Greetings, and welcome to the Full House Resorts Second Quarter Earnings Call. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, this conference is being recorded today, Thursday, August 6, 2020. I would now like to turn the conference over to Mr. Lewis Fanger, CFO, Full House Resorts. Please go ahead.

Thank you, and good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to our second quarter earnings call. I apologize for doing it during the trading day. We usually go after market, as you know, but it is a packed day today with couple of our peers going after market. But 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 security 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. And lastly, we're also broadcasting this conference call at fullhouseresorts.com, where you can find today's earnings release, the 8-K as well as all of our SEC filings. And with that said, we're ready to go, Dan.

Okay. It's odd to say this, it was actually an extremely good quarter. It's odd to say that because we were closed for over half of it. And we took the unusual step of releasing our June numbers because, frankly, the quarter numbers are not very relevant. And last year, of course, we were open, every property was open for the full quarter. And this year, all of our properties were closed for at least half the quarter. And even the June numbers, you have to bear in mind that Bronco Billy's and Rising Star were only open for half the month of June. And let me phrase how unusual this is. I mean, we have 5 casinos in different parts of the country, and they're each different. And we're small, but we're pretty diverse. And sure, you'll have your challenges, like you could have a hurricane in the Gulf Coast. And it could knock that casino out for a week, or if there's damage, it might be a month or two, or if there's a calamity, it might be a year or two, but it's one place. We've had the Ohio River flood and shut down the road going into Rising Sun for a week or two at a time. We've had forest fires in Colorado that have shut down the road that leads to Cripple Creek. There are snowstorms, sometimes in Colorado. There are snowstorms sometimes at Tahoe, but you never have something that shuts everything down at once for three months. And so this was really an unprecedented situation, and I'm sure much of the economy could say that. And I hope and think that the worst is behind us. Now as we went, as we were closed for three months, we only kept a handful of…

That was the best month in its history.

Best month in its 14-year history, and despite having half its slot machines closed. Bronco Billy's was only open for half the month. Again, it was only using half its slot machines. None of it's table games. Colorado has not approved table games out of concern that the chips might transmit disease, and table game is a pretty small part of our business. Despite being open only half the month, our casino revenues were 75% of what they were in the prior year of June, which means that our win per day was up quite a bit. Our payroll for the period, we were open, was down about 11%, and our marketing expenses were down 52%. Part of that was, we weren't exactly sure when we'd open. So you weren't, it was hard to advertise, and all of a sudden they say, okay, you can open, they opened. But the EBDIT was almost double what it was last year for the month, and that's despite only being open 2 weeks this year. Rising Star, similarly, it was only open half the month. It's operating with only about 40% of its slot machines, about half of it's table games. So its revenues were down 39%. But remember, it was closed half the month, okay? So it's revenues per day were actually up, and its revenues per slot machine per day were up a lot. The payroll at Rising Star for the period of time it was open, is about half of what it was last year. Marketing expenses are off over 80% from what they were last year. And so the EBDIT was up 33% despite only being open half the month. A little more challenged in Northern Nevada for issues I'll talk about in a minute. But they were open…

Let me, I have a couple of small things to add to you, Dan. With regards to the sports betting, we often get the question from a lot of you guys, how do I evaluate sports betting? And I just want to make one very important point to all of you that traditional gaming companies trade at 8x EBITDA, but you have to remember that when we go out and we run our physical casino, we have CapEx, we have to fix the leaking roof, we have to buy slot machines. And so when we look at our sports contracts, we're effectively getting $7 million of revenue, marginal expense, so effectively $7 million of EBITDA, but that $7 million of EBITDA doesn't have any of that CapEx attached. There are no slots to buy. There's no leaking roof. And so what is it? It's certainly not the same 8 multiple? Is it 10? Is it 12? You can pick whatever multiple you want. But that's a very, very important point that we want to make sure you guys know. I mean, we're very pleased to see that one of our partners, Wynn Resorts, just launched in Jersey. We have nothing to do in Jersey, just to be very clear, but we are linking up with them in Colorado and Indiana. And so it's nice to see them go live and knock on wood, as Dan said, we think they'll be live shortly in our 2 states. One other point I wanted to make, and it's, I had to look at it a few times because I didn't realize just how much had gone down. But if you look at the first quarter of 2019, our debt, our LIBOR rate was locked in at 2.8%. If you look here at the third quarter of 2020, we reset at 0.31%. That's 2.5 percentage points of difference. Now we have a LIBOR of 4%. So effectively, it's 1% for us. But the annualized interest savings between those 2 different data points is almost $2 million a year, that's $0.5 million a quarter. Now some of that's going to be eaten up by the waiver fees, but just a point that I wanted to make there for you. And that was really it, Dan.

