Tunica, Miss. - Help Me Out

I was just joshing.

 

If you get a good hand, say, "Oh snap!" That'll keep 'em guessing.

 

I believe I was the last Ole Miss graduate who never made one trip to Tunica.

 

Good for you, Reb. I dislike gambling. Hell, I have to line up with the social conservatives on SOMEthing. It will be a happy day for me when all of this poker horseshit fades back into Bolivian.

 

So irish, I guess you're not doing the Vegas outing?

 

I have no problem with gambling -- college wouldn't have been the same without betting on football -- but if I'm going to a casino it will be in Vegas.

Covering the Independence Bowl this year, I stayed at the DiamondJacks hotel/casino and didn't spend more than five minutes in the casino. I felt like I was in a truck stop that just happened to have poker tables.

 

Las Vegas is repulsive to me on many, many levels. It's a citadel of desperation, sleaze and exploitation. You won't catch me there if I'm not getting paid to be there.

My dad dragged me to the "Isle of Capri" in Bossier City once. Yup, kind of like a truck stop. The Wal-Mart crowd in attendance didn't exactly evoke images of glamor and the rat pack.

 

Tunica, the Mississippi Gulf Coast, and Harrah's New Orleans aren't that bad. It's not Vegas, but the casinos are nice and the clientelle is OK. The older riverboats in Louisiana are dumps -- tiny, dirty and the folks gambling there look like they barely have two quarters to rub together, much less money to gamble away.
The lowest ring of hell are those truck stop casinos, where you have a diesel pump and a portable building with five video poker machines inside....

 

Horseshoe poker tables were very tight last time I was there. But some of the old timers there were very entertaining....

Inky basically nailed it as to where to play. The Sheraton is in the same area, but nowhere near as lively.

Sam's Town, Hollywood (OK, some good memorabilia in the casino) and Resorts (DEAD!) are in another cluster. Fitzgerald's (motif is wearing), Bally's (dead, but a good spot if you want a cheap meal -- one point on the card gets you a free crappy buffet every 24 hours) and the Grand (overrated) are off by themselves. You WILL need a car.

For games other than poker, odds usually run pretty good. Just about every casino offers 10x or 20x odds on dice (Sheraton had a crapless game last time I was there--simply dodge the seven to get rich), and 3-card poker was still paying 4x on straights in every casino except the Grand (most Vegas casinos and most post-Katrina Biloxi casinos have gone to 3x on straights).

The drive from Memphis should be better now that a freeway connector (the future I-69) has opened from I-55 to the casinos. Before, you had to drive US 61 through some sketchy Memphis neighborhoods before hitting open Mississippi road. Probably about a 20-30 minute drive from Memphis to Tunica.

 

Years and years ago, we were going from Tunica back up to Memphis. We were thinking of stopping at a 24/7 fried chicken joint on the way back to whateverhotelthatisdirectlyacrossthestreetfromthePeabody. As we got close, we realized we'd just missed a drive-by by about 10 minutes. Cops everywhere, but no ambulances had arrived yet.

We wound up blowing our winnings on room service.

 

Vegas is great, but my heart is in AC.