Full House Still Awaits Chamonix’s $50 Million Payoff

Full House Resorts still has not collected the $50 million year its chief executive penciled in for Chamonix, and the Cripple Creek resort posted a $0.1 million adjusted property loss in the second quarter of 2026. Daniel R. Lee fired the opening team in March 2025 and called the first winter’s income scant. Costs later fell. The luxury box on the mountain strip has not paid off on the schedule he sold.

The latest print, released August 6, 2026, is the bill for that diagnosis. Combined Chamonix and Bronco Billy’s is no longer a free-fall. It is also not the engine a $221.8 million hotel was built to be.

Dan Lee Sacked Chamonix’s Opening Team

On the March 6, 2025 earnings call, Lee said he had acted pretty aggressively. He also said he does not make management changes lightly. The sweep went well beyond a single general manager.

JOBS THAT TURNED OVER

• General manager: The top job on the mountain went first, with a Colorado veteran named as the replacement.
• Marketing director: Database work and paid media sat at the center of Lee’s complaint about slow Denver play.
• Hotel director: The 300-room tower had to be filled without giving the house away.
• IT director: Property systems turned over with the rest of the senior bench.
• Human resources director: Staffing a new resort in a small town had already stretched the opening crew.
• Table games director: Mix, not slot volume, was the floor problem Lee called out.

A new corporate vice president of advertising came in around the same time. Lee’s prepared remarks said the company had hired Brandon Lenssen as general manager, a former Bally’s Black Hawk vice president and general manager with earlier tours at Isle of Capri Black Hawk. Lenssen started that March. Lee told analysts some of the people who opened the building were in a little bit over their heads.

The revenues are not yet where we expect them to be, so income has been scant. I’m still very convinced it’ll make $50 million a year at some point.

Daniel R. Lee, Chief Executive Officer, Full House Resorts Q4 2024 earnings call

He compared the ramp to Beau Rivage and L’Auberge du Lac, properties he had opened earlier in his career, and tossed in Bellagio for scale. Even that hotel, he said, did not get to $500 million in year one. The analogy was a stall. Cripple Creek is not the Las Vegas Strip, and Chamonix’s first full winter had already shown it.

Lee also walked through a restaurant conversion that still stings in the call tape. The team turned a dining room into a buffet and lost money serving discounted premium meats. Table games were about 10% of revenue against a mix he wanted closer to 20%. Baccarat tables and a dealer school were the fix he described that afternoon.

A $221.8 Million Hotel in a 10-Casino Town

Hensel Phelps lists a $221.8 million construction contract for the nine-story hotel and casino, 428,111 square feet, with a 300-key four-star room stack, a 16,000-square-foot gaming floor, a rooftop pool, a spa, and a 126,000-square-foot garage. Full House funded the build from high-yield notes, lifting a construction reserve from $180 million to $221 million after the design grew.

The 2025 annual report describes two adjoining casinos run as one entity. Guests get about 300 luxury rooms, 14 more nearby, two casual restaurants, a coffee bar, a fine-dining room, a jewelry store, a spa, a garage, a rooftop pool, and meeting space. Cripple Creek sits about an hour from Colorado Springs and two hours from Denver. The Springs-Pueblo-Canon City metro is about one million people. Denver is about four million. As of December 31, 2025, Chamonix and Bronco Billy’s were two of 10 gaming halls in town, and Full House calls Chamonix larger and higher in quality than the rest of that strip.

THE BUILD ON THE STRIP

• Phase I: The casino and part of the hotel opened in December 2023.
• Phased finish: Full House closed the remaining opening work in October 2024.
• Grand opening: The finished resort was celebrated in November 2024, with one parking lot still waiting on a thaw.
• Staff on the mountain: 303 full-time and 54 part-time workers at year-end 2025.

Colorado operations revenue jumped 161.1% in the fourth quarter of 2024 and 159.9% for the full year, off a small Bronco Billy’s base plus a new hotel. Market share about doubled, Lee said, even though a broad awareness campaign barely started before November, after election ad rates had chewed up the airwaves. Chief Financial Officer Lewis Fanger told the same call he had been watching Denver heat maps, and Denver had lit up. The feeder-market story was the whole thesis. A luxury room stack in a gold-rush town only works if Springs and south Denver drive over the pass.

