Twenty years ago, the casino in Rising Sun, Indiana was the sole player in Cincinnati’s gambling market.

But two months after the former Grand Victoria casino opened, it found itself on the wrong side of a battle and it has yet to fully recover.

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Today, the Rising Star Casino Resort battles six bigger competitors for a share of the Cincinnati gambling spend. Rising Star controls slightly more than 5 percent of the region’s $800 million gambling market. Officials at the casino’s Las Vegas-based parent Full House Resorts say they are working hard to reverse Rising Star’s fortunes.

“We keep trying different things with this property, kind of like it’s a patient in the hospital,” said Daniel Lee, CEO of the public company Full House, in a conference call with analysts. “You keep giving it heart shock and adrenalin and everything else. It’s shown a lot of improvement in the last few quarters.”

Some of those new initiatives include decking its halls and renaming itself the “Christmas Casino” for the last two months of the year. The riverboat casino tried the promotion for the first time last year and saw gambling revenues jump by double digits.

Bigger bets are also in store for Rising Star. Lee said $6 million worth of casino upgrades are planned including a newly-approved ferry service that could be launched in late 2017. In an interview with The Enquirer, Lee said Full House could also transfer some slot machines now in Rising Sun to a new Indiana site.

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Recent victory gives hope to owner

Full House officials persuaded leaders in Boone County to approve a restart of ferry boat service between Rabbit Hash and Rising Sun. Separated by the Ohio River, the two bucolic hamlets are less than a half-mile apart. They were joined together for more than a century until 1945 by ferry boat.

“It will be good for us, it will definately allow us to bring in more people,” said Rising Star’s general manager Steve Jimenez.

Full House still needs approvals of the plan from the U.S. Coast Guard and Army Corps of Engineers. But if the approvals come, the casino expects it can begin operating a 10-car ferry boat at least four times an hour by late 2017. Such a service would make Rising Star Casino accessible by a three-minute boat ride to Northern Kentucky – and its nearly 380,000 residents – compared with a 40-mile roundabout drive for Bluegrass gamblers interested in making the trip now.

Lee said establishing a quick connection to Northern Kentucky could be a game-changer.

“Right now, we’re surrounded: everywhere you come from you pass one of our competitors,” Lee said.

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A casino’s proximity to potential customers is critical as the U.S. market has become flooded with gambling outlets, Chad Beynon, an analyst with Macquarie Bank in New York, said.

“There’s too much product in the Cincinnati market,” he said. “It’s saturated and Rising Star no longer has a favorable location.”

Competition, location caused early problems

Time and industry shifts have conspired against Rising Star almost from the beginning.

Argosy Casino opened in Lawrenceburg two months after Grand Victoria, the forerunner to Rising Star, and won more customers in part by being located closer to Cincinnati.

Grand Victoria casino’s most lucrative year was in 1998 when it raked in more than $160 million of gambling revenue. But that year, Argosy, now called Hollywood Casino, brought in nearly $200 million of revenue.

In 2000, the Belterra Casino Resort & Spa opened in Switzerland County, located about 25 miles away from Rising Star.

Grand Victoria and Argosy opened in a decade when the industry was expanding into the Midwest and the South – often in remote areas to minimize controversy and resistance from residents. But that began to change as casino gambling became more widespread and accepted.

In the late 1990s, Detroit and New Orleans opened downtown casinos. In 2009, Jack Casino owner Dan Gilbert successfully campaigned to legalize Ohio casinos as a way to revive urban Cincinnati and Cleveland.

Jack Casino Cincinnati, previously named Horseshoe Casino, opened in March 2013 in Downtown Cincinnati. The casino brought in new slot machines, table games, restaurants, event space and a concert venue. Today, Jack Casino has become the region’s top gambling destination thanks in part to its location in the region’s geographic center.

Gambling became even more widespread as the horseracing industry successfully lobbied for new slot machines at racetracks. Between 2013 and 2014, Miami Valley Gaming in Turtlecreek Township, Belterra Park in Anderson Township and Hollywood Gaming at Dayton Raceway all opened.

Rising Star’s business suffered amid the glut of competition. Last year, the casino brought about $50.8 million of gambling revenue and had 765,000 visitors.

However, the casino remains a key economic driver in the region, employing about 600 people in Southeast Indiana. Last year, the casino generated about $7.5 million of state tax revenue and provided about $700,000 of money for local governments.

Reshuffling a casino’s strategy

Rising Star officials say there are other cards they can play.

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The casino’s corporate parent owns or controls more than 300 acres of land. The company plans to convert some of its extensive parking lots into a park for recreational vehicles with room for as many as 50 RVs.

RV parks are amenities at other casino properties including one at Full House’s Silver Slipper Casino & Hotel in Bay, located about an hour east of New Orleans.

“Ironically, most of these RVs are made in Indiana,” Lee said.

Beynon said the RV park concept is a masterstroke. The concept can’t be easily copied by Cincinnati rivals because they don’t have enough available land, he said.

Rising Star wants to add a new restaurant and VIP gambling space in addition to overhauling the cavernous pavilion at its main entrance. The entrance was originally designed as a waiting area for gamblers in the casino’s early days when the riverboat was required to cruise the Ohio River during gambling.

Last month, Full House began the process of raising $5 million to help pay for its capital project plans. The company also struck a deal with local government officials to lower its tax bill, allowing it to save about $500,000 a year.

Betting on the future

The state of Indiana approved the operation of riverboat casinos more than 20 years ago. State lawmakers later removed the requirement for vessels to be navigable, allowing them to be moored at a single location.

And while state political leaders have resisted expanding gaming, last year, they allowed casinos to move permitted gambling capacity from the riverboats to sites on land. That could reshuffle casino locations to better serve big Indiana cities such as Indianapolis or Fort Wayne.

“Indiana has a dilemma: it put all of these casinos around the state boarders and now Illinois and Ohio have their own. So Indiana’s are now in the wrong place,” Lee told The Enquirer.

In 2015, Full House proposed to move half of its Rising Star gambling capacity to a property near the Indianapolis International Airport. Dubbed “American Place,” Full House envisioned a 700,000-square-foot lifestyle center that would cost $650 million to build. The project would have been anchored by a small casino, but include a boutique hotel mostly for “casino high rollers,” a movie theater, conference center, condominiums and office space.

The Airport authority shut down its plans to redevelop the property, but Lee said Full House will continue to explore the possibility of relocating some of Rising Star’s gambling capacity to the airport or elsewhere into central Indiana.

If such a project were approved in the next few years by state lawmakers, Lee said Rising Star would remain open, but relocate mostly unused gambling capacity. While Rising Star is authorized to have up to 1,500 slot machines or gambling tables, it uses less than 1,000 machines or tables and has unused slots sitting in warehouses because of sagging demand.

“Relocating will happen eventually, it only makes sense for the state fiscally,” Lee said.

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