealers make lots of money. They probably live closer to those places than they do to us in many cases. We've been training people.
We run our own dealer school, and we've just recently reached out with a promotion where we're guaranteeing dealers $60,000 a year, including their tip income. Frankly, we think they'll make more than that, so the guarantee doesn't actually cost us anything, but it makes them more comfortable about taking a job with us. Second, if you're an experienced dealer and you're working at some remote casino, maybe a tribal casino up in Wisconsin or Minnesota or Michigan or something, and you wanna relocate to Lake County, which is a pretty nice place to live, we'll pay up to $5,000 a relocation cost. We're doing some pretty creative stuff to try to get dealers and we will eventually have enough to operate table games, full-board.
In the slot area, we are pretty well-staffed on what we need in slots, but we've had over 100 machines out of service. One of the manufacturers kind of fell flat on us. Out of 1,000 slot machines, we opened with 800 and something, and we're gradually getting to 1,000, closing that gap. In the food and beverage area is a big deficiency. We have two large restaurants, one with 300 seats, one with 200 seats, and then we have a third restaurant that is going to be completed in April. It's basically a diner that's gonna serve as our steakhouse. It's delivered in April. The staffing issues we have has us right now only operating one restaurant, and even that restaurant is only for dinner.
So we're really trying to fill this in quickly, so we can get a second restaurant open within a few weeks and expand the food service offerings to at least two meals a day and eventually maybe three meals a day in one of the restaurants. So at this point, we're only 50% staffed with limited operations, and we're still doing a $100 million a year run rate. Of course, there's always some unusual costs around opening that'll go through the income statement. If you're that understaffed and you're running that sort of revenue, I'm sure our margins, apart from the unusual stuff, are very strong. One other thing to point out is we opened with really no mailing list.
You would expect an active customer list in a market of this size to be at least 40,000-50,000 individuals. You know, people that you mail to, who you send free play to, and they show up and gamble and so on. Well, at opening two weeks ago, we had essentially zero. Today, we have about 15,000. Some portion of the 15,000 are gonna turn out not to be active. They just signed up to get a free buffet chit. So maybe out of the 15,000, you know, 5,000 or 10,000 will turn out to be active. So we have a long ways to go in building the mailing list. You know, we're still achieving that $100 million a year run rate with little or no customer list.
We're pretty happy with how we're doing. In Colorado, construction is progressing well. The large tower crane is coming down today. That's a sign of progress. Meaning that there's, you know, the buildings are basically, the exteriors are all built. Inside, the plumbing and electrical has been installed in a lot of the building. The drywall is going up in a lot of the guest rooms and in a lot of the public spaces. Portions of this is gonna be complete inside of five months, and others are gonna take as much as 10 months. We're gonna open somewhere within that timeframe, meaning in the fall. Where within that may reflect on what needs to be completed to open. Now, the casino, obviously.
Many, if not all of the guest rooms we'd like to have. We'd like to have the high-end restaurant open. The kitchen on that is a little behind. We want the parking garage. We want the meeting room space. The spa is a bit behind, and we may open without it. You know, that's the game we're playing, is trying to figure out what can we open, what's essential to be open to give a good experience to the customers. Like, do they really care if there's 300 rooms or 250 rooms? They're only staying in one. They won't even know if there's 50 rooms un-unfinished. You get into fire exiting issues and stuff like that.
We're trying to work all that out and we'll be open sometime in the fall. We've learned from the experience at The Temporary that it's very important to build the employee base at the same time as you build the building. Fortunately, the regulatory process of opening a casino in Colorado is different than it is in Illinois. We will know Pretty date certain of opening. We also have a core compendium of experienced employees to open with. We're not starting with zero. We're starting with a couple 100 people who are already working for us. We already have a mailing list. Bronco Billy's been building a mailing list for its 25-year history.
If somebody is a gambler in Colorado Springs or Denver, we probably have a pretty good idea who they are. Big advantage over where we were in Illinois. Now meanwhile, the construction of Chamonix has had a big impact on Bronco Billy's, kind of no surprise there. You know, Bronco Billy's used to have all sorts of parking. Today, it has none. We offer valet parking and park three blocks away. There's no hotel rooms on site. Perhaps most importantly, it has a lot less gaming capacity than it normally does. We actually made the situation a lot worse in the second half of 2022 because we closed the core part of the Bronco Billy's Casino.
Bronco Billy's is eight different buildings, each 25 feet wide, and we closed the middle three, and as well as its steakhouse, which is upstairs, in order to refurbish the casino and contemplation of Chamonix opening this year. In the third and fourth quarters, Bronco Billy's was a fraction of what it normally is, and as a result, it didn't earn anything, when historically it was a significant earnings contributor. The casino space reopened in late December. It looks pretty nice. The steakhouse is becoming an Italian restaurant, and it won't be open for another six months or so. It should be open at or before Chamonix opening. Meanwhile, on the balance sheet, we drew down the credit facility to pay the upfront gaming tax for the temporary.
