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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
Texas Holdem
poker
games that draw players who might go to the Choctaw Casino if it started
offering poker tournaments. The 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
Texas Holdem
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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