Construction took 14 months. Lawsuits consumed years. Ribbon-cutting occupied just minutes last month, and finally Michigan’s Pokagon Band of Potawatomi Indians opened its $400 million Four Winds Casino Resort near New Buffalo. But now that it is open, the casino rivals anything found in Detroit or the state’s burgeoning Indian gaming market.

Lakes Entertainment is managing the casino, which includes “the world’s largest automated poker room,” under a five-year contract. Lakes hired former Trump Plaza President Matt Harkness to run the property. With 3,000 slot machines and 100 table games, Four Winds is slightly larger than any of the three commercial Michigan casinos 200 miles east along Interstate 94 in Detroit. The only larger operation among the state’s 17 other tribal casinos is the 4,000-slot Soaring Eagle, which has made the Saginaw Chippewa tribe wealthy in Mount Pleasant.

Four Winds will be hunting some of its revenue among players who have frequented northern Indiana’s five riverboat casinos near Gary and Chicago, Illinois. They are 40 and 70 miles from Four Winds’ southwestern Michigan location adjoining a Lake Michigan resort town with 2,200 residents.

One attraction may be the forest-lodge design of the casino and its 165-room hotel. The rotunda inside the main entrance features two massive fireplaces. Six restaurants include a 500-seat buffet near retail shops and a child-care facility. The majority of 3,200 parking spaces are in a garage enclosed against sometimes rugged weather off the lake.

The 130,000-square-foot casino boasts “three entirely new categories of slot game play from WMS Gaming,” officials say, with “slots such as Monopoly Big Event, Top Gun and Super Money Grab representing the next generation in casino entertainment.” Nineteen PokerPro automated tables seat 158 poker players in “the Midwest’s only World Poker Tour Poker Room.” (Lakes holds 61 percent of WPT Enterprises, which runs the World Poker Tour TV series.)

Pokagon’s 3,200 members form a restored tribe, its federal recognition returned in 1994, when other Michigan tribes were finding their legs in the state’s gaming business that belonged exclusively to them before the first Detroit casino opened in the late 1990s.

By Casino Connection Staff

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