We also had to fund the pre-opening cost a little longer than expected, and opening later than expected meant we had less income. We had hoped to be earning some money in late January, early February. Now Illinois gaming law is a little bit ambiguous. And that's not a fault of the Gaming Board, it's a fault of the legislature. I mean, that's what happens when legislatures create laws. Sometimes they're not always clear. There is a tax on gaming capacity amongst other taxes. There's all these different taxes we have to pay. Well, one of the more important ones is based on how many slot machines you have, for example.
We thought we were going to owe now, meaning next week, it's owed 1 month after you open, about $38 million in gaming taxes. We would owe another $12 million when we open the permanent casino in three years because permanent has more gaming capacity. The gaming board is interpreting the law that all $50 million is owed now. From our reading of the law, we're not sure that's correct. We're trying to figure this out. Since we owe the money in one week, we're trying to figure it out fast. I know the casino that opened two years ago went ahead and paid the amount up front. Quite a few other casinos have the ability to expand, and they haven't had to pay it up front. We're trying to figure it out.
It's not the amount of money, it's the timing of the money. We thought we were going to pay $12 million three years from now. It's a much bigger factor for the Bally's Casino in downtown Chicago. For them, it's a huge number. To make sure that we have the money, if necessary, to pay that and to have more flexibility moving forward to finance the permanent American Place, we did an add-on to our senior secured bond issue, raising $35 million. We did it pretty quickly. Today, we're in a very liquid situation between the cash on hand and the profits from operations. We're now generating pretty good profits from operations, including from the temporary, and it's more than enough to complete Chamonix and to fund the initial construction of American Place.
That buys time for our new properties to prove themselves and for the bond market to continue to stabilize. Our existing bonds become callable in February of 2024. We've long said that sometime after they become callable, we probably issue a new bond issue, take those out and incorporate into it the money needed to build the permanent American Place. But with this a little add-on issue, we have flexibility probably all the way through 2025 to just be funding construction from our existing resources. That buys us a pretty long runway to figure out the right timing and how to finance American Place. Lewis, let me turn that over to you.
As Dan noted, we did do that revolver draw and the $40 million tack on notes last month. That's led to us having a lot of cash currently sitting on the balance sheet. Here in real time, we're sitting on about $210 million of cash, which includes $110 million of restricted cash for the completion of Chamonix and obviously $100 million of kind of unrestricted cash. We'll use a portion of our unrestricted cash to pay the initial license fees for the temporary, which are somewhere between $40 million-$50 million, as Dan noted. You know, we do have some modest, very modest uses of capital like that restaurant redo that Dan mentioned at Bronco Billy's will cost us about $1 million.
Of course, don't forget that our existing business generates cash too, especially with us heading into our seasonally strong season and a large new property, The Temporary now open. Some other cleanup items of note for you. We did sign a new sports skin agreement for Colorado. We actually executed it back in December, and it began its contractual term a couple of days ago. That means here in real-time, we have two sports skins that have not yet launched. One of those is in Illinois, where we contracted with Circa Sports. There's a natural process that gets followed, but pending normal gaming approvals, we believe that Circa Sports could go live here in the next few months.
Then we have one idle skin left in Indiana, which we continue to evaluate whether we use it ourselves or sign up a third party similar to all of our other sports skin agreements. For those of you keeping track, once Circa goes live, the total for all six of our sports skin agreements is $10 million per year of annualized minimum revenue, and half of that $10 million is related to our agreement with Circa, which is the most valuable. The most valuable, by the way, because Illinois has so many people in the state, and there just aren't very many sports skins in the state. In Lake Tahoe, we and our landlord agreed to extend our lease agreement for the Grand Lodge Casino.
It was due to expire on August 31st of this year. With the extension, it now goes until December 31st of 2024. Normally, we would ask for a longer extension. Its new owners plan on putting the property through an extensive renovation. I think in their ideal world, they would probably prefer to close down our casino while they renovate the entire tower. In our ideal world, we would have them renovate around us like we did a few years ago. We'll continue to have conversations behind the scenes about how we can still operate even while they do some extensive work on site. For the fourth quarter that we just finished, I know you've already heard from a bunch of our other regional competitors about a challenging end to the quarter.
Quite simply, there was just bad weather portfolio-wide, especially in December. In Mississippi, for example, we had icy roads, and that always creates chaos down south as people, they're not used to those icy roads, and they end up just staying indoors. Lake Tahoe is another example. We had snowfall up until 8:00 P.M. on New Year's Eve, which is never ideal. The two softer moments in the property portfolio were at Silver Slipper and Bronco Billy's. At Silver Slipper, our nearest competitor put out some pretty crazy promotions in the fourth quarter. Since then, promo levels have gone back to normal, and we've seen a recovery in visitation. Here in real-time, for example, we're seeing visitation that's about 10% higher than levels that we saw in November and December.
