Tom Reeg
Chief Executive Officer at Caesars Entertainment
Thanks, Anthony. Good afternoon, everybody. We pre -released for our bond deal in -- earlier in the quarter, so you had two months of brick-and-mortar operations, effectively, so I am going to be lighter on comments on brick-and-mortar and go a little deeper into digital. On the brick-and-mortar side, it either didn't hit New Orleans and we didn't have the caldor fire in Tahoe. We had had done a billion one of brick-and-mortar EBITDA in the quarter.
We had an extremely strong quarter. Demand remains particularly robust. In regards to New Orleans and Tahoe, Tahoe has pretty quickly recovered back to above 2019 levels. Not quite as strong as it was pre -fire, but continuing to build. And New Orleans, recall that we have significant operating leverage there that works in both directions. You've got a minimum guaranteed tax payment to the state and the city in Louisiana. So New Orleans EBITDA continues to trail '19, although it is continuing to recover as well. Going into the storm we were doing $11 million, $12 million a month in EBITDA at New Orleans, and now we're more like five or six in building.
Vegas had a record quarter, beating the record of the second quarter. So $424 went to $500 of EBITDA, $511 adding back the real ramp payment. As Anthony said, we were 50% margin again, that was in spite of us imposing occupancy caps mid-week, so that we could calibrate supply with our housekeeping services. We are struggling across the country to hire guest room attendants, Vegas is no exception. So even with the operating caps, we set a quarterly EBITDA record. In October, Vegas had the strongest EBITDA month in the history of Caesars. So the strength has continued into October regionals as well. We're still pacing up in the neighborhood of 40% over '19. So feel very good about the setup going into '22.
Customer demand remains strong. Obviously, the virus numbers have subsided considerably over the past six weeks to eight weeks, and we're seeing some pickup in demand as that rolls through. For digital, I spoke to digital in the second quarter call in terms of what you should expect from us. We are anticipating investing in the terms of a cumulative EBITDA losses north of a billion dollars into the digital segment, and generating cash-on-cash EBITDA returns at maturity north of 50%. And what we saw in terms of opportunity for us was the ability to activate our 50 plus properties, our 50,000 plus employees, and most importantly, our $65 million strong Caesars Rewards database, and that's what we set out to do.
As I go through these numbers, I'm going to talk about how I look at this business in terms of measuring what we're doing versus expectations. I would -- even though we're extremely encouraged that the numbers that I'm going to be talking about are ahead of our internal expectations as we launch this, it's very early and this is a long game, so we expect it to not be a straight line. What we anticipated was in states where we offered our Liberty technology, where we were starting on equal footing, and where we had existing strong database, that those would be our most effective markets.
And that describes Arizona to a T, which launched during the quarter, has not published results yet, but we think that the results will show us in excess of the handle numbers -- percentage numbers that Anthony described earlier. In the Liberty states in total, and I'm looking at handle because in the current customer acquisition environment, hold is volatile, not just because of the results of the sporting events, but because of the boost in the promotions that you offer. So I'm -- when I talk about share, I'm talking about handle share.
So in our Liberty states, handle share has almost doubled since launch. That's in the 6s to about 12% mobile market share. That's without Arizona. As I said, I'd expect that to exceed the average and bring it higher. Arizona is our second -- our third strongest state behind Nevada and Iowa where we have incumbent advantages and that reflects exactly what we expected.
States where we launched but we were late to the game but did have Liberty, we're seeing continuing -- continued build in market share on the order of the two to 500 basis points depending on the market since we launched. Importantly, if you're looking at analysis that looks at market share across the entire U.S. market, realize that we are not competing, for the time being, in Pennsylvania and Illinois which are two of the biggest markets out there.
When we launched, the Liberty platform was not approved in either state. It will be approved in the first half of 2022 is our expectation, but we didn't want to spend money guiding customers to an experience that would not be what we wanted to offer them. And so you see our share in those markets sucks, for lack of better term. If you look at where our customers are coming from. When you're spending like we're spending on advertising and promotion, you're going to get lots and lots of customers that show up at your door. A lot of them are not going to be worth a lot of value. If you look at our customer by count, Caesars Rewards customers are somewhere around 1/3 of our total new deposits since we relaunched.
By handle, Caesars Rewards customers are about half of our handle since re-launch. So validating that we think Caesars built a system over two decades that identified the valuable customers that everyone is out there searching for, we're seeing that in our experience and that's extremely encouraging as we look to the future. The performance in the Arizona also encouraging as we look to states like Louisiana, which just launched retail on Sunday, will launch mobile in the near future. Maryland will come online soon as well.
These are states where we are in a similar position to where we were in Arizona, so we'd expect to perform well. When we show -- when we give you our 17% total market share, that's everything. That's the states we're not doing well in like Pennsylvania and Illinois, that are not Liberty states, but also includes Nevada, which is not a Liberty state but where we have tremendous market share. We're not adding fantasy numbers in there, we're not adding a horse racing business in there, we're showing you pure sports betting handle. And if you think about what we're doing -- what we did in sports in the quarter, our handle for the third quarter was a little under $1.7 billion -- I'm sorry, a little over $1.7 billion for the full quarter.
In October alone, we did over $1.3 billion of handle. So we think we're continuing to generate momentum. And when I talked about the return on investment, obviously we had a model that showed where we expect it to get in market share and the pace at which we expect it to get there. So you can see from EBITDA loss that it's relatively in line with what we were telling people to expect.
But our ramp in market share has exceeded our expectations in terms of its pace. Now, the question to that is, does that mean there's a broader market -- a bigger market share number down the road? And the candid answer is we don't know right now, but what we do know is we are gaining share at a pace stronger than we expected given the investment that we've made. So encouraging results from sports.
In iCasino, if you want to -- if you want to think about somewhere where we have tracked a little bit below plan, we inherited a platform in iCasino that was non-competitive from a game-offering standpoint. And so again, we've not spent money advertising and promoting our iCasino business until we get the approvals we need to offer a broader array of games that's competitive with our peers that are out there. We expect that will take place before the end of this year. And so then we can talk with more relevance as to what's happening in iCasino.
We continue to perform strongly in New Jersey and iCasino, but we have not pushed our launch in iCasino beyond New Jersey today. So in summary, we're extremely encouraged bulk brick-and-mortar, and one thing I should say about wrapping this digital business into the physical enterprise, the employees that have leaned, just done an outstanding job of leaning into this launch for us. And Caesars Rewards, activating the database, this is not something where you just flip a switch. This is going to continue to build momentum as the quarters pile up. We -- I think we've done a good job of getting our message out there, getting our brand out there, and we're encouraged to see the customers respond.
And with that, I'll flip to Bret.