Monday, June 11, 2007

Gamblers get ready to 'tunnel in' on slots

The Meadows Racetrack & Casino opens its doors at 8:30 a.m. tomorrow to thousands of slots players, who, with their stares fixed on 24-hour beeping, blinking machines, will put a new face on gambling in southwestern Pennsylvania.

The grizzled horse handicappers for whom The Meadows was built in 1963 will appear nearby, later in the day, pencils and programs in hand. Their numbers in Washington County will be dwarfed, however, by the retirees, empty nesters, housewives and others who prefer gambling with more flash for their cash.

"As soon as I walk in, with all the lights and the bells, I just love it," said slots enthusiast Carol Diethorn, a 56-year-old Carrick resident. The medical transcriptionist, who works at home, expects to show up at The Meadows this week with $100 or so in hand.

"To me, it's a nice escape. I think I like that it's totally mindless, brainless," she said, quickly adding that she also enjoys crossword and Sudoku puzzles.

The temporary casino, a synthetic structure sprung on one day and readied in six months, sits at the far end of the North Strabane racetrack's parking lot. The facility contains 1,738 slot machines, clustered in groups according to their minimum wagers -- anywhere from a penny to $25 -- and by whether they have glitzy graphics or more old-fashioned spinning reel images.

Cannery Casino Resorts, a Las Vegas-based firm that bought The Meadows for $200 million last year, is to begin demolishing the longtime racing grandstand and its offices in August. A permanent building to be erected there and open in 2009 will combine slots and racing operations. It's expected to have up to 3,000 machines and several dining options. The temporary structure has a single, fixed-price, all-you-can-eat restaurant, a bar and snack bar.

The racetrack/casino -- or racino -- is the fifth to open in Pennsylvania and the first within easy reach of Pittsburgh, about a half hour away on Interstate 79. The other four recently opened racinos have so far drawn more customers and revenue than almost anyone projected. Officials of The Meadows are confident of doing the same, though their revenue forecasts are far higher than those of the Pennsylvania Gaming Control Board.

Whether their optimism is justified depends in large part on The Meadows' ability to draw patrons away from two similar facilities that have been operating for more than a decade in West Virginia's nearby Northern Panhandle, and retain those customers once a bigger standalone slots parlor opens in Pittsburgh.

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