Wind Creek Chicago Southland (Homewood/East Hazel Crest, IL)

It’s also active on Bravo now with this update:

“Hello to all Chicagoland and Northwest Indiana Poker Players!!!

Coming this November is Wind Creek Chicago Southland!

This 10-table room will be the place to find the best poker playing experience in the Midwest!

Check back soon for poker room updates or check us out at windcreek.com/chicagosouthland”

They opened today (?) and show 4 live games in Bravo right now.

Snuck a pic, the room and the entire casino was nice. 😍

Are they doing any special promos? How are the games and dealers compared with Rivers?

Just FYI when I called they said no high hand or other promos running currently and that they should always have 1/3 and 2/5 games running. But I also read somewhere that they have a bad beat jackpot so not sure if it was just an uninformed floor manager.

May be a while for things. For whatever reason, the place opened a few months prior to some projected opening dates.

Finally got a chance to get to this room today. Absolutely fantastic place. Great dealers, dedicated cashier in the room. A door to keep all of the casino sounds out. Tons of terrible button straddles for $7 or $12 with two or three limps. Yahtzee!

I drove from my home in the NW burbs to check out Chicago's newest poker room. The casino itself is very nice. I'm originally from the south suburbs and this part of the Chicago area is mostly working class and I felt very much at home here. The clientele at the casino and in the poker room was about a 50/50 mix of white and black players, with a smattering of hispanic, a reflection of the neighborhoods around the area.

The room itself is pretty small and has ten tables. They have a one window cage to buy chips. The room has a door, so it's pretty quiet inside, isolated from the clanging slot machines outside. This was prime time on Saturday night and two of the tables were empty, so that was kind of a surprise since this place just opened and I was anticipating more demand and a longer wait list. They had one 2/5 game and one 1/2 PLO, the rest 1/3 NLHE. They're on the Bravo app and you can add yourself to the wait list that way, but I didn't have a players card so had to go up to the desk to get on the list. Only had to wait about 20 mins though. If I tried this at Rivers, I'd be waiting two hours on Sat night.

As a 1/3 reg at Rivers the action itself was quite different than I'm used to at Rivers. Maybe it's the difference in player demographics. Sorry to throw out some sterotypes here, but Rivers has a ton of Asian players who crave action and so the pots tend to be much more multiway and bloated on flops than it was at WCCS. At Rivers you also get a lot of transitory players, waiting on some layover at O'Hare or at some conference/convention that are routinely hosted in Rosemont that tend to be net donators to the games. You're probably not going to get a whole lot of tourists types at this room.

Yeah, a whole sample size of one, but I've talked to a couple other guys who've played here and they also agreed. This place plays quite a bit tigher than the games at Rivers. There was a lot of limping, but I took down a few pots by raising in LP and usually took it down. At Rivers it would likely go call/call/call/call and it's $100 in the pot on the flop. They have the same straddle rules as Rivers, with a button straddle allowed, but at least in my 4.5 hour session I could count on one hand the number of times someone did it. Contrast that to Rivers where you might get that many in one round. YMMV, of course.

Not a big fan of the physical tables themselves. They have this 7-8 inch glass outer rim before the felt starts. No cup holders, you have to use the little tables. This makes for a bit of a cluttered area that can be difficult to manuever around in. They do have quite a bit of leg room underneth, so as a tall guy myself, that was pretty nice. The cocktail service was pretty bad, but let's give them some time to sort that out since the place just opened. They also have a $2 promotion drop at $20 pot, which is a bit brutal on top of the $6 max rake. They have a bad beat jackpot, quad 8s or better. Also a 5% room share, which someone at my table calculated would be about $70/person at the current $70k pot, so not sure how much that's worth. Probably take two hours to sort it all out when it hits.

Overall, a nice addition to the Chicago poker scene. Not sure how much I'll get out there myself since Rivers is much closer to me and the action I think is better. But for Southside rounders, a nice room to replace the increasingly dead Horseshoe Hammond scene.

I would agree that it's not worth the drive as I had a similar experience as eMark. I think the games at River's are better and I will continue to play there when I have time to play. I felt the games were tighter at Wind Creek and at least at my table, players didn't seem to have deep pockets. I experienced several lose 100-300 and then were done vs guys willing to lose way more at River's. I admit I have a small sample size

For sure it's better than the Horseshoe. It's right off the tollway and there's no cigarette smoke. The better horseshoe dealers moved to Wind Creek as well.

Screw Hammond, Indiana casino. Pervasive license pate camera surveillance is disgusting. Hammond cops run your license plate and see every place your vehicle has stopped in that town. You have not committed any crimes, so it's basically just spying on public. I take expressway to Hard Rock, which is right off expressway, to use sportsbook. No poker.