Legalization of live blackjack tables at the Choctaw
Casino — just 20 minutes north of Paris — will translate
into many more gamblers from Texas, casino manager Craig
Northcutt feels.
Oklahoma’s Native American tribes began attracting
Texans with massive bingo games about 20 years ago after
President Ronald Reagan signed the Indian Regulation
Act, Northcutt said.
“That evolved into electronic gaming machines five or
six years ago,” he noted.
And now, with last week’s passage of a constitutional
amendment, Oklahoma voters have OK’d the introduction of
live card games at the casinos for the first time, in
the form of blackjack tables. Heretofore, Oklahoma’s
80-plus tribal casinos have offered only electronic
gaming — sometimes referred to a “one-armed bandits.”
Special Question 712 also allowed the casinos some
faster machines — which will let people win or lose
money faster.
To handle bigger crowds, construction begins soon on a
new, 20,000-square-foot Choctaw Casino, twice as large
as the existing casino at Grant, Okla., six miles north
of the Red River on U.S. 271. Northcutt said it should
open in February, although it will be May or June before
the blackjack tables are available for play.
“We are going to have a full-blown casino. It’ll look
like a large airplane hangar,” Northcutt said. “We’ve
got 300 machines now. We’ll have 600 in the new casino.
We’ll take down the present casino.”
The casino has already begun running a free shuttle
between Paris and the casino. It leaves Home Depot on
Northeast Loop 286 at 11 a.m. and every two hours
thereafter until 11 p.m. The shuttle leaves the casino
at 10:30 a.m. and every two hours thereafter, with a
final shuttle bus leaving for Paris at midnight.
“You see a lot of the same faces,” shuttle driver Turk
Robinson said. “It’s free, saves a little gas for the
players.”
The casino expects the buses will become more popular
now that live blackjack will be available.
But live poker hasn’t arrived in the tribal casinos,
yet. After native American tribes sign a new compact
with the state of Oklahoma, which won’t be for 90 days
at the earliest, only blackjack will be offered in
addition to the present electronic games.
The constitutional amendment — Special Question 712, as
it was labeled on the ballot — also allows Oklahoma’s
three racetracks to offer casino gambling. But they’ll
get only the electronic machines like the tribal casinos
now offer — not blackjack.
In towns everywhere — like Paris — there are weekly
social poker games that draw players who might go to the
Choctaw Casino if it started offering poker tournaments.
A form of poker known as “Texas Holdem” has become
increasingly popular and has become a weekly fixture on
cable television.
But Choctaw Casino still won’t offer poker and other
casino games like roulette and craps associated with the
famous casino cities like Las Vegas, Reno, Atlantic City
or even Bossier City, La. Table games like craps, poker
and roulette are allowed only in Class III casinos, and
the tribal casinos of Oklahoma are Class II casinos.
Kirk Kyle, head golf pro at Paris Golf & Country Club,
said there’s a regular group of golfers who play cards
for an hour or two after they come in from golf on
Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays, “but they play gin.”
The men’s locker room has three poker tables, but not
much poker is played there.
Kyle said blackjack games at Choctaw Casino wouldn’t be
that much of a lure to that crowd.
Brenda Malone at Carpet World, 2115 Northeast Loop 286,
once offered a bus to Bossier City that left Paris at 8
a.m. each Tuesday and arrived at Isle of Capri Casino
about 11 a.m. Those on the trip would have about five
hours or so to gamble, then would board the bus about
4:30 p.m. to return to Paris.
“Everybody could hardly stand it when I quit doing it,”
she said. “A lot of the same people went each week. They
got to be like family. They’d call each other during the
week to make sure they’d be going again the next
Tuesday.”
Because of accidents involving a few such buses,
insurance got so high that Malone no longer could afford
to charter buses, she said. She bought her own
22-passenger bus, even though to avoid Department of
Transportation red tape, she accepted a maximum of 15
passengers per trip.
When a new group bought out Isle of Capri Casino and
stopped giving her a consideration in return for
bringing passengers there, it stopped being profitable
for her, and she stopped making the runs, she said.
“I know some of my old bunch would start going to the
casino over there (across the Red River) if they have
blackjack tables,” Malone said.
Robert Autry and his mother, both of Hugo, were playing
the slots at Choctaw Casino on Thursday. She plays
various slot machines, while he plays only video poker.
He was playing a machine that cost 10 cents a pull.
“This is the lowest-paying machine you can get. You
can’t win as much money as you could if you were playing
in Bossier City. One good thing about it is, on a fixed
income, we can’t lose as much money either, playing
here. We might lose 50 or 60 dollars here, whereas if
you go to Bossier, you might lose four or five hundred.
But you might also win $1,500 or $2,000. We save up our
money and go to Bossier City every once in a while,”
Autry said.
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