Okay. And on that, we're happy to take questions.

[Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from the line of David Bain with ROTH Capital.

So I was saying, by the way, we agree with you on the bifurcation of the sports multiple, but thanks again. So looks like in June '20 versus June '19, you did about, or June '19, you did about 50% of property EBITDA for the month relative to the quarter, or about 60% of adjusted EBITDA, again, for the month versus the quarter of last year. I mean can we get a...

No, no. I'm not sure that math is right. I add, when I add up the 4 segments, EBIT, adjusted EBITDA in 2020 was $2.7 million versus $2.0 million last year. That's entire month versus entire month. And despite the fact that in 2020, 2 of our key properties were only open for half that month. Now that is before corporate, but corporate is also down from last year. So we had about a 10-point swing in margins.

Okay. I was looking at the one month and the …

I think that's different than what you were saying. But I …

Yes. I was looking at the 1-month and June number, adjusted property EBITDA of $2.7 million. And then I looked at last year, adjusted property EBITDA of $5.5 million. But either way …

Yes. The $5.5 million is the full quarter.

Versus for the Month.

So what I'm saying is 2.0.

Yes. I think we're -- yes. What I was trying to get at is the sustainability. If we look at July and trends in August, have you seen any sort of -- was part of that pent-up demand stimulus other entertainment venues opening up now, any kind of trend differential?

Okay. And the -- if it was pent-up demand, you would have seen a significant lessening in July and we didn't. Now the impeding entertainment venue, and the only one that I can think of, that's material, is you now have some sports on television. So you can stay home and watch a hockey game, for example. And that really didn't come into play in July, and that's really a end of July, early August phenomenon. And our business is still strong. And we haven't closed the books for July yet. It's still early in August, but based on what I've seen, I'm pretty sure it was the best month in the company's history. And that's with half our slot machines still closed. I mean, we -- and so July was strong, first few days of August looked pretty good. And I've been trying to figure out what that is because like the extra unemployment benefits, people knew that, that was coming. And it's kind of funny. It's almost a -- some people run around and say, yes, everybody is getting all this generous stimulus stuff, and looking at it, I was like, really, it's -- yes, there are probably some people who were making minimum wage and then they became unemployed, maybe they're better off on unemployment. But in Mississippi, for example, the normal unemployment is only $200 a week. And so you could have been making $800 a week. And if you back out what it would cost you to buy a health plan for your family, it's not like it was super generous that you feel like going out and gamble. So I don't think it was -- I think the stimulus money was certainly helpful. But I don't think that was the major factor because you…

That's great. And can you give us a sense of how competition maybe is trending in Illinois. It seems like you may be inching ahead there according to some checks. And any kind of political happenings? You've always been helpful, like in keeping things in mind during the whole process that could delay things? And then finally, I know you mentioned the financing partner, should that go forward. Could you give us a broad stroke of what that could potentially look like in terms of splits or overall structure?

Well, it's kind of a moving target. We're talking with different people, with different formulas. But we need something where we can come up with some money for our share and somebody else comes up with their money and then most of it is debt financed. I did the deal for the Borgata. That was how it was done. I did the deal for what is today, Park MGM. That was a joint venture that was structured that way. And so something like that, because it's too big a project. If we did it on our balance sheet, we'd be betting the whole company, and we don't want to do that. Nevertheless, we think it's a very good project. And so if we can structure something that makes sense, it's good for our shareholders and good for somebody else, our partner will make good money, too. And so we're trying to work that out. I neglected to talk much about Northern Nevada. And I think it's worth talking about because they're, we're not doing as well. And there are some unique reasons. We operate the casino within the Hyatt Tahoe. And the occupancy of that hotel is down quite a bit from last year. And that's a hotel that people fly to. They come to, they normally have a good meeting and convention business and so on. And that hotel is not full in July when it normally would be full. And that's affecting our casino. Now we do have a local clientele as well who come, but we're not operating the table games 24 hours a day, 7 days a week because it just isn't the demand for it. And so that property is weak. And then in Fallon, there's a local business, and then there are people at…

No, that was great color. I was just wondering, just Illinois, like Waukegan, if any political happenings we should keep in mind? Any thoughts on competition, if you just heard something?

