Category Archives: Casino Venues / Resorts

Grosvenor Victoria is a modern, chain casino – in fact, one of 55 owned by Grosvenor Casinos in major town and cities throughout the United Kingdom – in Marylebone, a fashionable residential area in the West End of London. Established in 1970, the Grosvenor Victoria has the distinction of being one of the oldest casinos in the country and, with a casino floor covering in excess of 71,000 square feet, is the largest casino in London, by square footage. It’s a great UK based alternative to the best real money online casino out there.

The majority of the gaming tables at the Grosvenor Victoria are devoted to roulette and blackjack, but baccarat and craps are also available, along with other, less popular games, such as casino war, super stud poker and three card poker. Patrons who prefer their gambling in electronic form can choose from over 100 slot machines and automated roulette machines.

The Grosvenor Victoria, affectionately known as ‘The Vic’, also has the distinction of being the ‘home’ casino of well-known television presenter, writer and professional poker player Victoria Coren Mitchell, who remains the only person to have won two main events on the European Poker Tour. Coren Mitchell regularly plays cash games at her namesake casino, but the Grosvenor Victoria Poker Room caters for beginners and ‘recreational’ players, as well as more serious players. With a minimum buy-in of £40 and blinds starting at £1, cash games are available to suit all pockets.

Known as the ‘wonder in the Connecticut woods’, Foxwoods Resort Casino is a Native American casino owned and operated by the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation. As its epithet suggests, Foxwoods is situated in acres of picturesque woodlands on the Mashantucket Pequot Reservation on the outskirts of the town of Ledyard, Connecticut, in the northeastern United States.

Nowadays, Foxwoods is a sprawling complex, covering 9,000,000 square feet, but has its origins in the Mashantucket Pequot Bingo Hall, which originally opened in 1986. Indeed, Foxwoods still retains a huge, 3,600-seater bingo hall, which operates high-stakes matinee and evening sessions every day. Bingo aside, Foxwoods houses six individual casinos which, collectively, cover 344,000 square feet and constitute the second largest gaming floor space in the United States.

All in all, Foxwoods provides over 250 gaming tables which, at the last count, offered over 20 different games, including baccarat, blackjack, craps, pai gow and roulette. Slot machines, which include the latest state-of-the-art offerings, plus what Foxwoods calls ‘old school favourites’, number over 5,500, with stakes ranging from $0.01 to $100 a spin.

Foxwoods is renowned for the cleanliness and comfort of its gaming floors but, while it has been described in some quarters as ‘an amusement park for adults’, gaming is not the only form of entertainment on offer. Obviously, casinos are off-limits to anyone under the age of 21, but Foxwoods offers numerous activities and events intended to appeal to teenagers and children.

Owned and operated by Caesars Entertainment, the Empire Casino is a Las Vegas-style casino built on the site of the former Empire Ballroom in Leicester Square in the West End of London. Occupying a total of 55,000 square feet, spread over two floors, the Empire Casino opened, at a cost of £16 million, in 2007; it was, and still is, the largest casino in the British capital city.

The main body of the casino, which shares the ground floor with a separate, dedicated poker room, features 30 or so gaming tables offering classic games, such as blackjack, punto banco and roulette. The main casino floor also includes the majority of the state-of-the-art slot machines and electronic roulette machines, although a smaller number of electronic gaming machines is also available on the second floor and in the poker room.

Unsurprisingly, granted that the Empire Casino hosts the World Series of Poker Europe (WSOPE) and offers customers opportunities to qualify for the World Series of Poker (WSOP) Main Event in Las Vegas, the Empire Poker Room has a WSOP theme. Nevertheless, players of all abilities can enjoy playing cash games or tournaments, for small or medium stakes, twenty-four hours a day, in a modern, vibrant, but nonetheless professional, setting. Capable of accommodating up to 80 players at any one time and with its own, dedicated bar, the Empire Poker Room is widely regarded as one of the best in London.

Officially known as the Rio All-Suite Hotel & Casino, the Rio is situated on West Flamingo Road, a mile or so west of the stretch of South Las Vegas Boulevard known as the ‘Las Vegas Strip’, in central Las Vegas. The Rio opened in 1990 but, nowadays, is probably best known as the home as the World Series of Poker, which it has hosted, in May each year, since 2005. Aside from a large, dedicated poker room, offering 30 tables, the Rio includes a long, winding casino floor – unsurprisingly, based on a Brazilian Carnival Mardi Gras theme – covering 117,300 square feet, or just over a hectare, in total.

The casino floor houses over 90 popular table games, including, but not limited to, baccarat, blackjack – single, double and full shoe versions – craps and roulette, together with poker variants such as Caribbean stud, pai gow and three card. Slot machines galore are also present. Table minimums, on the whole, tend to be a little higher – mostly $25 for blackjack, for example, compared with $10, or even $5, elsewhere – than in nearby casinos. Lower-limit tables are located in the outlying areas of the casino but, for ‘high rollers’, a high-limit room has table minimums starting at $100. The Rio also features 1,200 traditional, spinning-reel and video slot machines, some of which offer progressive jackpots, with stakes ranging from $0.01 to $500 a spin, plus over 350 state-of-the-art video poker machines.

Crown Casino and Entertainment Complex, commonly known as Crown Melbourne, is a large integrated resort in the Southbank precinct of Melbourne, the capital city of the state of Victoria, in south-eastern Australia. Opened in its current location, on the southern bank of the Yarra River, with sight of the central business district, in 1997, Crown Melbourne occupies an area of nearly 5,500,000 square feet – making it the largest casino complex in the Southern Hemisphere – of which 220,000 square feet is devoted to the casino floor.

Table games encompass baccarat, blackjack, including a controversial, low-stakes variant called ‘Blackjack Plus’, which vastly inflates the house edge, craps, poker and roulette among others. Crown Melbourne also offers a wide variety of fully automated tables games, poker machines – known locally as ‘pokies’ – and slot machines, with stakes starting at A$0.01.

The Crown Poker Room, which occupies its own dedicated, smoke-free space on the lowermost floor, is widely considered to the best in Australia. Big enough to accommodate 50 tables, the poker room offers several variants of poker including, of course, Texas hold’em; cash games, to suit all pockets, are available 24 hours a day and poker tournaments start twice daily. Of course, the Crown also plays host to several high-profile professional poker tournaments, including the Australian Poker Championship, a.k.a. ‘Aussie Millions’, held annually in January.