Caesars Entertainment is spending over $32 million to expand gaming at Indiana Grand Casino.
Construction at the Shelbyville property will start this April and hopefully finish before the end of the year.
Indiana Grand World Series of Poker
Indiana Grand’s expansion will add 25,000 square feet to the casino.
That extra space will make room for 100 new slot machines and 25 new table game positions.
A big focus of the expansion will be allowing players to qualify for World Series of Poker tournaments.
The construction will create a new 20-table live poker room to make that happen.
When it’s all said and done, the new space at Indiana Grand will create 100 new jobs at the casino. That’s great news for the industry’s workers, who have gone through a lot over the past year thanks to COVID-19.
The investment from Caesars shows that the company is focused on making the most of its Indiana properties.
Caesars investing in Indiana
Indiana Grand’s expansion will help Caesars hold its share of Indiana’s gambling market.
The company’s merger with Eldorado last year set up a dominant force in the casino industry.
However, the Indiana Gaming Commission believed that allowing Caesars to keep five casinos in Indiana would give it too much power over the state’s industry.
The commission forced Caesars to offload three of those casinos to help level the playing field.
The company has already sold Tropicana Evansville and Caesars Southern Indiana, with Horseshoe Hammond set to change hands before the end of 2021.
Caesars will only own Harrah’s Hoosier Park and Indiana Grand once Hammond is sold. With only two properties in the state, the company is looking to maximize revenue at both locations.
Investments like the table game expansion at Indiana Grand will help make that happen. It could also mean that a similar expansion project could be coming to the Harrah’s property in the near future.
For regulars at Indiana Grand, the new expansion is just the latest version of a continued push for more table games.
One year of Indiana Grand table games
It took years to be able to play live table games such as blackjack and poker at Indiana Grand.
The casino only had slot machines and electronic versions of table games for a long time.
That was thanks to an old law forbidding “racinos,” or casinos with horse racing tracks, from adding the live versions of games.
Since Indiana Grand and Harrah’s Hoosier Park are the only racinos in the state, that left the duo at a disadvantage compared to the rest of the state’s gambling spots.
That finally changed during the summer of 2019, when lawmakers passed a new provision to revoke the out-of-date ban.
Both casinos immediately began construction for new table games. Indiana Grand’s four-month expansion began in September 2019.
The casino was finally ready for the public to try out the new options on Jan. 1, 2020. Since then, gamblers at Indiana Grand have had the same live table game options as the rest of the state.
The new $32 million investment from Caesars will take that a step further.
Although Indiana Grand has had table games for over a year now, it still has noticeably fewer gaming positions than many of the state’s other casinos.
This new expansion will fill that deficit and put the property on par with its competitors.