Over at Bronco Billy's, I don't want to go over everything that Dan already mentioned, the sheer fact is the size of the casino is a fraction of what it usually is. At its lowest point, we were running Bronco with 55% fewer gaming positions than pre-construction levels. Even today, after the opening of the renovated gaming space, we're still at about half of our usual gaming capacity. We look forward to when Chamonix is open, we have parking on site and hotel rooms on site and a full casino as well. With all of that said, I probably have two last points that I want to make here, or a couple last points.
One is, if you look at the EBITDA numbers, in 2022, they were down, but I do want to remind all of you that we still had some pretty good record numbers in there. Silver Slipper had its second-best year in its 16-year history. I don't think it's slipping much from what you've seen for what it's worth. Over at Rising Star, they had their second-best year in at least the past 10 years. You know, from our seats here, I think we were probably a couple million dollars below what we would have liked, but that shortfall is made up through just 15 days of EBITDA from a fully ramped up American Place. Dan kind of hinted at it. I'll be a little more explicit.
I don't think the ramp-up period is going to be very extensive at all at American Place. We're very, very pleased with what we've seen out of the box there, given all the limitations that we're currently running with. I think you're going to see a pretty positive impact from that opening here very, very quickly. The other last point I want to make is the way I view the opening of the temporary is as a massive deleveraging event. Again, as Dan noted, we're very pleased with how the opening weeks have been. Regardless of what your estimate might be for EBITDA out of the temporary, it should result in very meaningful growth to this company.
Keep in mind that we raised the majority of our debt to fund construction of The Temporary and Chamonix, now you have the first of those projects open and doing well. The second one, which should be just as meaningful as the Temporary, should be to our financials, is only a few quarters away from opening. Just keep all that in mind. With all that said, Dan, you want to take some Q&A?
All right, let's go for it.
Thank you. We will now be conducting a question-and-answer session. If you'd like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad. A confirmation tone will indicate your line is in the question queue. You may press star two if you would like to remove your question from the queue. For participants using speaker equipment, it may be necessary to pick up your handset before pressing the star keys. One moment, please, while we poll for questions. Our first question is from the line of David Bain with B. Riley Securities. Please go ahead.
Great. Thank you. Dan and Lewis, congratulations on another exciting casino opening.
First, I guess, Dan, you gave some early run rate numbers for Waukegan. That was very helpful. I mean, how should we view it in context, though, with the upcoming augmented hours, games, amenities, marketing of the database? Can you help us think about how that $100 million kind of, that cadence from here as those things begin to kind of funnel in? Then maybe Lewis on that, how we should think about EBITDA margins, that cadence given, you know, fixed costs for a temporary relative to a new permanent casino opening.
Well,
Qualitative is fine, but quantitative is better.
Yeah, that's okay. Well, I mean, at this point, you have kind of a rotation of the tenants. In other words, the tenants will probably continue to run at a pretty good base of, you know, 20,000, might slip a little into the teens, 15,000, 20,000 people per week coming through. The win per admission, which today is about $100, that's pretty low by Illinois standards. So I think the win per admission will creep up as we have longer operating hours and frankly, more reasons to come. I mean, at this point, our food and beverage offerings are pretty limited, for example.
You know, as you transition, you know, I mean, granted, you get some kind of free business from everybody coming to see the new place, but a lot of those people don't gamble or frankly, couldn't get to a table because we didn't have enough tables. I mean, on opening night, within an hour of opening the doors, every table was filled. You know, I think we will end up at a higher run rate than 100. It'll build gradually over time. Well, you know, that number is just gaming revenue. I'm not counting food and beverage in there.
We have a center bar that is a bar, is actually doing pretty phenomenal numbers. We're not gonna pay for everything with the bar. It's a very successful bar. you know, I think we end up with something north of $100 million. I mean, I don't think it's gonna be $200 million, maybe not even $150 million , but $120 million , $130 million , $140 million , somewhere in there, and pretty high margins because it's almost all slot machines. I think we're running 80/20 today, slot machines to tables. As we get the tables open longer, we might be 70/30 instead of 80/20. In Illinois, it's a little unique. The gaming tax is actually lower on the tables.
That shift probably shouldn't hurt margins very much. I, you know, that's the bottom line. We'll see. We have to build the mailing. Typically, I tried to characterize it to our advertisers that our advertising agency, that you're looking out at a lake that you've never fished in before, and you have to go out and fish in a lot of different places, and eventually you figure out where the bigger fish are hanging out, and now you start focusing on them. Right now, we've been doing a lot of broad-based marketing. We've got, you know, wraps on the commuter trains. We have signage all over the commuter train station in downtown Chicago. We're on television, we got billboards up all over the place.
Gradually, as you build a mailing list, you stop paying for the general media, and you focus on the segments and the people. That's why the players club is so important, as you build that players club database, and you know a lot about those people because you know how much they gamble, and you know what days of the week they gamble, and so on. So you start incentivizing them to come in with free play or meal offers and so on.
