Luckiest Casinos in Indiana

How can you get lucky in Indiana? That’s an easy question, right? All you have to do is visit one of the state’s 13 casino destinations. We wish it was that simple! Unfortunately, whether or not you’ll bag yourself a big win might depend on the casino where you choose to play.  For the national picture on legal casino gambling, our gambling by state guide is a good next stop.

Indiana banned lotteries way back in 1851, and it was bad news for gambling all around, for well over a century. Attempts to legalize casino gambling were blocked time after time, until finally casinos were allowed from 1993 onwards. Casinos were expected to raise $100 million in taxes per year, which to politicians, is a jackpot in itself!

Of the 13 Indiana casinos, 12 of them are commercial casinos, and one is a tribal casino. In total, the gambling industry in the state supports just over 38.000 jobs, and the gross gaming revenue for 2023 stood at $2.82 billion. 

So, to come to an irrefutable conclusion about which is the luckiest casino in Indiana, our Casinos.com team analyzed thousands of Tripadvisor reviews, to see how many mentions there were of keywords like “lucky”, “winner”, and “jackpot”. 

Based on that, we created a scale that ranks these casinos:

If you can’t handle the suspense anymore, we’ll cut right to the chase. 

The luckiest casino in Indiana is officially the Hard Rock Casino Northern Indiana. It got a superb rating of 48% on our Luck Scale, with eight out of 50 reviews mentioning the word “won”, and three calling out the word “jackpot”. 

This casino is pretty new, but one person has already said “Winning a "Grand Jackpot" on a penny slot machine during my first visit to the new Hard Rock Casino in Gary, Indiana was a great introduction!”. 

That sounds pretty promising to us.

Not too far behind the number one spot, we have Four Winds Casino South Bend, which got 38.39% on the scale. The casino promises fine dining options, as well as over 1,600 slot machines including big progressive jackpots, plus 10 live poker tables. 

Surely you’ll get lucky at one of those? Four Winds had a high number of people using the words “won” or “winning” in their reviews (12 and 15 times out of 112 respectively), and one player said “My first visit here was lucky. I hit a jackpot and came home with lots of winnings." The same person also sang the praises of the buffet and spa, so it doesn’t sound like you can really go wrong here.

In at third position is Majestic Star Casino in Gary which received a rating of 31.17%, with 24 keyword mentions out of 77 reviews. 

This one is on a boat - what fun! According to one review “I won 3 jackpots last year at Majestic -- two after having recently lost at Rivers”, well that’s all fine and well, but unfortunately the Majestic Star Casino closed for good in 2021, so no one’s winning a jackpot there these days.

Onto the not-so-lucky. Rising Star Casino failed to impress, with 13.07% on our scale. Although five people did use the word “winning”, there were absolutely no mentions of “jackpot”, “handpay”, “bonus”, or “profit”, which doesn’t bode well. 

Indeed, one unhappy visitor said “Very tight machines...all people not happy and complaining...the weekly awards only goes to friends and relatives!” Ah but come on now, it’s on a boat, and seeing we can't visit Majestic Star anymore, we might have to give it a go.

Horseshoe Hammond didn’t do much better, with 13.55%. Although, there were over 15,000 reviews, so you can’t please everyone. This casino is just 20 minutes from downtown Chicago, and boasts a selection of 1,800 slot games where you can try to get lucky. “I'm a high roller & my losses here was more than $30k in a year. But never won a thing!” big, if true. 

Methodology 

Casinos.com utilized Tripadvisor reviews to do an in-depth analysis of phrases associated with luck to determine the luckiest and unluckiest casinos in the state of Indiana. We calculated the percentage of luck-rated mentions in the total Tripadvisor reviews and extrapolated them as if all Casinos had the same number of reviews for fairness.

Keywords tracked: Lucky, Luck, Winning, Big Win, Winner, Bonus, Profit, Success, Jackpot, Hand Pay

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