Both casino sites and land-based casinos are popular among West Virginia natives and visitors, with the Mountain State becoming the fifth US state to legalize online gambling back in February 2019, a testament to their affinity to the iGaming sphere. Each land-based casino - of which there are five - can apply for a single online casino license. And while not everywhere in Vegas in terms of the magnitude of casino establishments to enjoy, West Virginia still has an active casino presence, with thousands heading to brick-and-mortar establishments every week, raking in $756m in gross revenue a year as of 2022.
That got us wondering, with a thriving casino economy in the state, which were the "luckiest" and "unluckiest" for bettors to go to? There are just five land-based casinos in the state of West Virginia;
Our research and analytics teams, which are constantly on the look-out for bespoke dating relating to casinos, took it upon themselves to scrape review data on each of the casinos listed above related to keywords associated with luck - so, for example, reviews that had one instance of "lucky", "won", "winning", "success" and other terms that could signal some big wins.
Well, that's a difficult question to answer, as how casino games work is essentially the same in every establishment, with slight rule variations such as slot volatilities or house rules in blackjack. Our data instead concentrates on which WV casinos have the highest (or lowest) winning chances, according to people who have actually stepped foot in and played with real money at casinos.
However, according to our calculations, the Mountaineer Casino in New Cumberland, Hancock County, has the highest probability of winning if punters' reviews are anything to go by. Primarily a thoroughbred racetrack, here you can enjoy the ponies and the casino floor that boasts a whopping 1,000 slot games. As well as hundreds of racing dates a year, some 39% of reviews boasted some element of luck. "All we can say is that, in our experience, we have more luck at Mountaineer than at The Meadows or Rivers casinos," said one reveler.
Hollywood Casino at Charles Town Races was a close second at 37.1%, with a far larger sample size to go by in terms of reviews - over 1300 have taken time out of their day to inform others about their experience. Alongside this, they had the highest percentage of people mentioning the word "jackpot" in their review at 3.3% - almost doubling their closest rival. Another casino and racetrack combo, Hollywood Casino (which could soon have a Hollywood Casino online in West Virginia) has a 153-room hotel alongside the table games and sports betting, which was introduced in 2018. "The food was great even won a couple of jackpots while we were there this time."
But for something to be lucky, something else has to be considered "unlucky" - and unfortunately, that's where Mardi Gras Casino & Resort comes in with a 25.24% luck scale rating and just an 0.98% of reviews mentioning the word "jackpot".
"You can usually hear when someone hits a nice jackpot, but I thought I was in a library," said one visitor. Not exactly encouraging.
Disclaimer - keywords were scraped using Trip Advisor, and analysts measured sentiment subjectively. This article does not determine how lucky or unlucky a casino is as an exact science and is purely for hypothetical and entertainment purposes based on the reviews of real people.
Casinos.com utilized Trip Advisor reviews to do an in-depth analysis of phrases associated with luck to determine the luckiest and unluckiest casinos in the state of West Virginia. We calculated the percentage of luck-rated mentions in the total Trip Advisor reviews and extrapolated them as if all Casinos had the same number of reviews for fairness.
The data and graphics on this page are free to use as long as proper credit is given by linking to the original article.
Colm Phelan has spent several years working in the iGaming industry and has plenty of experience when it comes to writing, researching and rigorously testing online casinos and sportsbooks. While Colm has invested a lot of his time into the digital marketing world but his other passions include poker and a variety of sports including golf, NFL and football.
Read Full Bio