Right.
You know, part of the, you know, getting the second restaurant open is an opportunity for us to market it to say, "Hey, come back and try our Asia-Azteca," which is just opening. Then when we get the steakhouse, we can say, "Come in and try North Shore Steaks & Seafood." It's a process. You know, whereas in Colorado, we already have a pretty good sized mailing list. It's just going out to them and saying, "We know you've gambled in Cripple Creek before. Why don't you come up and see this new thing we built?
Right.
Yeah. I don't know that I have a ton to add on to that, Dave. I mean, I'll tell you a couple things, though. I do wanna reinforce that when Dan talks about $100 million of run rate revenue at this point, you know, that is purely gaming revenue. When you think about overall margins, you know, all the food and beverage tends to dilute your margins. Don't run a 30% margin off of, you know, in the long run, at least, off of just Dan's gaming number. It's higher than 30%. You know, I'm not saying it very well, but I think you get what I mean. Everything else dilutes your margin down.
Whatever margin you're using on the run rate gaming revenue should be a much higher number. All that gives me a lot of confidence. I mean, look, if you run a 40% margin on Dan's run rate number there, you're looking at $40 million of roughly $40 million of EBITDA, assuming everything else is break even from a restaurant side. You know, when you walk through the facility, I'll be honest, it's. You know, I'm meeting people there for lunch this week on Thursday, and I don't have anywhere in the building to take them for lunch yet, right? It's not just on a Thursday, it's every day of the week.
You know, if you're a gaming customer going in, you can go and grab a hot sandwich from the two Airstream that we have on site there. If you want a true sit down meal, you don't have it. We've got a, you know, we're making sure we put some food trucks on the outside, especially on weekends. We are planning on getting some brunch service into L'Américain here in the near term, but it's. You've got a portion of your day where if you're a normal, good gamer, you expect to wanna show up, have a meal, go and play a game. Right now, we're only servicing you for the dinner part of every day of the week. Do keep in that in mind.
Despite all that, we're doing $100 million of run rate revenue. You know, the first mailers didn't start hitting people's inboxes until a couple days ago. We went all of February without having any of your usual promos out there as an example. You know, this is a very, very strong start. I won't give you numbers per se. I will tell you that I continue to think that this thing will be EBITDA positive pretty quick out of the gate. I'll leave it at that, but I feel very good.
That's all very helpful. Then I just had one follow-up strategic question, looking at 2022 EBITDA generation, you know, particularly from a few properties, you know, as they begin to normalize, but still be dwarfed by Waukegan, Chamonix. Can you remind us the strategic rationale not to divest kind of the smaller portions of the portfolio? I ask, you know, from a forward equity capital or investment into the more sizable contributors, you know, your time, and even from an investor standpoint, it's sometimes a little distracting when a property is off, like, $500,000 for a one-time reason, and it's like 30% off of consensus.
Well, I mean, it doesn't... Like, the smallest one is Fallon. We could sell it pretty readily. There's a lot of people who'd be interested in buying it. We manage it in conjunction with the Hyatt Tahoe, and so it's, to a large extent, it's the same management team that goes back and forth. That makes it more efficient for us to run those two. You know, if you sold Fallon, you'd have to put the entire management team just against the Hyatt. If you go to the Rising Sun, which is relatively small, I mean, a few years ago, we thought we might have to close it.
Frankly, the management team there has done a terrific job, and it's now, you know, making $6 million, $7 million, $8 million a year. I think it was $8 million in the peak year with the stimulus checks and $6 million and change last year. You know, now we're pretty happy with that in a very competitive environment. Frankly, we don't need the money. We have enough money to build everything we're doing, and it really wouldn't move the needle much if we sold one of these properties. It, and also is a good place to, what's the word? Build a management team that you can promote to other places. Anyway, that's, you know.
Yeah.
We've got no real reason to divest, you know, you know, when you start thinking, you know, what you start thinking is, okay, what happens if the bond market is crappy, and it comes time for us to raise the rest of the money to build American Place? We could always do what Bally's did and go, turn to a REIT and get the REIT to fund most of it. We could even do a sale-leaseback on some of our other properties and do it. I happen to think that's probably more expensive than it will be to go to the bond market if you really measured everything.
We have multiple ways to finance American Place, and frankly, it's an asset of the company that we have not done the sale-leaseback thing yet. Luckily, listen, it, we're a public company, you know, everything's for sale. If somebody comes in and offers us a 25 times cash flow for any asset we have, we'll be happy to take it.
Right.
Yeah. Well.
Okay, great. Thanks, guys. Yeah, go ahead.
David, I was just going to say, and The good news is Nevada, Northern Nevada has not taken too much of our time for what it's worth. Ultimately, we're trying to balance the time relative to the EBITDA contribution, and at this point, it's the team up there is doing a decent job.
Okay, great. All right. Thank you very much.
Thank you. Our next question is from the line of Ryan Sigdahl with Craig-Hallum Capital Group. Please go ahead.
