Opening night for Baltimore's first casino a huge success

About 15,000 people visited the casino Tuesday night, said general manager Chad Barnhill. Officials had only expected about 10,000, and lines stretched around the building from well before the casino's 9 p.m. opening until well after.

The casino has its own seven-story parking garage with more than 3,300 spaces, though one story is reserved for employees and two for valet service. The garage reached capacity at one point in the night, as did the US$ 442 million casino.

The youthful and the less youthful waited their turn to enter Horseshoe Baltimore, seemingly backing the city in its wager on the popularity of gaming and the allure of a new urban site for it. The city had made a big bet on legalized gambling, and people streamed toward the casino to lay down bets of their own. “Horseshoe brings the promise of a better Baltimore,” declared Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake.

She and the director of the Maryland Lottery and Gaming Control Agency took turns pulling down a giant slot-machine lever to signal that the betting near the Inner Harbor could begin, along with a new burst of optimism.

The US$ 442 million casino, owned by Caesars Entertainment, is the state’s fifth since Marylanders legalized slots in 2008 and table games in 2012.

It joins a growing list of casinos that have opened in major cities, bringing with them desperately needed jobs as well as concerns about placing 24-hour gambling halls on the doorsteps of those who can least afford to play — and lose.

"For a while the trend was to build casinos in destinations like Las Vegas, Biloxi, Atlantic City. Now, the trend has shifted to be more building casinos in urban areas like Cincinnati, Columbus, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and now, Baltimore," said David Schwartz, director of the Center for Gaming Research at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

Caesars chief executive Gary Loveman touted the casino’s urban setting, saying it was “built to meld in.” Casinos have already boosted gambling’s contribution to the state’s Education Trust and General Fund by almost $300 million for fiscal 2014. Horseshoe’s arrival will send that number even higher. If state projections turn out to be right, gambling in Maryland is on the verge of becoming a US$ 1 billion industry.

Horseshoe enters an increasingly crowded Mid-Atlantic casino market, where the success of new gambling halls has come at the price of the established ones in West Virginia, Delaware and Atlantic City. One of the biggest winners has been Maryland Live, the two-year-old casino next to the Arundel Mills mall, just 12 miles south of downtown Baltimore.

Maryland Live is expected to be the hardest hit by competition from Horseshoe and MGM’s planned casino resort at National Harbor, slated to open in 2016.

The state’s other casinos are smaller and farther away, in Perryville, Rocky Gap and Berlin. As of July, Live owned an 80 percent share of the state’s casino market, the University of Nevada at Las Vegas’s Center for Gaming Research estimated.