Penn Relaunches and Relocates Former Riverboat Casino Hollywood Aurora

Hollywood Casino Aurora in Illinois opened on June 24, after renovating the riverboat casino that was in operation for over 30 years. In its place, Illinois is getting a casino resort, with a larger gaming floor space, expanded amenities and a hotel that will give Aurora the option to attract overnight guests. Illinois is home to 15+ landbased casinos, mostly spread out across Chicago and near the coastline of Lake Michigan. This casino has the advantage here of being geographically a bit more isolated from the rest, in the city of Aurora, near the Fox River.

Previously, the riverboat casino used to sit right in the middle of the Fox River, but since Illinois changed the laws about these venues and allowed operators to take them onshore, Penn relocated the original Hollywood Casino Aurora. It has a different kind of atmosphere, and one that Penn Entertainment invested $360 million in cultivating. With the new casino opening, it marks a bigger trend of riverboat casinos slowly going landbased across the US, substituting floating gaming floors for on-land casino resorts.

Hollywood Casino Aurora Grand Opening

The new Hollywood Casino Aurora opened on June 24. Located at 2500 N Farnsworth Avenue, around a 30 minute drive North of the original location, the relocation of the former riverboat casino cost Penn Entertainment $360 million. Now, instead of sitting right on Stolp Island, where the original riverboat was moored, the landbased Hollywood Casino Aurora is located in the suburbs of Aurora, up North and on the Eastern side of Fox River. This casino spans 220,000 square feet of gaming floor space, with over 1,000 slots and 50 gaming tables for visitors. Besides this, visitors also have a dedicated sportsbooks lounge, with sports bets powered by Penn’s new betting brand, theScore Bet, and wall-to-wall screens.

Amplifying the experience, and expanding on the customer service facilities, Penn has also added diners, an event center, and spaces for meeting and conferences. The hotel, another new addition, has 200 rooms, with spa and wellness facilities. All in all, Hollywood Casino Aurora has gone from being a downtown riverboat casino to a landlocked, suburban casino resort retreat, near Aurora and outside Chicago.

Penn Entertainment in the Commercial Gaming Market

Penn Entertainment is a commercial casino chain, like Caesars or MGM Resorts, with a widespread portfolio of venues. It owns the Hollywood Casino, Ameristar and Boomtown chains, among others, and has 40+ locations in 20 states. In Illinois alone, Penn also runs Hollywood Casino Joliet, Argosy Casino Alton, and Prairie State Gaming in Aurora. Then, Penn Entertainment also has partial or full ownership of several race tracks, including Freehold Raceway (NJ), Hollywood Casino at Kansas Speedway (KS), and Sam Houston Race Park (TX).

Like other major commercial casino brands, Penn Entertainment has also expanded into online and iGaming niches. It bridges the commercial casino games experience with online verticals through the Penn Rewards program, Penn Play, much like competitors Caesars and MGM, though the digital gaming brand is not as popular as those two. One area that Penn has branched out into more aggressively is online sports betting. It acquired the popular Barstool Sports betting platform in 2023.

Penn Entertainment began by buying a stake in Barstool Sports in 2020, before acquiring Canadian sportsbook Score Media Gaming the following year. In 2023, Penn upped its game, acquiring Barstool outright, securing a $2 billion 10-year licensing agreement with ESPN, and then rebranding the sportsbook into ESPN Bet. This platform was its flagship sportsbook project until Penn scrapped it in 2025. It replaced ESPN Bet with theScore Bet, bringing the Canadian book to the US market.

TheScore Bet, as well as its great portfolio of landbased casinos, make up most of Penn’s big gaming empire in the US.

