Hollywood Jamul opens; Hutchinson opposes Arkansas casinos

While the eyes of the industry were focused on the closing of Trump Taj Mahal, there was another long-awaited event on Monday: the opening of Hollywood Casino Jamul, near San Diego. Combine in-progress road construction with a new casino and you had an opening-prescription for gridlock. However, by Tuesday traffic was reported as being back to normal. “This is pretty much nothing, compared to yesterday,” a California Highway Patrol spokesman told The Times of San Diego. Casino opponent and County Supervisor Dianne Jacob was guilty of the Bad Pun of the Week, when she chided Caltrans for the incomplete road work, saying, “I advise motorists to not gamble with their lives and stay away.” (Groan!)

Casino developer and manager Penn National Gaming opened Hollywood Jamul with 1,700 slots and 43 table games, plus a Tony Gwynn-branded restaurant that will now be a de facto memorial to the beloved slugger. There’s still no sign of Penn being able to offload the $436 million construction cost onto another lender and the sudden return to business as usual in the Jamul area might not be a good sign of things to come.

* Now that Pinnacle Entertainment is in place as manager of The Meadows Racetrack & Casino in Pennsylvania, it’s making no secret of the fact that it considers the property badly in need of an upgrade. (And if you doubt Pinnacle’s ability to deliver a crowd-pleasing product, the proof is in the numbers.) Meadows General Manager Rodney Centers says The Meadows could withstand improvement in loyalty program, restaurant lineup, table game repertory and in the age of its slots machines … in short, pretty much everything. Pinnacle has already spent $2 million in slot updates atop the $138 million it paid for the casino license. It has 10 years to make its ROI pay off before its lease with Gaming & Leisure Properties expires. While Centers regards The Meadows’ slot inventory as out of date, he primary area of concern is its terrible standing in table game revenue — ahead only of puny ‘resort’ casinos Isle of Capri Nemacolin and Valley Forge.

During its tenure as a Cannery Casino Resorts property, there was a recent do-over of the food offerings, but Centers doesn’t feel the $3 million revision went far enough. He told a reporter, “We’re looking at possibilities of sports bars or different venues with more focused menus, maybe some enhancements to the food court.” He also didn’t foreclose the possibility of continuing host-community payments on a voluntary basis, saying, that it was ultimately the Legislature’s problem to solve but “I’m sure we’ll have ongoing conversations” with the affected communities.

* “This issue will most certainly have a negative impact on our communities, and it will no doubt create out-of-state monopolies. This is a bad deal for our state.” With those words Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson (R) waved away an Economic Impact Group study that projected 3,400 short-term jobs, 3,200 long-term ones and $122 million tax revenue from three casinos, if approved in the coming election. The horsey set — which already has VLTs that offer “instant racing” — added its disapproval to Hutchinson’s. Of the three casinos on the ballot, the Cherokee Nation is expected to manage the one in Washington County (encompassing Fayetteville), while the other two are up for grabs. The study assumes that two of the three casinos will be on the scale of Hard Rock Hotel & Casino Tulsa, while the third would be much smaller. Huffed Protect Arkansas Values/Stop Casinos Now Chairman Chuck Lange, “This ‘study’ is political propaganda and not worth the paper it’s printed on,” perhaps before availing himself of some video gambling at the Hot Springs horse track.

* Caesars Entertainment is awfully confident about skill-based slots, planning to install 271 GameCo machines at its Atlantic City casinos. (It will also incorporate Gamblit SKBs into Harrah’s Rincon and its Las Vegas Strip properties.) Here’s a preview of what you can expect to say, if you play GameCo’s machines.

* Tioga Downs‘ evolution into a full-scale casino continued as the first 63 of an anticipated 950 new slot machines were installed. Owner Jeff Gural isn’t going to get the Meadowlands Racetrack he coveted, so the transformation of Tioga Downs will have to be a consolation prize.