Good afternoon, guys. A lot of talk about the first two weeks of performance, obviously, on The Temporary. It's top of mind. It's the focus. Curious, that run rate that you keep referencing back to, I guess, when you look at other openings, how accurate is that? Or I guess, is there typically a lull, I guess, after the first few weeks, before you get the mailing list, before you get the amenities, before you get the hours, all of those things ramped up?
I don't-
Well, it I was gonna say.
Go ahead.
Every opening is a little different. You know, this is. I always say every opening has its price. In this case, it was the fact that we're understaffed and having to deal with that. It's very frustrating me to walk into these restaurants that are, you know, we were all focused on getting them built. Now they're built, we don't have the employees to run them. The process there in Illinois, even non-gaming employees have to fill out 25 pages of a 30-page form, and they basically ask the name and address of every girl you've kissed since third grade. That's fine and expected for Lewis and I. We do that all the time with every gaming commission.
It's not common that somebody applying to be a waiter has to do that, and they have to fill it out in English. When the community we're in is 50% Hispanic and the people applying for those jobs, a majority are Hispanic. We end up sitting down with them and helping them to reform. By the way, it's not the fault of the Gaming Board, it's the fault of the law. You know, they're just, I think they're as frustrated as we are in that the law requires them to do that. We're trying to hire waiters to come in and work in these restaurants, and they have to go through all these background checks, which takes time. You know, they can go next door and get a job with the restaurant next door.
I mean, unemployment's at record low levels. We're working our way through that, and it takes time, and that's the current challenge. Now the process of lots of, you know, tourists are looky-loos, as the industry calls them, coming in to see a new place, so you get large numbers of people mulling through, and then gradually figuring out which of them are gamblers and coming back. That's a very normal process. you know, and we had it at L'Auberge, we had it at St. Louis, and so on. You gradually figure out who the gamblers are and build the mailing list, and that's, it's a normal process. Will there be a lull?
You know, the second quarter might not be at a, may or may not be at a $100 million run rate. I'll bet it will be because we'll be adding hours, we'll get all the machines up and running, we'll be adding more table games, and we'll get the restaurants open. At L'Auberge in Lake Charles, and it's a long time ago now, 15 years ago, you know, it opened and then there was a little bit of a lull. And then we worked through it and the lull was over. It also opened with all of its restaurants open and all of its table games open.
I think we're less likely to have a lull here because we're gonna build the staffing and build the operating hours and everything else. You know, it's like the fact that we only have 28 table games doesn't matter that much on a Tuesday, but on swing shift on a Saturday, it really matters.
Yeah. Well, and the other thing to keep in mind, Ryan, is Dan's right. You know, usually you open up with your full breadth of amenities, and we haven't in this case. On top of that, we opened without a date, right? Or not a date, but we opened the day later than the day after we the public knew the date, is maybe the right thing to say. So if you were to sift through the questions that we get on, you know, Facebook and all those channels, you know, via Google and everything else, the number one question by far, last I looked, it was something like 75% or 80% of our questions was, "Are you open?" Right?
You know, usually with a normal casino, you've got that date out there six months in advance, and you're telling people, "We're opening this day. We're opening this day. We're opening this day," for months and months, and you're just beating it home. In this case, you know, there are a lot of people that just don't even know the doors are open yet. I'm not sweating it here.
Just two quicker ones here on Bronco Billy's, and I'll turn it over. One, how long in advance do you think you'll be able to announce that opening? Is it a few months? Or I guess any timeline there. Secondly, with the new casino renovation floor done, do you think that that property can turn back to EBITDA positive going forward even before Chamonix opens? The bigger one.
Yeah. Actually, I the numbers are already quite a bit better just in the five or six weeks since we got it open. The answer to that question is yes. I mean, it's still operating with a lot of the amenities not there, but it's much better than it was a few months ago. I'm sorry, that was. Oh, in terms of an opening date, well, you know, we can largely pick the opening date, but I don't want to get too far ahead of the. There's a point where the construction is largely done and you're installing the furniture. At that point it becomes very predictable when you can open.
We have a few pieces that we're trying to catch up with, like the kitchen for the specialty restaurant, needs to catch up a bit. There's an issue with, we couldn't do all three towers at once 'cause we couldn't get enough light gauge steel workers, so we had to build towers one and two, it's actually one and three, and what we call tower two is behind the other ones. It's possible to open without that tower being completed, except that some of the exiting from tower one goes through tower two. We have to satisfy the fire marshal that while that tower may not be completely furnished and open to the public, there are safe fire exiting methods to go through.
If we can't reach an accommodation with the fire marshal, you probably don't wanna open without towers one or two. Tower one has most of the suites, for example. There's issues like that that we have to resolve, but we should know, you know, 60 days ahead of the opening date so that we can then advertise the opening date and have a party. I mean, we actually had a pretty decent opening party at The Temporary, but it was a process of telling people, "Hey, we're getting close. We're getting real close. Be ready. You might only have 24 hours notice." Literally, we get approval at, like, 2:00 on Thursday. We blasted out emails to about 1,000 people saying, "We're opening tomorrow, party is at 6:00.
