Reading an Ohio Casinos List: Eight Details That Are Usually Wrong

Most published lists of Ohio casinos are assembled from other published lists, so the same handful of errors propagate. Eight recur often enough to be worth naming, and each one is checkable against a primary source in a minute or two.

1. Class II and Class III

These labels appear against Ohio venues constantly and mean nothing here. They come from the federal Indian Gaming Regulatory Act and describe tribal gaming. Ohio has no tribal casino. A listing that prints “Gaming License Class: Class III” for a Columbus racino has copied a template built for a different regulatory system.

The two classes that exist in Ohio are a Casino Control Commission casino licence and an Ohio Lottery Commission video lottery terminal licence.

2. One Opening Year for a Racino

A racino is two businesses on one site, and they are usually decades apart in age. Scioto Downs has run harness racing since 1959 and switched on video lottery terminals in 2012. A single “opened” year against that name is ambiguous by construction, and listings rarely say which of the two they mean.

3. A Founding Date From Another City

Hollywood Gaming at Dayton Raceway is regularly credited with 1959. Raceway Park in Toledo opened that year, roughly a hundred miles away, and it was Raceway Park’s harness licence that moved to the new Dayton facility. The date is real; the venue attached to it is not.

4. Retired Operator Names

Penn National Gaming became PENN Entertainment. Eldorado Resorts was absorbed into Caesars in 2020. MGM Growth Properties was absorbed by VICI Properties in 2022. All three names still appear as current owners in material published this year.

5. Owner and Operator Treated as One Party

At nine of the eleven venues the company running the gaming business and the company owning the real estate are different. Gaming and Leisure Properties owns five; VICI Properties owns four. A single “owner” line cannot describe both, and which one a listing means is almost never stated.

6. The Wrong Code of Racing

Four Ohio racinos run harness meetings and three run thoroughbred. Belterra Park, JACK Thistledown and Mahoning Valley are the thoroughbred tracks, and Thistledown hosts the Ohio Derby, the only graded stakes race in the state. Listings that describe all seven as harness tracks are wrong about three of them, and the error is common enough that it appears in otherwise careful reference material.

7. Floor Figures With No Stated Unit

Some sources publish square footage, some publish machine counts, and a fair number publish one under a heading that implies the other. The two are not convertible. A 100,000 square foot floor tells you nothing reliable about how many terminals stand on it, and the ratio across the Ohio venues varies by a factor of three.

8. A Brand Name That Has Changed

JACK Cincinnati is Hard Rock Casino Cincinnati. The rebrand is visible on the venue’s own website, which is the fastest way to check any of these, and the old name persists in listings, directories and map data.

The Underlying Reason

None of these errors is careless in isolation. They persist because the primary sources are split across two regulators, because racinos genuinely have two ages, and because corporate real estate in this industry changed hands three times in five years. A listing assembled once and not revisited will be wrong within about eighteen months, and most listings are assembled once.

The venues’ own sites are the fastest check on brand, hours and games. The two commissions are the only authority on what a licence permits.