Well, I think the one thing that happened is they had, the legislator altered the rules to make it more feasible to have a casino in Downtown Chicago, and which is great. That didn't affect our projections very much because we think that gambling in Waukegan will be principally from that area between Chicago and Milwaukee. But that may take some of the other guys focus to say, hey, let's see if we can get the one in Downtown Chicago, which, look, we're not big enough to do Waukegan, we're certainly not big enough to do Downtown Chicago.

Backing up on our own, Dan.

On our own right. But that...

We've done major projects of this size, bigger than this, but yes.

Yes. And so I think that's the only thing that's changed in Chicago. Of course, the backlog because everything has kind of slowed down because people are learning how to have gaming commission meetings on Zoom calls and stuff like that. But we still think they will get around to it near year-end. There's still, you had to submit by a certain date. There were 3 proposals that made it by the city. We were 1 of the 3. City's consultant rated us the, by virtually every measure as the best of the 3 proposals, the only spot we were weak was that we're small relative to the size of the project. Now the other thing that I think has happened is you see the spread of Internet gaming, both sports betting and actual gaming. And so it's now starting up in Pennsylvania, the Internet gaming. The numbers out of New Jersey, which is the only state that's had it now for a couple of years have been very impressive. And I think there's clearly pressure on state budgets across the country. You can't shut the economy for 3 months and not have it effect sales tax revenues and income tax revenues and so on. So I think every state in the country has fiscal issues at this point. That's why they're all trying to get the federal government to send them some money. Whether it will or not is yet to be seen. But there are pressures on state budgets like never before, and yet Internet gaming is more socially acceptable. Everybody is like, well, why not? We already have regular casinos. We already have sports betting that you can do online. Why wouldn't we allow you to play a slot machine online, and so it's a good source…

I think the only thing to add to that, David, is our existing sports waging agreements with Smarkets and Churchill and Wynn, those only encompass sports wagering. If we were to go down -- if we were to have online slots and will not get approved, certainly, we could look to use those guys for an online casino business as well, but that's all additive. So keep that in mind. The only other point I wanted to add was what strongly appears is that sports wagering is the small piece of the pie, it's the online casino itself, where you see significantly more revenue being generated.

[Operator Instructions] Our next question comes from the line of Chad Beynon with Macquarie.

Wanted to, I guess, boil down some of your comments, Dan. You gave us a lot of I guess, good revenue driver perspective and kind of a good understanding of what could move this up or down? And then also on the payroll and marketing side. But as we put all of that together, I know historically, consolidated, you've generated margins between 10% and 12%. I think Silver Slipper got as high, close to 20%. A lot of the companies in the space have been talking about maybe a new normalized margin goal. So if we get back to 2018 or 2019 revenues, can you help us think about what margins could look like? Or inversely, is there a revenue number on a percentage basis that gets you back to historical margins, given all of the payroll and marketing reductions that you talked about earlier?

Well, I will tell you for the month of June, our operating margins were up about 10 points over the June of the prior year. And it would have been more than that if we had been open for the full month of June. Because you got certain things like utility costs for the full month and only half a month of operations, so, at 2 of the 5 properties. So I don't know that I want to predict that we're going to have 10 points higher going long-term forward because the marketing costs were very low in June because, as I mentioned, suddenly, you're opening and maybe you didn't have time to do the normal marketing you would have done. And we were cautious, like we don't know if people are really going to show up, so let's make sure we don't have too many employees, and then people did show up, and that was okay. But I don't think we'll go back to the margins we had. I think we'll have significant improvement and that maybe 5 points, 6 points, 7 points. And we were headed that way anyway. That was part of the reason we put in the Konami system was to make our marketing more efficient and to reexamine things. There's another little phenomenon that happens. Recognize, when you operate these casinos in these small towns and casino has been around, some of our places have been open 25 years. And Lewis or I will go into town, we'll talk to the management team. We'll say, you got to be efficient with the payroll. You got to be careful. We want you to try to reduce the payroll, and that's often a difficult conversation because nobody wants to lay off their neighbor, their friend, the person…