Penn and Riverboat Casinos

Penn is definitely among the bigger commercial casino brands in the US, which also includes the likes of Wynn, Bally’s, and Las Vegas Sands, but it doesn’t have the same major Las Vegas Strip or Atlantic City casinos. Instead, the portfolio is more spread out, with venues in Kansas, Indiana, Missouri, Louisiana and Mississippi, among others. A fair few of these were, or still are, riverboat casinos, including:

• Hollywood Casino Joliet (until 2025)
• Argosy Casino Alton (still riverboat)
• Ameristar Casino Council Bluffs (still riverboat)
• Argosy Casino Riverside (still riverboat)

The Argosy Casino Alton was opened in 1991, and it was one of the first Illinois riverboat casinos. This venue cruised along the Mississippi River, in accordance with state laws, before it was allowed to permanently dock in 1999. The others in that list also opened in the 1990s, during the golden age of riverboat casinos in the US. And Hollywood Casino Aurora was one of the flagship projects of Penn, originally comprising two riverboats, until this was replaced with a 70,000 square foot moored structure, sitting in the middle of the Fox River.

Illinois Laws on Riverboat Casinos

But in 2019, Illinois changed its stance on riverboat casinos. The state was one of the first to adopt riverboat gaming, through the Riverboat Gambling Act in 1990, but only on the condition that the action had to happen on the river, during gaming hours and they couldn’t occur when the riverboat was docked. This all changed in 2019, when Governor JB Pritzker signed a massive gambling expansion bill. He authorized six new commercial casino licenses, allowed casinos to expand the number of games and tables they offered, legalized sports betting and mobile betting in Illinois, and also allowed riverboat casinos to move onto land.

Penn Entertainment soon after announced that it would restructure Hollywood Casino Aurora, and take the venue onto land. The permissions were given, and the operators could reframe the entire business model into an integrated resort, with accommodation and expanded facilities to attract more visitors.

Gradual Shift in Riverboat Gaming Trends

It pretty much set the trend for Illinois riverboat casino operators to consider scaling up by relocating their riverboats to dry land, with opportunities to expand their business models. And to be fair, this is not just something that has happened in Illinois. It is happening all over the states, with riverboats in several Midwestern and Southern states gradually becoming either fully or partially land-based, or undergoing an entire infrastructural change and becoming casino resorts.

Originally, riverboats were launched to use a legal loophole to provide casinos in states where these were either completely banned, or only allowed through landbased tribal compacts. Operators, like Penn, could use riverboat casinos to target players in Illinois, Mississippi, Indiana and Louisiana, abiding by state laws and serving players in accordance with those gaming regulations.

But as more states relax their laws around these gaming venues, and player needs change, riverboats are slowly losing their appeal. Where on land expansion is possible, more classic riverboat casino operators are using the valuable casino license and relocating to suburban areas, away from the prime downtown positions the riverboat casinos used to occupy. Or, they are holding onto those positions, and leasing or buying nearby land to erect buildings to support the riverboat casino with hotels and onshore facilities.

Illinois’ Developing Gaming Market

Illinois is among the faster growing commercial casino gaming markets in the US, recording a 17% YoY increase in gaming consumer spend from 2024 to 2025, at $3.4+ billion in 2025. That puts it behind only Nevada, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and just behind Ohio in spend. Online casinos are not legal in Illinois, but online sports betting is, and Illinois has 10 sportsbooks licensed by the gaming board. These hold tethered licenses, partnered with local casinos or racetracks. Unsurprisingly, Hollywood Casino Aurora is partnered with theScore Bet, Penn’s major sports betting brand.

But Illinois is also known for its controversial per-bet tax. The state charges between 0.25c and 0.50c fixed taxes per bet, which most sportsbooks relay to the customers (though this has changed at FanDuel and at select other books). The per bet tax is being appealed by lawmakers right now, and is hugely unpopular among players too. Another interesting part of the sports betting market is Illinois’ stance on prediction markets. It was among the first to express concern and take legal action against prediction markets, but recently the sentiment seems to have changed slightly. Illinois announced that it will extend the per bet tax onto prediction markets – creating confusion as to whether or not prediction markets are now recognized – and also as to where the lawmakers stand on the appeal against the per-bet tax on sportsbooks. The federal courts were quick to take action against the prediction market per-bet tax.

But despite the inconsistencies in the mobile betting sector, as well as illegal online casinos and still legal sweepstakes casinos, the commercial gaming space is evolving at a swift and stable rate. The charm of these legacy riverboat gaming venues seems to be on the out, as more operators are building integrated resorts with hotel getaways, wellness options, entertainment facilities, and more upscale gaming experiences.