What the New Managers Changed

The first thing the new bench changed was the cost line, not the drive from Denver. On the second-quarter 2025 call, Fanger said Chamonix revenue was virtually flat at $11.6 million versus the first quarter, while operating expenses were $1.2 million lower, implying nearly $5 million of annual cost synergies. Scheduling, overtime, and a pile of small cuts that did not touch the guest-facing rooms did the work. He also said the new marketing director was still too new for mailers to show up in that quarter, and that July looked EBITDA-positive on a preliminary basis.

THE BENCH AFTER THE PURGE

1. March 2025: Lenssen arrives as general manager of Chamonix and Bronco Billy’s.
2. April 2025: The new operating team begins landing on property.
3. July and August 2025: New directors of marketing and group sales start.
4. January 2026: A pastry chef is promoted to run food and beverage.
5. February 2026: A new finance director starts.
6. March 2026: A new assistant general manager is named the week of the fourth-quarter call.
7. July 2026: A new casino director, formerly with Wynn and Fontainebleau in Las Vegas, is hired a few weeks before the second-quarter print.

Lee spent the second-quarter 2025 call cleaning up another mess the opening crew left him. He said he should have staffed marketing years earlier, and that a lot of people in the property’s database were dead. That is not a Denver problem. That is a list problem. The new managers inherited a hotel that had been buying occupancy with cheap and complimentary rooms to seed a player file, then had to wean the building off that habit.

The 2025 annual report shows how that wean looked. Occupied room-nights at the Colorado hotels fell to 48,319 from 59,816 in 2024, a 19% drop, while hotel revenue still rose $1.5 million on higher average rates. Colorado operations revenue moved from $44.2 million in 2024 to $49.1 million in 2025, up 11.2%, or $5.0 million. Table games revenue for the West segment improved 5.8%, or $0.3 million, mostly from expanded tables at the combined Cripple Creek complex. The new team sold fewer cheap nights and kept more of each dollar that did come in.

THE RAMP IN PRINT

By the third quarter of 2025, Lee could say the still-new team had made great strides. High-frequency guests visited more than 33% more often in September, and slot revenue from those guests more than doubled. Rated slot play rose 4.5%. The property had stopped being only a cost story. Summer on the mountain is supposed to do that.

Summer Profit, Then Another Small Loss

Cripple Creek is a seasonal market. The annual report says so in plain language: summer does the work. The $2.1 million of adjusted property EBITDA in the third quarter of 2025 sat on that calendar. The fourth quarter, Lee said on the March 5, 2026 call, is a slow one in this market. Revenues were up and expenses were down, and the loss shrank versus the prior-year fourth quarter. He also said, for the first time in recent memory, the company had a fully formed management team.

That line did not age cleanly. The same remarks listed a finance director from the prior month, an assistant general manager that week, and a chef promoted in January. On August 6, 2026, Lee was still introducing a casino director from the Wynn and Fontainebleau orbit. Combined Chamonix and Bronco Billy’s grew 11.7% in the second quarter, with a modest April loss offset by positive May and June. Adjusted property EBITDA was $(0.1) million, $1.1 million better than $(1.2) million a year earlier. The West segment as a whole was $(0.1) million, against $(1.1) million in the prior-year period, with Grand Lodge still under renovation at the Hyatt in Lake Tahoe.

Company-wide, second-quarter 2026 revenue rose 5.6% to $78.1 million. Adjusted EBITDA rose 19.5% to $13.3 million. The net loss improved to $8.7 million from $10.4 million. American Place, the temporary Illinois casino, set property records and is doing the heavy lifting. Chamonix is the other new box, and Lee still called it early in its expected ramp.

Cripple Creek Tables Finally Started Moving

The mix problem Lee flagged in March 2025 was never going to be solved by a nicer lobby. Table games had to show up. In the third quarter of 2025, table-game revenue at the property was up 53% versus the same quarter of 2024 and up 296% versus the third quarter of 2023. Lee said the table business was starting to thrive. On the August 2026 call, management put a sharper number on the gap that remains: Chamonix’s win per position per day was about $175, roughly half the Black Hawk market average. Monarch, the other high-quality casino in the state, was described as maybe twice as high, or north of $600.

