Gambling in the Mountains

With the holidays around the corner, I took some time off and came home to Denver to hang out with family and friends. A few of my friends in town are also enthusiastic gamers, so it was only natural that we set aside one day to to do some gambling.  Last week I told you why Vegas is a ton better than Midwest casinos.  After spending a day in Black Hawk, CO gambling, I can tell you that Black Hawk is much closer to a Vegas experience than anything Midwest.

Since Black Hawk is an old mining town in the mountains, there isn’t a ton of room for casinos.  Thus they are all built alongside Main Street.  This creates a similar strip-like environment where you can park in one place and walk between several different properties.  By law, table minimums and maximums can’t go above $100, but that’s really the only limiting thing in Black Hawk.

Unfortunately, there is no presence in Colorado by any of the major Las Vegas Strip corporations like Caesars Entertainment or MGM.  The closest it gets is a Riviera, but that recently was sold to a different ownership group too. Therefore you can’t have points in Black Hawk count towards any in Las Vegas.

But other than that, booze is comped, table games are aplently, and there are a lot of different casinos to visit.  So while Midwest casinos aren’t Vegas, Black Hawk is more like Vegas-lite, and it definitely got me even more excited for my trip to Vegas in February.

Tagged as: Black Hawk, Caesars Entertainment, Casino, Colorado, Denver, Gaming, Las Vegas, MGM, Riviera