What it means
Casino Arizona is the low, wide casino at the northeast corner of McKellips Road and the Loop 101, the first gaming hall the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community opened and the one locals mean when they use the name without a qualifier. It is where south Scottsdale and Tempe go for bingo, for the poker room, for a cheap buffet and a Tuesday-night slot session. It is not where they go for a show or a hotel; that is Talking Stick, four miles up the freeway, which the Community also owns and which carries “Casino Arizona at Talking Stick Resort” on its gaming floor.
Hearing the name correctly tells you something about the speaker. Visitors say “the casino” and mean the tower they can see from the 101. Locals say “Casino Arizona” for McKellips and “Talking Stick” for Indian Bend, and they say “the Community” for the government that owns both, because it is a sovereign nation, not a Scottsdale business. The site’s guide to that government is the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community; the resort has its own page at Talking Stick Resort.
Where you’ll meet it
On the freeway signs at McKellips; on billboards along the 101; on the Diamondbacks’ broadcasts, where the Community’s casinos are a sponsor; and in south Scottsdale conversation, where “going to Casino Arizona” is a short drive east.
Where the word came from
The name is a claim of scale: not a tribe’s casino, the state’s. It dates to 1998, when the Community entered gaming late and deliberately. The federal Indian Gaming Regulatory Act of 1988 had set the framework; other Arizona tribes signed compacts with the state in the early 1990s. The Community passed its own gaming ordinance on June 26, 1996, signed its first compact with Arizona on August 18, 1998, and opened Casino Arizona at Salt River that same August in a temporary structure at McKellips and the then-new freeway: a poker room with 47 tables and 240 employees. Slot machines, 250 of them, followed by March 1999, and in September 2000 a permanent building opened with 500 slots, 50 table games and 1,200 workers.
The brand spread north almost at once. In March 1999 a second Casino Arizona opened at Indian Bend Road and the 101 in a sprung tent structure, beside the Pavilions shopping center the Community had built a decade earlier. That tent did a decade’s business, and in April 2010 the Community replaced it with the 15-story Talking Stick Resort, opened April 15, keeping Casino Arizona as the name of the resort’s gaming floor. The compact under which both operate was renegotiated after Arizona voters passed a gaming measure in November 2002; the Community signed the current compact on February 5, 2003, and it authorizes exactly two casinos.
The 2002 referendum also changed what the McKellips floor could hold. Bingo was removed to make room for the newly allowed games and did not return until 2012; it is now a 1,000-seat hall, and the reason your grandmother knows the building.
What it is not
Casino Arizona is not a Scottsdale casino, legally or fiscally; it is on Community land, and the city collects nothing from it. It is not Talking Stick, though the two share a logo and a loyalty card. And it is not the Fort McDowell casino, We-Ko-Pa, which belongs to the Yavapai Nation east of Fountain Hills.
The fine print
The compact is the fine print. Arizona’s tribal-state compacts set how many machines and tables a tribe may run, what share of revenue goes to the state and to cities and towns, and how long the deal lasts; the Community’s 2003 compact followed the 2002 voter-approved framework, which is why the Community’s own gaming history page describes it as “authorizing two casinos.” Gaming revenue is the Community’s, spent by its elected council on government, schools, police and health services; none of it is taxed by Scottsdale, and the compact’s state-shared revenue is distributed by formula, not by neighbor.
Scale, as of the most recent public descriptions: more than 100,000 square feet of gaming at McKellips, about 1,000 slot machines, 50 blackjack tables, five restaurants, the bingo hall and the poker room it started with. The Talking Stick floor is larger, at roughly 240,000 square feet. Employment across the Community’s gaming enterprise is in the thousands, a major share of the East Valley’s hospitality jobs.
The record’s gap is the usual one with tribal enterprises: the Community publishes dates and compact terms but not revenue, so every dollar figure you read about Casino Arizona is an outside estimate. The Community’s gaming history page is the primary source for the chronology here; the floor counts come from Wikipedia and the casino’s own promotional pages and change with every remodel.