We open to the public at 8:00. We were able to get 400 people in the place. Despite our staffing challenges, the staff there did a terrific job at serving a high-end meal and having a great party atmosphere in the place. It went very well. I will tell you, it was not the way you normally wanna open. I mean, you don't normally wanna tell people you get 24 hours notice to come to a grand opening party.
Yep. Good. Thanks, Lewis, Dan.
Yeah. Thank you, Ryan.
Thank you. Our next question is from the line of Chad Beynon, with Macquarie. Please go ahead.
Hi. Good afternoon, Lewis and Dan, and congrats on the opening. Dan, just one, just kind of on the outlook here. I know you guys don't give guidance. I'm just trying to think about some of the same store growth opportunities of the business that aren't facing, you know, new competition or disruption. I guess mainly Mississippi, Nevada. In the press release, you outlined a number of things that, you know, hurt the properties in the fourth quarter and for the year. As we look at kinda where the, you know, the floor is, or the foundation of those financials, is there any reason to think that, you know, these couldn't grow from here?
I know Indiana, you talked about some competition, but just trying to figure out, you know, Mississippi, Nevada, if kind of the worst is behind you guys? Thanks.
Well, I think in Indiana, you do have a new competitor opened in September, so we have several more months of that. We've done reasonably well despite that competitor. I think that's okay. There really isn't anywhere else that we have a new competitor. We had as Lewis and I mentioned, in Mississippi, we had a competitor get very promotional for a while, and then I think they realized they were spending money foolishly, and they backed off. We're about to lap, or we have lapped the opening of online sports betting in Louisiana. That shouldn't be a factor going forward. In Colorado, we're the guys adding capacity, nobody else is.
In Northern Nevada, you know, Larry Ellison acquired the Hyatt over one year ago, I guess. That's, you know, good news, ultimately, because he has a history of going in and, you know, significantly improving the hotels he's bought. He owns four or five now. You know, we hope to continue to be the casino operator there. His indication so far is that that'll be the case. I don't think he wants to go get a gaming license and have to deal with those issues. It's an amenity to a hotel. Now, we may. He apparently intends to significantly refurbish the hotel. He's gonna start with the stuff along the lake, which is hugely valuable real estate.
It's kind of exciting to think what he could do with that. Then he's going to go to the main hotel building, which is where our casino is. As Lewis mentioned, we would prefer to operate during that, but the construction people almost always would rather just close the whole thing. That's a discussion we haven't had yet with them. You know, that lease has been extended several times. They never let it be a long-term lease. I wish they would. But it's been extended, by, you know, one year, three years, two years, every few years. You know, it'd be wonderful if he fixes it up to be a really high-end hotel and we are still there running the casino. I hope and believe that that could be the case.
We may end up going, you know, a year, a year and a half without a casino while he's doing that. We'll see how it shakes out. In Mississippi, we've actually made a lot of headway to have the approvals to build a hotel tower out over the water. We're a little busy building the other stuff we have, but we think we could get a pretty good return adding a hotel tower there someday. You know, it's, let's finish the construction we have going now, but we do have stuff we can do down the road. The sports books, you know, it was a little bit of surprise to us when Churchill shut down their sports betting operation 10 months ago.
We've now replaced one of them, and then we got the Circa deal. I think we're back in a good position with the sports betting stuff that it'll be a guaranteed minimum of about $10 million a year, as Lewis said. With one Indiana skin still available. Have I addressed everything? You know, Bronco Billy's is gonna be kinda part of Chamonix when it opens. It's a whole different scale. I mean, Chamonix is gonna make 10 x what Bronco Billy's ever made.
Gotcha. Okay. Thanks. No, appreciate that. Just, yeah, trying to fine-tune everything. I know we're all focused on The Temporary in Chamonix, but, you know, as we've said, the legacy business still matters to cash flow. In terms of some iCasino movement. I know, you know, Indiana and Illinois have been states that, you know, everyone has talked about potentially being on the docket in 2023 or 2024. I know there was a little bit of lost momentum in Indiana. Just wondering, if this is legalized, would you guys consider doing it on your own, you know, running one of these very valuable, profitable skins?
Would you consider, you know, leasing it out and bringing in, kinda guaranteed cash flow similar to what you'd done on the sports wagering side? Thanks.
Yeah. Well, we've considered both. It's probably easier to do the iGaming ourselves, 'cause you can rent or buy the software to do it. There was a particular issue with the sports betting as a small company. It... You were concerned that, let's say, the Colts got into the Super Bowl. Well, all of our customers in Indiana were gonna bet on the Colts. If the other team in the Super Bowl was not a place we have a casino, we were gonna end up with an unbalanced book. That is kind of a difficult thing to do.
