Commercial casinos in the United States had the best three-month period in the history of the gaming market in this country.

According to the American Gaming Association, US casinos won 11.1 billion from players in the first quarter of 2021. Operators generated these numbers from the beginning of the year to the end of March. The third quarter of 2019 is associated with the best quarter in the history of the market.

These figures represent a 18% year-over-year increase in revenue, which says little since the entire land-based casino shut down in mid-March 2020. But that's still a 4% increase from the first quarter of 2019, well before the US pandemic was under control. Revenue does not include money won by tribal casinos.

According to the report Associated Press, several casino CEOs are optimistic about the industry as players seem to be looking forward to getting back to normal life and getting back to the casinos. Terry Glebocki, CEO of the Ocean Casino Resort in Atlantic City, repeated these opinions to the news agency.

"I think more and more people are feeling more comfortable going out [to casinos]," Głębocki said AP. "There's a lot of pent-up demand out there. People want to go out and have fun, and that's what you do at the casino. "

What makes the quarter even more remarkable is that almost the entire market was operating with capacity constraints enforced by the government. 14 out of 25 states with commercial casinos were limited to less than 50% capacity. Several of these states, including Pennsylvania, also had outages during this time.

March was a particularly good month for casinos as 12 states saw record revenue levels. Arkansas, Coloardo, Iowa, Maryland, Michigan, Missouri, Montana, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Dakota and Virginia had the best month ever in gambling markets. Nevada, the nation's largest gambling market, hit the $1 billion mark for the first time since February 2020.

With online gaming as widespread as ever in the United States, and an ever-growing number of states legalizing sports betting, new avenues of gambling provided a springboard to higher levels. Land-based casinos saw a 10% drop compared to Q1 2019, but online gambling has pushed those numbers up to surpass previous levels.

The US sports betting market also set new records with $ $961 million in the first quarter of 2020. This is an increase of 270% year-on-year and more than all of 2019 when bookmakers combined $909 million for the year.