I visited the Rivers Casino for the first time yesterday. Considering that the place is less than a year old and only ten minutes from my house, you'd think I'd have managed to get in there before now. But casino-going, like watching a movie or visiting one of the last few video game arcades, is an activity that you go to as a group, even though your actual experience is individual. And until yesterday, I never had a group that was ready to go to Rivers.
That said, it wasn't all that special. It was new, and therefore clean, which is nice. And since it came into being well after the indoor smoking ban in public places, there's isn't the lingering odor of years of tobacco that haunts the older riverboat casinos. All the machines are new, and in good shape. Even the furniture was comfortable.
Despite all that, I wasn't actually very impressed. Rivers is smaller than your average Vegas casino, which is to be expected, but it's also smaller than the better casinos in the area like Horseshoe in Hammond, or Potawatamie in Milwaukee. Those are the casinos that Rivers should have been competing with, and they just didn't get there. There's no other attractions, no sports betting or poker room, no theater for concerts or shows. The buffet line spills out along the wall of the casino floor which just seems cheap, and discourages you from trying to eat there, which shouldn't be the point.
Given how Rivers was sold to the public as a place to draw money from out of state due to its proximity to O'Hare, it kind of feels like a bait and switch. The casino that exists might pick up the random bored travelers or convention goers from the nearby Donald E Stephens Convention Center, and that's fine. What it isn't is a place that people will travel to Chicago to go visit the way they might some of the Vegas casinos or the ones in Atlantic City, or Atlantis in the Caribbean. Indeed, when I looked at the license plates in the parking lot, they were almost all Illinois plates. Which means that rather than the destination casino that was supposed to draw money from other states to us, it's really just taking money from Illinois citizens and giving it to the casino company and the government.
Granted, no one's being forced to play and donate their money. I played some and lost some money there myself. Still, the Rivers Casino just isn't what I expected it to be, and that's disappointing.
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