LINCOLN, R.I. - Like Massachusetts, Rhode Island has no full-fledged casino - yet. But on a Friday night at the former Lincoln Park greyhound track, lately reborn as a glitzy gambling emporium, visitors might have a hard time telling the difference.
The cavernous main floor is a sea of lights and noise, as thousands of mesmerized patrons slap the blinking buttons on banks of glowing, gurgling video slot machines. Michael Jackson's "Billie Jean" thumps away above the dull roar of the machines. At the Lighthouse bar in the center of the room, customers in lamp-lit, sunken seating wait for an Aerosmith tribute band to start playing, while upstairs, in a richly furnished steakhouse, diners savor $48 aged steak and $8 potato wedges kissed with truffle oil.
The makeover at Lincoln Park, now known as Twin River, cost $220 million. Investors doubled the size of the complex, which now stretches the length of three football fields, and boosted the number of slot machines from 3,200 to 4,750. They added a 2,500-seat auditorium, a comedy club, and a slew of bars and restaurants. The latest innovation, virtual blackjack tables, blurs the line between video games and true casino gambling, with "simulated" dealers, life-sized and animated, appearing on video screens instead of in the flesh.
The ambitions behind the expansion - to remake the gritty dog track as a Vegas-style showplace, and attract more gamblers from Massachusetts in the process - have proven lucrative: The average number of daily visitors has swelled 60 percent, from 10,000 to 16,000, since the expansion was unveiled last year, casino managers said, and as many as half of all customers are now coming from the Bay State, according to the University of Massachusetts.
The project shows how closely the casino experience can be approximated, without the games typically thought to define it, and how profitable such experiments can be. With no hotel on site, the slots operation at Twin River now rivals those at Connecticut's Foxwoods and Mohegan Sun casinos, each of which has 6,000 to 7,000 machines. Twin River poured $212 million into Rhode Island coffers last year, according to the state lottery division, more than Foxwoods sent the Connecticut government. That sum will increase if legislators approve a plan to let the complex stay open 24 hours a day instead of closing at 2 a.m. Some legislators, facing a steep budget deficit, have also proposed that table games be allowed there.
As the hour approached 10 p.m. last Friday, players packed the virtual blackjack tables, sitting elbow-to-elbow as they faced the onscreen dealers. The dealers - dimpled young men in silk shirts and buxom women in sparkling bustiers and low-cut evening gowns - turned their heads to make "eye contact" with the players, and spoke in soothing, digitized tones.
"I'm sorry," purred a dealer to a losing player.
"Oh, you're so sorry, I'm sure," the player snapped back at the screen.
A woman dressed in a track suit and sneakers, with long, dark purple fingernails, fed another $20 bill into the slot on the table.
"Suck it up, suck it up," she chanted.
Video slot machines are allowed at two venues in Rhode Island, where they were meant to save two failing pastimes. Greyhound racing has survived in Lincoln, but jai alai, a type of Spanish handball, was phased out in Newport in 2003. Despite the limits on its spread, the slots business has become the state's third-largest source of revenue, after the state income tax and sales tax, budget officials said.
Massachusetts casinos could hurt Rhode Island's cash flow, but the owners of Twin River would stand to benefit. Two of the partners who bought Lincoln Park for $445 million in 2005 and transformed it, Len Wolman and Sol Kerzner, have partnered with the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe to push plans for a casino in Middleborough, 40 miles away. The two also own part of Mohegan Sun, about 50 miles from Twin River.
Set in leafy Lincoln, near a tony subdivision of white brick mini-mansions, the revamped Twin River is attracting younger patrons, according to its general manager. Its Irish pub, Fado, was built in Ireland and shipped over in pieces; its Italian restaurant, Carmine's, seats 600 people. Both offer views of the racetrack. One bar has built-in slot machines; another gives customers keys to their own cigar cabinets; a third employs bottle-juggling "flair" bartenders.
After years of steady decline, wagers at the greyhound track have stabilized since the expansion, said the general manager, Craig Sculos. Younger customers gravitate from the bars to the track, where renovations include granite-topped betting stations, he said.
Last Friday, Massachusetts residents were everywhere at Twin River, scooping up Alaskan King Crab legs from the buffet, and settling in at candy-colored machines with fairy-tale names like Persian Princess and Mystical Mermaid.
"Share in my treasures," urged a Cleopatra II machine in a seductive voice.
Patrons said they chose machines where they had won before. For Scott Pelman, a marketing executive from Dedham who said boredom drove him to Twin River, that meant a seat at a Pharaoh's Fortune terminal, where he lost $400 in three hours and vowed never to return.
"I'm disappointed in myself for coming down here," he said. "I had the day off, and I could have done anything else."
Such losses can mount quickly. Because of the rapid pace of video gambling machines, which allow players to place a bet every five seconds, Robert Breen, director of the Rhode Island Gambling Treatment Program, says video slots players who become addicted do so in about a year, three to four times more quickly than those who develop addictions to other kinds of gambling.
Industry allies cast doubt on Breen's research. "I think we would need a lot more studies before we could say that," said Christine Reilly, director of a Harvard-affiliated center, the Institute for Research on Pathological Gambling, established with funding from the industry group the American Gaming Association.
At Twin River, sisters Hilda and Rita Porcelli sat side by side at Tabby Cash machines decorated with smiling cats and balls of yarn. The North Providence siblings visit Twin River four times a week and head to Foxwoods or Mohegan Sun every weekend, said another sister, Emily Porcelli, who declined to give her age but admitted she spends $400 a week on the slots.
"I get it back," she said. "I enjoy the games, the atmosphere, the lunch. . . . Maybe you'll bring me luck."
As the smoke and the lines at the ATMs thickened, gamblers tried their best to summon windfalls.
One man veered ritualistically between two machines. Another leaned in close to his video terminal - a Stinkin' Rich machine featuring a cartoon skunk - and swirled the fingers of one hand up and down, back and forth across the screen, as the colorful icons flashed past.
"It makes you feel like you have some kind of control," he said.
