The Catawba Nation has announced the addition of 12 live table games at its Two Kings Casino outside Kings Mountain. The casino will introduce a free dealer school to help train employees, including new hires, to handle the new table games.
The tables will include games such as roulette, craps, three-card poker, blackjack, mini baccarat and Mississippi stud poker. Catawba Nation Chief Brian Harris said the introduction of the casino games will satisfy customers, who have been requesting these additions for more than a year. Harris also mentioned that the tables will create more than 150 new jobs.
“By adding live table games, we are giving our loyal patrons something many have asked for and also anticipate drawing Charlotte residents and visitors to the region who have not yet been to the casino,” Harris said.
“This is just one way we are setting up the needs of our customers and for our tribe to facilitate the needs of our customers. We are in need of people to apply, for people to go to [dealer] school. That way, we can be fully staffed before we open the table games,” he said.
Permanent Two Kings Casino still in the works
The Two Kings Casino opened in 2021 and immediately brought North Carolina casino traffic to Kings Mountain. Since its opening, the casino has been housed in a temporary facility, but the Catawba Nation has plans to convert it into a permanent casino and hotel.
While those plans were stalled due to regulatory hurdles, the land for the conversion has been purchased, with the hope of finishing the new project by 2027. According to Cleveland Country real estate records, the parking lot and surrounding land were bought for $40 million last month.
“Anytime you go there, [even] late at night, the parking lot is full,” Kings Mountain Mayor Scott Neisler said of the Two Kings Casino in a 2021 interview with FOX 46. “Counting up all the proposed housing developments, we have 3,000 housing units ready to be built in Kings Mountain. … The developers are already paying for expanding that intersection, and the design has already been made.”
“We have a 19% poverty rating in our city,” Neisler added, considering the then-new casino’s possible economic benefits for the area.
The Catawba Two Kings Casino has indeed had a positive impact on the local economy, including the creation of jobs and revenue generation through tourism as well as tax collections. It has helped the Catawba Nation, a tribe of more than 2,800 members, achieve tribal sovereignty, which allows it autonomous control to make decisions on the development of the casino while also respecting cultural traditions.
Online sports betting complements retail casinos
North Carolina’s recent launch of online sports betting was a raging success, with almost 370,000 active accounts recorded in the first 48 hours, according to geolocation security company GeoComply. During that time, GeoComply recorded 5.36 million geolocation checks for sports betting activity, more than twice as many as in neighboring Virginia.
“It’s early, but North Carolina is already delivering on lawmaker expectations when they legalized online sports betting last year,” Lindsay Slader, GeoComply’s SVP of Compliance, said in a statement to NCSharp. “The state’s well-structured approach to mobile sports betting safeguards consumers and opens up significant revenue streams.”
The Catawba Tribe can pursue an online sports betting license, due to its current retail sportsbook at the casino. However, the tribe has held off on entering the market.
North Carolina will waive the $1 million operator licensing fee for the state’s two tribal entities (the Catawba and the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians). It also gives exclusivity to do business with people living on tribal land for the sportsbook that partners with a tribe. That constitutes five counties worth of people in the case of the EBCI, but doesn’t amount to much of anything for the Catawba. Their land ownership in Cleveland County consists mainly of the Two Kings Casino and the surrounding parking lots.
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