If you change the betting odds at our sports book to try to attract bets on the other team, then we will not be offering our customers as good a deal as they can get from another casino in Indiana. We made the decision early on to do the sports betting through licensing with companies like Wynn, who's got a huge sports book in Las Vegas, so they can balance it with what they have out of Las Vegas, so that they don't have that concern. When you get into iGaming, that's just a large number of small independent statistical events, and that's the business we're in. We'd have to hire some people who understand how to market that business online, but those people are available.
But, you know, on the other hand, if somebody offered us a great deal on a skin, then we might decide to license it as we did in sports betting. We'll see. Yeah, I'm just thinking that somebody made the question before about, you know, why don't we divest some of the small ones? You know, maybe the real answer is, as the company gets bigger, maybe we should take the small ones and just group them all together. You guys, you know, when you see the Boyd numbers and they talk about, you know, the Midwest district, well, just portfolio theory of one casino in the Midwest might be up 30%, another one's down 30%. You look at it looks very stable.
They've kinda camouflaged it by grouping things together, whether it's them or Penn or most of our competitors group it together. We're one of the few companies that shows you pretty much earnings of each casino with the exception of Northern Nevada, with the share of management teams. We lump them together. You know, Boyd certainly has lots of small properties, but nobody gets focused on whether they're up or down a lot in one little market because they combine it. I'm sure Keith Smith pays attention to it, but doesn't confuse the analyst.
We appreciate all the details on the properties and also on the temporary. Congrats on the opening. Thanks, guys.
Okay. Thanks.
Thanks, Chad. Hey, Dan, we've got five minutes and two last questions. Let's try to get through both real quick.
That's Lewis's way of telling me to be succinct. Go ahead.
Thank you. Our next question is from the line of Edward Engel with ROTH MKM. Please go ahead.
Hi. Thanks for taking the question. Again, congrats on getting Waukegan up and running. I know it's too early, is there any kind of early learnings of where that customer base is coming from? Is it all Lake County, or are you seeing people kinda close to the suburbs of downtown Chicago as well?
No, it's heavily Lake County. You know, it's really heavily Lake County. There's very little from downtown Chicago, so.
Yeah. Not a lot to add to that. It's very heavily Lake County.
Yeah. I think like the city of Waukegan is a third, and I saw the numbers and it's. It's kind of, it's interesting, like, we're not even drawing very far from Rivers or Potawatomi. I think the casino revenues we have, as we've been saying all along, will mostly be from increased gamblers in our region. My guess is we haven't had a very big impact on either of those guys. Recognize Rivers does about $600 million a year in revenue, and the Potawatomi does about $400 million a year in revenue. Grand Vic, which is also kind of in the market, does about $120 million. There's $1.1 billion of revenues.
If we take 10% of that, well, that's $100 million. That's our run rate. Okay. Yeah, I don't think we're gonna have much impact on them, and I don't think we have very much overlap with Bally's at all. People in Chicago don't wanna drive up to Lake County. They think it's a place you go on weekends or something, and people in Lake County don't wanna go downtown 'cause you get stuck in traffic.
Great. Thanks. I'll pass it off.
Thanks, Ed.
Yeah. I mean, the one way to think of Lake County, it's like having a casino in Greenwich. You know, it's like, it's not gonna compete with Manhattan. It's gonna draw on people who live in Greenwich. If you're familiar with the New York geography, we're the Westchester County Casino, if you will, so.
All right. One last question, Dan.
Mm-hmm.
Thank you. Our next question is from the line of Jordan Bender with JMP Securities. Please go ahead.
Great. Thanks for taking my question. Keeping in mind the bumps in Illinois with the hours, the labor, some of the restaurants opening, et cetera, how should we think about that property running at a run rate over the next couple of months? Should we expect something in the next month or two, or should it be more of a traditional, like two - three quarter ramp?
I think.
I-
Go ahead, Lewis.
Go ahead, Dan. Oh, I was gonna say,
I think we. It's gonna ramp slowly, but it won't necessarily be completely consistent. I mean, if you know, eventually you'll get monthly numbers from the Illinois Gaming Board, if there's one month that's a little below an $8 million per month run rate, I wouldn't worry about it. But the trend will gradually be up, you know. I think by the time we get to, you know, later this year, it should be running $10 million-$9 million. I told you what some of the numbers are of the, of the competing casinos. I mean, Grand Vic is a tired 25-year-old traditional riverboat, and it's still doing $120 million.
Yeah. I think the only thing to add onto that is, you know, usually I would talk about a casino ramp taking, you know, 18 months before you're on the run rate. In this case, you know, I think it's gonna be a lot faster than that for what it's worth. I don't think it's 12 months either. I think it's quicker than that. Part of it's gonna depend on how quickly we can get the rest of our amenities up and running. That, you know, I do think that's gonna be sooner versus later. We've got enough labor, I think, on the table game side, so that so that we can extend the hours here very, very shortly for what it's worth.
