Treasure Island is Vegas-like

 By Bryan Mileski February 7th, 2010 No Comments »

Posted in Blogs

I finally got the opportunity to spend some time yesterday at Treasure Island Casino in Welch, MN. Because they typically host their larger tournaments in the late winter/early spring, it always seems like forever between trips down there.

PMac and I covered the Island Tournament yesterday, a $600+$60 NLHE event won by Dan Dow. Dan’s a young, humble kid who lives near the casino. He and pal Darren Childs (2nd place in POY standings) both made deep runs. Darren finished 4th and is planning a trip to Commerce in the next week. Both these young, talented players anticipate being at Grand Casino Mille Lacs in a couple weeks for the Minnesota State Poker Tour. “I want one of those.” Childs said as he pointed to his wrist, referring to the MSPT bracelet.

Back to TI, the event center they hosted the event in was fantastic. You can see photos in the gallery. The only drawback was that they can only have 10 tables in that event center due to overhead camera constraints. Either way they hosted a fun, exciting tournament. The next one is scheduled for March 6th. That tournament is currently scheduled to be a $1,000 event but they may reduce it to $600 as was yesterday’s. I don’t know if that’s been decided yet.

After the tournament, we had the opportunity to walk through a good part of the casino. They’ve designed parts of the casino similar to the view you would get walking through many casinos in Vegas. Each restaurant or room has its own design, they separate areas of the casino into sections. One flaw from a poker player perspective was that the poker room is really hard to spot unless you know exactly where it is. It’s a nice room once you get there but I’d recommend more signage with arrows for the casual player on a weekend retreat.

BUT, the casino was BUMPIN! It was packed and appeared to have a great night-life. Every single slot machine had a butt in the chair, the blackjack tables were full, there was a live band with many people eating, dancing, etc. They definitely have done a great job of creating an exciting, Vegas-like atmosphere. It was electric!

I can’t speak to if its like that every weekend but it was for sure the place to be on Saturday night.