Resorts World NYC opens full casino in Queens with table games, live dealers

The cards were ready to be dealt in baccarat and blackjack and Mississippi Stud poker on Tuesday at the expanded Resorts World New York City’s debut. The roulette wheel was to be spun and the dice rolled in craps.

But first, the billionaire chairman of Resorts World’s Malaysian-headquartered owner rolled the first ceremonial dice, smiling showgirls pranced around on stilts, rapper Nas performed in a tuxedo and punning politicians gushed over both one another and what is the first legal commercial casino with table games and slot machines in city history.

"We have hit the jackpot, Queens!" Donovan Richards, the borough president, said. The project and its local collaboration was a message to developers about the sort of diversity, equity and inclusion that Queens cherishes and the Trump administration rejects, he said.

On Tuesday the expanded Resorts World opened to the public as New York City's first casino to offer table games with live dealers, as the showgirls mingled in corseted bodysuits with fringe skirts and towering feathered headpieces, and ordinary New Yorkers jostled for swag bags and free food while dealers prepared to welcome their first gamblers upstairs.

The casino says it’s the first one like it in the city’s 400-year history. It has more than 240 table games, 2,500 slot machines, 1,250 new jobs, with 950 new dealers, bringing the total to about 2,200 people, growing to 2,700 by summer, according to the company. The casino secured a city license.

"We are all in," said chairman KT Lim, of the owner Genting, a resorts and casino conglomerate, which is planning to expand  R esorts World New York City and become one of the nation's largest such resorts. 

The opening represents the beginning of full casinos in downstate New York: The casino at Aqueduct Racetrack in Queens got one of three state licenses, with the others planned for Hard Rock Casino next to Citi Field in Queens and in the Bronx that will be built by Bally's at Ferry Point, both to open circa 2030.

Resorts World, which has spent billions on the project, has been open since 2011 at the site of South Ozone Park’s Aqueduct Racetrack, but it was not a full-fledged casino, instead offering video gambling terminals.

Carolyn Cestaro, 63, a healthcare account manager  from Oceanside, who came to check out opening day, said she’d come back if she enjoyed the experience. But the casino gives her pause.

She typically takes trips to Atlantic City, which, when the first casinos opened there in 1978, was the sole jurisdiction besides Nevada with legalized casinos.

Now there is a casino just over the Nassau-Queens border.

"I’m not happy that it’s so close to where I live," she said, and it’s "too close to my house, that’s number one."

Then there were promises in Atlantic City made long ago that casinos would revitalize the area and help the local people. Officials’ lofty promises never materialized, she said, similar to what some critics have said in New Jersey.

"I see what happens to Atlantic City. And I hate to see it happen here," she said. "Over the years, they always said they were gonna do something good for Atlantic City. I think today Atlantic City is worse than what it was."

On Tuesday, Cestaro was seated at the Ultimate Ca$h Wheel slot machine on the casino’s second floor trying her luck one flight below the new live tables, before the politicians, casino executives and other "VIP" guests would clear out. She put in $100.

"Right now, I’m ahead $341," she said. "I’ve just been here 15 minutes."