From what I understand, the Vegas room will not be involved with the Bethlehem room. Two separate entities.

won't Mount Airy Casino be the closest from North Jersey?

The last 20 or so posts in this thread make it seem like PARX is not even going to have a poker room

I live about 10 minutes from Parx. We took my mother-in-law there last weekend to let her throw away some coins in the slots. While there, I spoke to several "suits" about poker. They all said it was a done deal. The bad news is, initially, the room will be in the racetrack building - not the nice new facility. They think "eventually" it will be relocated (in the next expansion), but that will NOT be for a few years.

The racetrack is a ****hole.

In any case, they expect cards in the air by the 4th of July holiday.

I live 10 minutes from Harrah's Chester (PA). Never been there because a warehouse with slot machines surrounded by a slum holds no interest for me.
Poker, though, is a different matter. Not sure how that will play out, although it will obviously hurt the AC market.
For someone like me, who prefers tournaments over cash games, I always book comp/discounted rooms in AC for multi-day tourneys. It will be strange to sleep in my own bed for PA tourneys - can't wait to see what they offer. But I don't have any grand illusions because innovations like Survivor/Double Play/Deep Stacks, etc. most likely aren't on PA's radar. Also, I can't see how they can compete with some of the better AC poker rooms for sheer ambiance.
I've seen Parx and other popular PA casinos listed in this thread, however a sleeper may be the soon-to-open resort-casino at the Valley Forge Convention Center. Can't ask for a better highway location where the Schulkyll Expressway, Route 202 and the PA Turnpike all meet, almost adjacent to the King of Prussia Mall.
Any thoughts on this site?

Yea... it'll make one of the WORST traffic jams in the world even worse.

Have you ever driven in that area? Whoever designed that mess of highways and passed the zoning laws on the building layout, should have their balls torn off!

I wouldn't ever consider going there. I had an office off of Gulph Rd. I hated it every time I had to visit the place. I'd rather get a root canal without Novocain!!!

they gonna hurt

http://www.thestreet.com/_yahoo/stor...FREE&cm_ite=NA

Its a chicken and egg problem now. No one ever used to worry about people going to vegas and no one still does. It is the premier gambling destination. If AC had built the same status it would be fine. Now no one will invest and therefore it will never be.

Greg

That article about sums it up.

Trop, Bally's, Caesar's, Borgata and Harrahs could well be the core of the future, along with Revel if it gets built.

Sea level increasing at half a centimeter per year over the past 20 years is having an impact. In 20 years or so we'll be playing at swim-up tables at the Showboat. Cocktails!

Link

I'm interested why Bally's and Trop are on this list. Bally's is awful. Wild West is a glorified tunnel to get from Bally's to Caesars.

The only reason I would ever go to Tropicana is for the Quarter.

I agree.

Why would anyone in PA or DE now have to drive and pay tolls to get to A.C. ... What is the attraction now? A poor beach and boardwalk?

Having non gambling options is always a good thing.

The trop has some nice things going for it, with alot people at the quarter bars and restaraunts on the weekends. obviously, the casino and poker room need alot of work but its not horrible.

AC is always booming on the weekends i don't understand how the casinos don't do better financially but its likely more a debt thing.

i agree though that AC will have to shrink a bit and the places that are just gambling and not much else might go first. The worst place in AC are bally's, trump marina, wild west, resorts, trump plaza, showboat. i would assume a couple of these places might go out of business at some point probably not all of them, though. it seems doubtful in this economy that someone will invest the huge amount of money to remodel these casinos.

i think the borg will be fine as its going to be a resort (unlike the PA places) so it still can attract enough visitors.

OK, pick any five or six. no problem. Seriously. Frankly, I think that long term, after X number of bankruptcies, the debt service will get to the point that it will support most of the current Casinos. They only pay 6% tax to the state. At some point, IF they keep rehabbing the town, and get the room rates right, they will attract more people during the week. Gee whiz, When we had a summer rental in Dewey, we would almost always get it rented from Sun - Fri.

I am going to take a wild guess here that you are not a Economics Major.
Your tax obligations in PA have nothing to do with the NJ Casino operators tax obligations. You pay taxes based on your income, not the income of another entity in another state.

OK, then let's try this.
You have a $100 bill to put in a slot machine.
Your choice is PA or NJ.
The casino owners in PA have to pay 55% of their profits in taxes.
The casino owners in NJ have to pay 9% of their profits in taxes.
Where do you put your $100?

Evertthing else being the same, NJ. The comps and payout rate should be much better in NJ.



But everything else is not nearly the same when the Pa. casino is 20 minutes away and AC is 2 hours.

For me, this is the most on-target line from the article: "Atlantic City wasted a 30-year head start," says Dennis Forst, analyst at KeyBanc.

Truer words were never spoken. Competition will hurt, but in the long run, it could actually provide the motivation for AC become the attractive beach resort that it once was, and could be once again.

It's time for AC to leverage its assets. For 50 years it's chosen to be a slum; that's an incredible waste of potential.

ATLANTIC CITY, SUDDENLY SURROUNDED

Go back 30 years, and there were, of course, really only two gaming markets: Las Vegas and Atlantic City, notes Alex Calderone, who provides turnaround and crisis management services to the gaming sector at Conway MacKenzie. Between 1980 and 1990 only a few more jurisdictions legalized gaming, like Iowa and South Dakota. From 1990 to the present, however, 30 additional states have legalized gaming or implemented tribal gaming.

I still wonder why AC never really took-off. I was naive enough to think the city-by-the-sea could actually compete with Vegas. (This was back in the 80s.)
I guess there are/were many factors, local and state politics, greed, etc.
It’s really a shame.

Jim, I am not trying to be obnoxious and I am NOT in the gaming industry, but you may be confusing slot pay outs with state taxes. I don't believe that PA can set their slot machines to pay out that much less in PA than in NJ.

Smart slot players know how to read the payouts (they are on the machines) and they would not take such a sucker bet as what you are saying.

It was the PA casino owners that agreed to pay the excess taxes which should tell you how lucrative the gaming business is.

Maybe someone in the industry can help us?

Quality of governance would be a quick answer. AC has an atrociously poor one, even by NJ standards.

I live in central PA and it will be 2 hours to the nearest card room which is still to far imo.

Right now its 5 hours to AC(if there is no traffic) and costs about $100 with gas, tolls, and parking. I can only go sun-thur due to ridiculous weekend room rates.

I'll still go to AC sometimes because my wife's family has a beach house like 30 mins from there but that will be it.

My visits will go from 6-8 times a year to once or twice. The only way AC could get me there is with free weekend rooms and I doubt I'll ever get that playing 1/2 and $10-20 a hand BlackJack.

Here is an article from today's Philadelphia Inquirer on this very issue

Hilarious that the article mentions the Sands. Just last week the mayor of Bethlehem was threatening to seize the property via eminent domain if they didn't get going on the hotel/shopping center.