State figures cannot isolate Chamonix. The Division of Gaming withholds property-level results. Cripple Creek’s published gaming statistics still sketch the pond this hotel has to fish. The town’s 2024 adjusted gross proceeds were $183.6 million, up 11.4%, the year Chamonix’s phased opening filled in. In July 2026, Cripple Creek took in $18.1 million, up 2.8% year over year, with slots at $17 million and table games at $1.1 million, up nearly 30%. Tables are growing off a small base. Slots still pay the rent.

That is the second-order bind. Firing a table-games director and adding baccarat can lift a mix. It cannot manufacture a Black Hawk-sized drive-in market on the west side of Pikes Peak. Most guests still come over a mountain pass with few alternatives, a risk the annual report lists next to wildfire and heavy snow. The building is nicer than anything else on the strip. The strip is still Cripple Creek.

Why the $50 Million Year Is Still a Bet

Lee has not walked the $50 million line back in a later prepared release. He has talked around it. On the third-quarter 2025 call he said Chamonix was the 13th project of his career and that every one had exceeded the run-rate EBITDA promised to investors. Casino ramps are hard to time, he said; run rates tend not to be. An investor deck circulating in 2025 put illustrative run-rate EBITDA for Chamonix in a wide band that included $50 million at fat enough margins. The August 2026 release did not repeat the figure. It said awareness is building, the Colorado Springs market is still developing, and there is meaningful upside.

S&P Global Ratings did not wait for that upside. On November 12, 2025, the firm cut Full House to CCC+ from B- and cut the 2028 notes to match, citing a slower-than-expected Chamonix ramp, weaker 2025 metrics, and refinancing risk as construction of a permanent American Place would add debt. Through the first nine months of 2025, company revenue was up 3.6% and reported EBITDA was down 2.2%, with Chamonix named as the drag. The outlook was developing. The ratings note said Chamonix had been largely unprofitable since the phased opening finished in October 2024, and that a slow path to cash flow would make the 2028 wall harder to climb if Illinois spending started before Cripple Creek threw off real money.

The $50 million year was always a people story in Lee’s telling: wrong team, fix the team, the building does what it was designed to do. Eighteen months of new hires show the other half. The team can take $4 million to $5 million out of the cost base and swing a summer quarter into the black. It has not yet turned a 10-casino mountain town into a $50 million cash machine. Win per position at half of Black Hawk is the tell. The rooms are nicer. The bets per chair are not.

The 2028 Notes Sit Behind the Ramp

As of June 30, 2026, Full House held $33.4 million of cash and $48.4 million of liquidity, with $25.0 million drawn on a $40.0 million revolver. Debt was still led by $450.0 million of 8.25% senior secured notes due February 15, 2028, callable at par. American Place is the property that services that stack. Illinois produced 41.0% of 2025 revenue and 71.2% of adjusted EBITDA. Mississippi’s Silver Slipper contributed 23.2% of revenue and 24.1% of adjusted EBITDA. Chamonix is supposed to become a third leg. It is not one yet.

Lee spent most of the August 6, 2026 call on the permanent American Place financing, an extension to operate the temporary Illinois hall through February 2029, and a Waukegan vote that lets the company keep the sprung structure for five years after the permanent building opens. Chamonix got a paragraph. New marketing, a growing database, a modest April loss, a Las Vegas casino director, and the same ramp language the company has used since the first winter. Full House is trying to refinance the 2028 notes and fund a much larger Illinois casino while the Colorado resort is still, in the company’s own words, early in its expected ramp. Designing the next building is the part this management does well. Getting Chamonix to the number Lee quoted in March 2025 is the part that is still unpaid.

The new casino director had been on the job a few weeks when that call began. The $50 million year remains a point on a chart, not a run rate. Cripple Creek will take another summer to show whether May and June were a step or just the season doing what the season always does.

Disclaimer: This article is news reporting and analysis of Full House Resorts and its Chamonix Casino Hotel for general information only. It is not investment advice, a recommendation to buy or sell FLL or the 2028 notes, or a forecast of future earnings, ratings, or refinancing outcomes. Readers who are considering a position in the company or its debt should consult a licensed financial adviser who can review their own holdings and risk limits. Revenue, EBITDA, ratings, and staffing figures reflect the cited company filings, contractor disclosures, and state gaming reports as of the dates of those documents and can change in later quarters.