DEADWOOD, S.D. (KELO) — After 18 months of setting records for gaming numbers, Deadwood saw a downturn in March.
Month after month, the city of Deadwood saw more gamers than ever before. Over a year later, casinos saw their first dip.
“Of course when you look at it as a whole we didn’t get the numbers quite where we wanted them for an end result of the month or the quarter,” Nold said.
Casino Manager, Tyler Nold, at the Deadwood Mountain Grand says it’s not a bad thing.
“We’re really excited about how incredible 2021 was. You can’t really take those numbers and celebrate them in the moment but right now, having somewhat of a bad start to 2022, we’re trying to be positive and realize 2021 really was incredible,” Nold said.
Sports wagering during the month of March was the highest yet here in Deadwood.
“We knew that March Madness was going to be good for Deadwood and sports wagering. We were just shy of one million dollars, about 975,000 so we were very very happy with those numbers,” Rodman said.
Mike Rodman, with the Deadwood Gaming Association, is hopeful with summer tourism coming up that this downturn won’t stick around.
“We still think there is more upside, a little hiccup in March, but what we are hearing is that hotel reservations look strong for this summer and we’ve got a lot of events. We think that there could be some upside again for 2022,” Rodman said.
The South Dakota Gaming Commission reported a six percent decrease in Deadwood’s gaming numbers for the month of March compared to last year during the same time.