The other thing that helps us out is our typical guests don't need to travel, you know, 40, 45 minutes to come visit us for the first time. You know, a typical guest is gonna be traveling 15, 20 minutes. You know... And then when you actually get to the site, I think what a lot of people have been appreciating is we're right off the freeway. We're right across the street from a giant Walmart. We're kind of already inserted into people's everyday lives, into their shopping patterns and everything else. You know, I think all of that is going to combine into a scenario where the ramp is on the shorter side versus what you would see for most other casino openings.
Great. One last housekeeping. How much lift do you have in Colorado?
Say that again?
In.
How much left to spend in Colorado?
Yeah.
Well, recognize the $110 million in the restricted payment account. There's a third party who every month goes through and looks at what it takes to spend and to complete it and, you know, where we are, and that's the $110 million.
Yeah.
You know, it's, There's some stuff that, like I'll probably wanna spend a little more on marketing in Denver than is in the budget currently and so on. For the most part, that's the hand. That's what's needed to complete it. That does not include the $1 million change in the steakhouse and the Italian restaurant, that sort of thing.
Yeah. Yep. Yeah.
Great.
That's right there. Yeah.
Great. Thanks, guys.
You got it. Thanks, Jordan. One truly last question, Dan. We'll be quick, so we don't go too far over time, but we'll go ahead and clear it out.
Yeah. You know, by the way, before we get the question, I just remind people that I meant to say it when the fellow from ROTH asked a question. We are gonna be at the ROTH conference next week. We're looking forward to it, so.
Yeah.
Last question, Lewis?
Yeah, I'll take it.
Thank you. Our last question is from the line of John DeCree with CBRE. Please go ahead.
Hey, guys. Thanks for sneaking me in. I think you've covered everything, so maybe one just for you, Lewis. Point of clarity. The real-time cash you had given, the $210 million, does that include the $36 million or so that was drawn on the revolver? If that's accurate, how do you think about the timing of repaying that? Is that just after Waukegan ramps to a point you're comfortable with?
Yeah. We'll probably end up paying at least a decent slug of that back here in the near term for what it's worth. When we originally did that draw, we did it on a 3-month draw. We've already put in the request to kind of term out that SOFR contract, if you will. It's behind the scenes, boring stuff with revolver draws. Yes. The short answer is it does include all the cash from that revolver draw, and you should expect us to pay a decent chunk of that back in the near term.
I don't think we're gonna pay it all back yet, in large part just to hold onto some extra liquidity as we kind of wade through these, the opening weeks. Not expecting to need it for what it's worth.
Got it. Last one, Lewis. Excluding what's left in Chamonix and at Waukegan, do you have a rough number as to what we should expect the CapEx to be for the rest of the portfolio this year?
Chamonix is, well, it's, we're spending roughly $10 million a month these days, and we've got $110 million left to spend. In theory, you should be clearing out most, if not all of that account here over the balance of the year. You know, you'll, you might have a little bit of that pushes into 2024 just because of retention and whatnot. By and large, expect us to clear out that account in 2023. For the temporary, the real-time cash number that I gave you already includes the vast majority of construction spend for the temporary.
You know, there's $2 million of trailing out of that real-time $210 million of cash number. And then obviously we've got the gaming license fee as well. Depending on what that, what that final number is for that gaming license fee, is I guess affect the full year. I'm looking at Adam as I say this. I wanna say we made maybe $7 million bucks or so prior to this real-time cash number. If you're gonna include the $7 million already spent plus another $2 million, let's say, for the first quarter, $10 million of trailing remainder CapEx at the temporary plus the gaming license fee.
Of that $10 million, about $7 million or $8 million has already been spent in the real-time number I gave you. Hope I didn't confuse you there, but I just don't want you to accidentally double count.
Right.
that's.
Let me add to that. The other properties, there's very little needs to be spent. We've fixed up the Silver Slipper and Rising Sun and Fallon and even Grand Lodge are all in pretty good shape. We probably will spend single digit millions in the next, I don't know if it's this calendar year, but certainly in the next year on professional fees for designing American Place. You know, we got civil engineers and architects and all that so that we can get going with the construction. We have to be open in three years, we have to get going here pretty fast.
Yeah. I'll give you one last number there, John. If it helps you, the maintenance CapEx figure for 2022 was about $3 million bucks for the properties.
Okay. Yeah. Pretty small. That's perfect. Everything I need and congratulations again, guys, on getting The Temporary open.
Oh, yeah. Thanks, John. I'll see you on a couple days at The Temporary.
Yeah. Looking forward to it.
Okay.
Thank you. As there are no further questions at this time, I would like to turn the floor back over to Lewis Fanger for closing comments.
Well, Dan, you wanna close it out?
I think we're done. Thank you, everybody, we'll keep working hard at it and, next one open is, six months away. Okay, thank you. Bye-bye.
Bye, guys.
This concludes today's teleconference. You may disconnect your lines at this time. Thank you for your participation.