I went to Harrahs Chester, PA last night, Thursday December 31, 2009 around 12:10am. All the slot machines, cannot accepted the promotional coupon that we received in mail. It was so hectic in the casino, the line in the cashier was so long and crazy.

Most of the Harrahs's Chester employees can not handle that situation and really have bad attitudes with customers. I believe this is kind of like a scam, we received the coupon but couldn't used it. Be careful...

I live 15 minutes away from here and go here several times a month, so I can give you a pretty accurate picture of the casino. If you enjoy playing slots and are not looking for anything else you will have fun here. This is particularly true if you smoke, since about half the slots here allow smoking. If you don't smoke, there are plenty of slots far from the smoking areas as well. The payouts of the slots are not nearly as good as Atlantic City or Las Vegas. It pays better than Delaware Park though. Figure on about a 90% return, as opposed to the 93% to 95% you get in AC.



If you are looking for more to do than play slots, this is not a good choice. The Diamond lounge was open late when they first launched the casino, but they decided to close it early to try to push their best players out and back onto the slots. It is now basically dead except the hour and a half they serve free food there. Though why anyone would eat that food is beyond me. School cafeterias serve better food than the Diamond lounge does.

They have a typical Harrah's circle bar in the back which is surrounded by smoking machines, but does not allow smoking in the lounge. They will usually have the local Philly sports game on, but you have to usually beg them to put on the sound. The other bar on the Casino floor is called a sports bar, but has no high def televisions and plays loud music instead of the sound of the game. It does seem to get a lively crowd from Chester on Fridays and Saturdays when they have live bands, if that is your scene.



Food at the casino ranges from terrible to mediocre. I wouldn't feed the Diamond lounge food to my dog. Their high end restaurant is not terrible, but would never compete in AC or Vegas. The best food is probably the sports bar, which serves average TGI Friday type of fare. I would suggest eating somewhere else and then coming here to just play the slots. If you really want a meal with your gambling, drive down the road to Delaware Park which actually serves decent food.



In conclusion, if you live nearby or are visiting Philly and want to take a quick trip to a place to play some slots for a few hours, this is a good choice. It is a half hour drive from center city and despite the location, perfectly safe to drive in and out of. If you have a whole day to kill and want to gamble, drive the extra hour it takes to go to Atlantic City and visit any of the casinos there (Caesars is my personal favorite). You will have a much better time in AC than Chester.

Delaware Park used to have good comps and big payouts, but recently their comps are bad and their payouts are lousy. We were told by a security guy that the machines will not pay out well unless you put a lot of money into them.

We used to go there all the time but since they took our bonus slot dollars away we hardly go. We were told that one of their departments did away with rewarding people for coming to their casino unless you play and lose alot of money. We were getting 25 slot dollars which they cut back to 10 slot dollars. Now they even took that away. They weren't losing money by giving people slot dollars if you think about it when you win you end up putting more money into a machine anyway. What were they thinking?

They say you have free play in their slot tournament on Thursday, but they don't let you play if you don't have enough points. Now compared to Harrahs in Chester, Chester is pretty. If you find the right machine the payout is ok.

The best casino though I think is Harrington Casino in Delaware. The payouts were pretty good. The customer service people are alright. At Delaware Park the food is pretty good though depending on what you like. The sodas have too much ice though and sometimes even though the drinks are free some of the ladies who take the drinks around get a little upset if you don't give them any money.

The slots are ok, nothing great nothing bad, There are no table games, but got some sorta blackjack dealer-type thing in a big machine that deals cards to multi players

The diamond club blows. The only one worse i have been to is the one in Windsor, Canada. And dont expect much from the restaurants inside.

Customer service is ok. Some of the security people are very rude and seem to be very bored from the things i see them do. If you're not far from there, it's ok to visit and play once in a while.

This place is great for people who want to take a break for a while and go see some horse races and it's way more convienent than driving to Delaware Park or Philly.

The food isn't all that great and some of the tellers don't really know what they're doing, but other than that it's not that bad.

People hear Chester and think all the wrong things, for heavens sake it's behind a prison what could possibly go wrong? Nothing dangerous is near you, you're completely safe.

But in all honesty I dont think it's fair that because you lose money you give it a bad rating, the place is nice and live racing there is really nice.

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