Downtown Richmond comedy club will relaunch as a casino bar
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Sandman Comedy Club. Photo: Karri Peifer/Axios
After just over a year in business, Sandman Comedy Club is closed. The club at 401 E. Grace St. hosted its last show June 25 and will reopen next month as Sandman Casino Bar.
Why it matters: As the city gears up for a second casino referendum, it shows just how much the state’s laws around gambling have already loosened — and how a gray area remains.
What's happening: It turns out running a comedy club is expensive.
In addition to the general overhead of running a restaurant, owner Michael Sands told BizSense he was also paying comedians to come, sharing door sales and shelling out thousands more for comedians' food and lodging.
- Last year he spent $32,000 on hotel rooms and another $22,000 on meals for the acts, per BizSense.
Enter the new concept: A restaurant/bar with pool tables, dart boards, a few Queen of Virginia "skill games," Virginia lottery-regulated keno machines and nightly Texas hold’em poker tables, Richmond BizSense reported.
The intrigue: It's a bold concept, launching amid the state's rapidly changing gambling laws, which ushered in the first horse betting machines in 2019, OK’d some casinos the following year and saw the first sportsbooks bets the year after that.
State of play: Five types of gambling are currently legal in Virginia.
- 🤞 Virginia Lottery.
- 🏇 Horse race betting, including the "historic horse racing" slot machines at Rosie’s Gaming Emporiums.
- 🤾♂️ Sports betting.
- 🃏 Charitable gaming, including Bingo and poker tournaments, allowable for nonprofits to raise funds.
- 🎰 Casinos, which state lawmakers legalized in 2020 for five cities to open one each, including Richmond — the only city where voters rejected the proposal.
🚫 Electronic betting machines, like Queen of Virginia, are currently banned in Virginia, but an ongoing lawsuit has blocked the state from enforcing the ban, so they continue to operate in a"gray area of the law," AP reported.
- The suit could go to trial this year.
What they're saying: "The state opened Pandora’s box to allow (Las) Vegas-style casinos to come into the state. Once you do that, it’s hard to tell me that I can’t have legal gambling in my facility," Sands told BizSense.