I visited the brand new Margaritaville Casino in Biloxi this past weekend. (It opened last Tuesday).
Short version: I walked in, looked around, and walked out.
Slightly longer version: The building itself is supposed to resemble an old style Key West home, I suppose. Anyway, it looks quite different from the outside compared to most casino designs. It is a land based casino (i.e. not built out onto the water like Hard Rock or Beau Rivage). The main casino floor is elevated about 20 feet above ground level, to help limit damage from hurricanes.
The casino itself is small. It was jam packed on Saturday afternoon, as was to be expected for a newly opened casino. Because of the crowds, it was impossible to do a thorough job of checking out the VP inventory, but the machines that were vacant were uniformly awful. Everything I checked was 8/5 Jacks, 20/12/10 Deuces Wild, 8/5 DDB, and similar trashy pay tables. The best games I could find were some 8/6 JOB single line games. The multi line games had pay tables ranging from bad to "cruise ship". It looks like their approach to VP is to not take any chances. Of course, the customers were still pounding away on the machines like there was no tomorrow.
I didn't bother to find out anything about the players club, since I didn't see anything worth playing. I'll try to stop by again in a week or two when it is less crowded. It's certainly possible that there are one or two great games that I missed due to the crowds, but probably not.
EE
