Arkansas Has Three Casinos and a Hole Where the Fourth Was Supposed to Be

Arkansas's three casinos paid the state $116.9 million in the fiscal year to June 2026, up from $740,000 in the year before Amendment 100. Southland pays half of it. The fourth casino the amendment promised, in Pope County, was licensed in June 2024, voted out of the constitution that November, and is still in federal court.

Published 2026-11-09.

The Arkansas Department of Finance and Administration's casino gaming table for the fiscal year that ended June 30, 2026 shows $116.9 million in casino and sports wagering tax receipts, up from $112.6 million the year before and $107.3 million the year before that. In the fiscal year that ended in June 2019, before the casinos opened, the same line was about $740,000 from the two racetracks' electronic games.

Three casinos produce all of it: Southland in West Memphis, Saracen in Pine Bluff and Oaklawn in Hot Springs. The 2018 amendment that created them authorised a fourth, in Pope County, and in 2026 that one is a licence that was awarded, cancelled by voters and is being argued over in the Eighth Circuit. Here is what the three that exist are like, which one suits which trip, and what happened to the fourth.

Amendment 100, passed in November 2018, let the two existing racetracks, Oaklawn and Southland, add full casino gaming and authorised one new casino each in Jefferson County and Pope County. Southland became a full casino on April 1, 2019; Oaklawn took the state's first legal sports bet on July 1, 2019; Saracen's sportsbook opened that October and its full casino in 2020. The tax is 13 percent on a casino's first $150 million in net receipts and 20 percent above that.

The money shows who is winning. In calendar 2025, by the department's figures as reported by Talk Business & Politics, Southland paid $58.4 million in tax, Saracen $30.4 million and Oaklawn $27.2 million, and total casino revenue in the state was a record $742.6 million, with $610.3 million from the machines, $70.8 million from tables and $61.5 million from sports betting. Our Tunica guide covers the other side of that ledger: the Arkansas share of Tunica's patrons fell from 16 percent in 2007 to under 8 percent, and Southland is why.

Southland sits off I-40 and I-55 in West Memphis, 8.4 miles and about 13 minutes from Beale Street by OpenStreetMap routing, and Delaware North has owned it since the 1970s, when it was a greyhound track. The dogs ran their last race on December 31, 2022, and a $320 million expansion finished that same month with a 20-story, 300-room hotel and a 113,000-square-foot gaming floor. The casino's own pages list 2,300 slot machines, 50 live table games, a high-limit room and an AAA Four Diamond rating on the hotel.

The sportsbook is DraftKings, with 18 kiosks in the building and the DraftKings app statewide since March 2026, when it replaced Delaware North's own Betly. The players club was renamed Ember Rewards on July 1, 2026, with tiers from Spark to Phoenix, and it is Delaware North's shared program, so it also covers the company's other casinos, including Two Kings in North Carolina. Southland said in 2020 that it prohibited smoking inside, and we found no announcement of a reversal, but we could not confirm the current policy on its site, so ask.

For a Memphis visitor with one evening, this is the casino, and it is a better one than most people outside the Mid-South assume: a new tower, a full pit, and no state line to speak of. For a Little Rock player it is 131 miles east, which is why Little Rock does not go there.

Saracen Casino Resort in Pine Bluff, 46 miles and just under an hour from the State Capitol, is owned by the Quapaw Nation through Saracen Development LLC and run as a commercial casino under state licence, not as a tribal casino under federal law; the distinction matters for taxes and not at all for a visitor. It opened in 2020 with an 80,000-square-foot floor, and its site now lists more than 1,500 slot machines, 30 table games and the state's only dedicated poker room, which is open Thursday to Monday and closed Tuesdays and Wednesdays.

The thing that was missing opened in June 2026: a 14-story, $230 million hotel tower of 320 rooms, which took the resort's total investment past half a billion dollars, following a 1,600-seat event center that opened in April. The sportsbook is BetSaracen, the one Arkansas mobile app that is still the casino's own brand, with retail windows open noon to 7pm on weekdays. The card is the Saracen Player's Club, in Red, Silver and Gold. In 2020 Saracen described itself as a smoking facility; we could not confirm whether that has changed.

With the hotel open, Saracen is the one Arkansas casino that is a complete resort an hour from the capital, and the only one where a poker player has a room to go to. That is a real change for the state, and it is a few months old.

Oaklawn in Hot Springs, 55 miles and about 70 minutes southwest of Little Rock, has run thoroughbreds for more than a century and added a casino, a 200-room hotel, a Forbes Four-Star spa and an event center in a $100 million expansion finished in 2021. The casino is 65,000 square feet, the only smoke-free floor in the state, with more than 1,400 slots, more than 30 tables and poker as a table game rather than a room. Oaklawn Rewards runs from Silver through Gold at 10,000 points and Elite at 60,000 to two invitation tiers.

The racing is the point. The 2026-27 meet runs 65 days from November 27, 2026 to May 1, 2027, approved by the Racing Commission in May, and the stakes schedule has the Southwest on February 6 for $750,000, the Rebel on March 13 for $1.25 million and the Grade 1 Arkansas Derby on April 10, 2027 for $1.5 million, with the Apple Blossom and Oaklawn Handicap a week later. The mobile book is now FanDuel, branded "OaklawnSports powered by FanDuel", since March 2026.

Hot Springs is also a national park town, with Bathhouse Row a short drive up Central Avenue from the track, which makes Oaklawn the one Arkansas casino that is a weekend without the casino. In racing season it is the best trip in the state; in summer it is a smoke-free slot floor with a good hotel attached.

Amendment 100 named Pope County, around Russellville on I-40 between Little Rock and Fort Smith, as the site of the fourth casino. After six years of applications and lawsuits the Racing Commission awarded the licence to Cherokee Nation Entertainment in June 2024 for a $325 million Legends Resort & Casino with a 200-room hotel, 1,200 slots and 32 tables. Then the Choctaw Nation, whose Oklahoma casinos sit on the same I-40 corridor, spent nearly $18 million backing Issue 2, a constitutional amendment to strip Pope County from the casino amendment and require a local vote for any future licence. The Cherokee spent nearly $16 million against it. On November 5, 2024 voters passed Issue 2 by 55.8 percent to 44.2 percent, and the licence was gone.

Cherokee Nation Businesses sued in federal court. Judge D. Price Marshall Jr. upheld the amendment on August 28, 2025, dismissing the contract-clause and bill-of-attainder claims. The appeal to the Eighth Circuit was fully briefed by August 2026 with no argument date set. Separately, the Arkansas Supreme Court ruled in December 2025 that the Legislature may amend voter-approved amendments by a two-thirds vote, which opens a legislative path nobody has yet taken. As of November 2026 Arkansas has three casinos, and the Oklahoma casinos our Oklahoma guide covers keep the Fort Smith corridor. Our border casinos piece is about exactly this kind of fight.

Where the usual advice is wrong: it treats Arkansas as a Memphis footnote. Southland is that, and good at it. Saracen with a hotel and Oaklawn in season are destinations in their own right, an hour from Little Rock in different directions, and the first is the state's poker room while the second is its only non-smoking casino. Pick by those two facts. The state list with distances is on Arkansas casinos, and casinos near Memphis and near Little Rock rank them from each city. If gambling has stopped being something you decide the cost of in advance, 1-800-GAMBLER is free and confidential.

Topics

• arkansas
• hot-springs
• west-memphis
• pine-bluff
• south

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