All 9 Tunica Casino's Closed Due to Flooding

Yup, so don't go there. Like anybody was going to.. The video is entertaining, though.


video

Got an email yesterday about Golden something in Tunica is re-opened. Ain't never been there but they keep sending me emails.

ON-EDIT:

10:00am of May 18th was the re-opening of the Gold Strike in Tunica after dealing with record flooding.

Yes. Free drinks. And I've been told by several people that its very easy to get meal comps even for minimum play.
My local Indian casino here in Florida has a Floorman who spent several years in Tunica and recommends the Gold Strike. Ofcourse he is biased because he used to work there but some poker regulars at the local Indian casino all favor the Gold Strike too.

I've been getting the e-mails as well. After seeing the pictures of destruction, I can't believe they are opening up so soon. Someone did a hell of a job cleaning up. Either that or it's going to be disgusting when people go to visit.

I've been to Tunica once when I was living in St. Louis. It's about a 5 hour drive away and has a good variety of table games. We spent a night in Memphis and a night in Tunica. I had the best run of poker in a cash game that I ever have had, so I have good memories. And the drinks are free, which I hadn't found outside of Vegas.

Now that I'm living in Chicago, it's too far for me to ever consider going to again, unless by some weird chance I happen to be in Memphis again.

I'm not sure if that was the casino in question, but I saw mention on TV that many of those casinos will have no problem re-opening.

They're barges, so they just floated above the flood. Once the water levels receed to the point where the parking lot is no longer covered, there's little to prevent them from opening.

Yes, those walkways from the parking lot to the casino-barge used to be sloped downwards, during the flood it would have been an steep uphill climb. So it was a simple matter of inspecting the parking lot for debris and washout areas, inspecting the walkways and hosing them down and then simply re-opening. I guess this was one time when those silly regulations about "riverboats" worked.

Farther south than Tunica, in Greenville, MS, there are three casinos -- two on riverboats and one that at least appears to be on "solid" ground near the normal path of the river. Here is a link to a web site from a couple of guys who have been taking aerial photos of the Greenville area.

You can see that the levee is working very well, keeping the swollen river out of the downtown area. The two riverboat casinos are near downtown but on the wet side of the levee, of course. They appear to be floating high, with their parking lots underwater. It looks as if they will be fine once the water recedes.

The third casino is south of town, near the bridge to Arkansas. It, too, is surrounded by water with its parking lots submerged. It appears to have been constructed on its own little patch of high ground, with a bit of a sea wall around it (though I can't really remember from my only visit whether that is actually accurate). If the water doesn't go much higher, even that casino should be fine.

The river was supposed to crest in Greenville yesterday, at a level higher than the great flood of 1927. Good levees can do a great job, provided the Corps doesn't decide that it is better to blow them up, sacrificing one area in an attempt to save another.

I was at the Horseshoe Southern Indiana last night. They were closed as recently as a couple weeks ago, but the river (Ohio) there is back down nicely now. Even the lowest parkinglots were clear of water, though the employees were still parking in the hotel ramp. There appears to have been some interior damage in some areas - most notably the walkway from the shore to the boat. They had the carpet ripped up, the walls stripped and covered temporarily, and water removal equipment everywhere.

I'd imagine the Tunica casinos and other MS and LA properties will have similar recoveries as the water recedes farther south. I hope everything is fixed up and operational by the time I'm in the area in mid-july!