Interesting. Separately, despite current market conditions, and I think a lot of these deals were announced right ahead of the pandemic, but there has been a pretty active market for regional and gaming properties, I'd say, under $20 million of EBITDA or so. I think a lot of the bigger players are divesting these, and there's been a number of press releases from some of the smaller players. How do you think about the consolidation environment in this space kind of on the back of what's going on? Your appetite to potentially grow with another smaller needle mover or vice versa, if there's an asset in your portfolio that you think is no longer kind of core to the thesis?

Look, we're here to try to make money for shareholders. And if somebody comes to us with a casino that's for sale, and it's at a good price, and we think we can make money for shareholders, we obviously look at it. But today, we're really conserving liquidity because we're still not out of the woods yet. I mean you could -- you have spikes in different markets, you could end up having another period of closure, right? So we're being very cautious. Frankly, nobody has offered us one for sale in a while. And I think that might be because this is a tough time to sell a casino, you're not going to get a very good price here for a while. And we don't feel a need to sell anything. Now if somebody offered us 15 times cash flow for any of our properties, we'd go by them lunch, right? But so we're in this to make money. We don't need to get bigger just for the sake of getting bigger. We look at a lot of deals. I mean, we did acquire Bronco Billy's, which has been a -- become a very important part of the company now. And if something else came along that we could buy at a reasonable price that we thought had good upside, we'd obviously look at it, but it's not our priority these days. Our priority is to get -- we're on our feet now. We want to stay on our feet. We want to stay lean, get to the point where -- right now, we're all looking at 1 month. We had 1 month that was great. I think we're going to be able to give you a quarter, that's great. And maybe by year-end, we can show you 6 months, that's great, right? And at some point, people start to say, hey, this company really is doing EBDIT in the high 20s. And because that's the run rate that June would suggest. And then at that point, you look at it and say, gee, they have $108 million of debt and $25 million or $30 million of EBDIT, they're under-levered. Then you're not going to be paying LIBOR plus 7% on the debt anymore, and then that opens up all sorts of opportunities for us. But we need those -- we need a solid 6 months of good stuff and maybe a little longer than that. Because I actually think we're under-levered today. But if you're just looking at trailing 12 months, you wouldn't believe that. And so we need a period of time to prove it to people. And so that's what we're focused on.

Sure. And then my last one, just around the Colorado initiative to increase the maximum bets. Do you have a sense of how that's trending? And then secondarily, if that passes, I guess, what does that mean for your current business? Or does it maybe just improve the medium-term return if you go back to building the parking garage and a more expanded structure?

Yes. I mean, the hotel we designed is a 4 star hotel. And so obviously, if you could -- like today, if somebody showed up and wanted to gamble $1000 a hand, even if the state -- I mean, it's just not likely to happen, right, and the state wouldn't allow it. But if -- and so I don't think it would change much for Bronco Billy's itself as it exists today. It would certainly make the numbers even better if we built the hotel and upgraded the property. And so we're all for it. And the history of Colorado has been that voters generally have approved these measures. And so I think it's likely to pass and that would be a positive. Now clearly, it's like Ameristar and what Monarch is building, so it's a pretty big plus for them. And it could be a plus for us when we go and build the hotel. But Bronco Billy's, as it exists today, is not going to be very appealing to that person who's willing to gamble $1,000 a hand.

And I think we've gone over time, Dan. So I suggest, we just wrap it up.

All right. Well, we're keep plugging along here and try to keep the momentum going that we came out of June and July with. And thank you for your support, and we told you on last call, we were going to be a survivor. And I think at this point, we're not only surviving, we're thriving, and we're just trying to keep that going. So thank you.

That does conclude the conference call for today. We thank you for your participation and ask that you please disconnect your lines.