You are wrong. Only a couple of casinos in AC will do well after the PA opening....while a few will have to close...and the rest will struggle to survive.

This.

Resorts and Hilton will go, especially if the Revel is finished. Now, IF someone gets these properties for next to no money, that is a different story. After those two, it will depend on how much debt they have to service.

http://www.philly.com/inquirer/busin...__casinos.html

Would YOU sell your 50% stake in a casino if it was doing WELL? That is what MGM is doing with the Borgata. Really.

Unless if PA casinos allow free alcoholic beverages, I will still go to AC. I am not paying for beer in a casino. It seems wrong.

You think smoking will hurt? LOL, you kidding. That will only help PA casinos. AC is going to a huge hit here. Trust me they are hurting and unless they start putting money into the town and get it to look better than the slum that it does they will be dead in 5 years. You will see at least two casinos go under.

They do not give you drinks in PA? And yes, SMOKING HELPS the revenue, net net.

I have only been to the Meadows in Pittsburgh. I was playing slots slowly and waiting for a free drink. An attendant walked by and I asked her what the deal was. She said you can get juice, soda or water for free but you had to pay for beer or mixed drinks. She said it was a state law.

Also the meadows does not give you drink tickets for betting on horses. The buy a $2 ticket for a horse to win and get a drink coupon at the Borgata is probably the most important feature of any casino to me. Who would think patron shots, 12 year old Glennfiddich, and Blanton's bourbon could be obtained for $2?

I heard this, too. I was playing poker at Showboat in AC, and the dealer was talking about the PA casinos and some of Harrahs' plans. He mentioned that PA casinos will require players to pay for alcohol at the tables.

At first, I was sort of incredulous, and then I remembered that this is what life in PA is like. The state still does not allow private liquor stores, but instead, sells alcohol only through state-owned stores. James Carville once described the state as Pittsburgh and Philadelphia with Alabama in between. It's a miracle that the gambling bill passed at all.

one always must remember to be careful of sources. i remember playing the pink chip game (it was 7 card stud in those days) at tropicana years ago as the borgata was about to open. i can recall a certain dealer telling the table the borgata was built on a former garbage dump and that there were some engineering studies that indicated the casino might not be a safe structure......now i see same dealer pitching cards at the borgata. ive never brought this up to him before, but now im actually thinking about it...

This argument doesn't make any sense. There could be a variety of reasons MGM would sell a stake in a company. IIRC they sold a casino or two to help finance the city center project in Las Vegas.

AC will survive. Clearly it won't have 11 casinos forever but until PA becomes a beach state people will come to AC in the summer.

We'll find out what the initial impact will be soon enough, however, I expect to see a significant drop in AC revenue once the PA casino's open with table games.

This will be most evident in the summer months. With up to 3 full-service casinos opening in/around Phila, the draw will be enormous. Especially for daytrippers. I certainly will not sit in the horrendous summer traffic to get to AC, when I can stay here and play. I'll also be more inclined to play more often, since my commute will be 1/3 of that to AC.

Those people that are more interested in the shore experience, along with the folks that tend to stay overnight, will continue going to AC for that. But, when they just want a night out - they are going to stay here.

Expect a significant drop in AC business once the PA houses open.

To many people, the distance won't matter. I'm in upstate NY. I live 1H 45M from Turning Stone, 2H 30M from Mohegan Sun and Foxwoods, and 4H 30M from Atlantic City. Atlantic City is my first choice and Turning Stone is my last. I spend more time each year in the casinos of AC than the other three combined. Mainly because of the better variety of casinos and games, and there's much more to do when not playing poker.

Based on the article linked above, AC is in worse shape than I knew. At this point, there isn't going to be any new construction of bigger newer nicer casinos in AC for the foreseeable future. So AC is going to slowly decay while Philly will have newer nicer casinos.

AC isn't going to die - but it is going to shrink. The problem that AC is facing is that even a fairly small loss of revenue will be enough to put the most vulnerable casinos under. Truth is that there may be enough to keep 8 or 9 casinos healthy, but not 11.

I think you're in the wrong forum .

PARX gives free drinks when playing slots. I can not imagine that would be different for table games.

you get free drinks at harrahs when playing bjack... so i don't see why you woulnd't get them for poker too. and yes, this is going to KILL! ac, having poker so close to philly with that many people who live near philly is going to destroy ac's business. obv AC will still get all the new yorkers and people from north jersey, but look for the amount of people from southeastern PA and delaware to slowing decline as they start heading to PA for their fix.

also, the games will be just as soft in philly as in AC.

I hope this turns out to be true, but I'm not so sure. There is a pretty big poker community in the Philly area. I used to play in a monthly MTT that was run at a firehouse, and the players were pretty good. They would always start a 20/40 cash game for the players who busted out, and you'd see the same players with big stacks every month. Also, when the big tournaments would come to AC, their names would appear on the cash lists a lot.

It seems like there will be a fair number of new casinos in the Philly area (including parx, Harrahs Chester, and Foxwoods once it gets built). I'm sort of worried that the number of choices will disperse the casual players, leaving the tables to be mostly populated by regulars who know what they're doing.

Anyway, I guess there's not much sense to worrying about what the games will be like once they get here. We'll see soon enough whether the games are soft or not, and in the end, there probably won't be too much of a difference in the skill of a 1/2 NL game whether the table is in Philly, AC, Las Vegas, or Biloxi.

The Parx poker room will have to be etraordinarilly terrible beyond words for me to justify driving 1h 45m to AC instead of 20m to Northeast Philly. People smoking at the table (if this happens) wouldn't be one of those reasons. I imagine this would be the same for many people.

Same for me, I'm 10 mins from Parx, 90+ to AC.

The only thing I am concerned about is that the poker room is supposed to be in the racetrack building - not the new casino. That might just suck... but, not enough to divert to AC on a regular basis.

Original poster seems delusional IMO. Slot parlors in PA have hurt Atlantic City. Poker will not be any different. Personally, A.C. is a three hour ride for me. If I can play poker in PA less than an hour from home, my Atlantic City trips will go from once a month to a couple times a year. People are not going to regularly drive several hours to Atlantic City when there will much closer options.

Good post. I live in the Baltimore/DC area and will always choose the the Philly casinos once they open over AC because it's 1 hour less of a drive. I will only go to AC when I get comped a free room. If I want to go to the beach...I can drive to Ocean City, MD or Dewey Beach, DE or Avalon not AC

My hope is that the poker is solid in PA with free Heinekens and that AC is forced to become more resort-oriented. Maybe they could pretty up their beaches a bit or make some of them private for the adjacent casino? I was so excited when they started building beach bars, but they're completely ghetto. AC needs to pick up its game.

you take a mouse and put 2 pieces of cheese.. it's going to the shortest route almost every time.. if someone can save even 15 mins, i believe they will choose PA, Sands has the Venetian after all, they know a thing or two about poker rooms

Yeah, especially after all the storms that slammed the beach this year (not that the beach looked good before that either...) They have a LOT of work to do. A lot of the dunes are completely wiped away (especially down near Taj and Showboat), a lot of debris that got washed up (broken shells, tree limbs, etc..) is now all over the beaches, and beach erosion is so bad you can see drainage pipes exposed in the sand. It really is a sad sight to see compared to what it used to look like years ago...

Seriously, much like many sectors of the economy, the casino industry will have to shrink, and improve their product to stand out from the rest. I hope 3-5 casinos in NJ greatly improve their facilities. The rest should close or become museums or something else.

Ok, but how many day trips did you make to AC?