The Globe visits Twin River

Today's Boston Globe looks at how the renovations at Twin River are said to be drawing lots of visitors from north of the border.

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.

Of course, there's the obligatory reference to the buxom digitized video poker dealer, and also a note on how the facility's owners are, er, covering their bets:

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 ....

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.