Grande Vegas certainly showing its age, but there is still a good amount of content here to warrant a visit, especially if you are a US player.
Today we wanted to pay homage to one of the founding fathers of the online casino industry: Grande Vegas. This online casino is, as of writing this, 12 years old and is still around with an active playerbase. What’s more, this is one of the rare online casinos that accept players from the United States and, as you will see later, that is a huge deal in this industry.
In this piece, we are going to take a look at what makes Grande Vegas special, how it copes in today’s online casino industry, and the sacrifices it had to make to get US players on board.
About Grande Vegas
The year is 2009, the king of pop passed away, the sixth Harry Potter movie had just come out and the word of gambling was introduced to online casino called Grande Vegas. Naturally, since Internet speeds were limited back then, you couldn’t just log in and play the games. You had to create an account, link your payment method and then download the casino to your desktop PC.
From there, you would play the game and use the actual website to use your bonuses, make deposits, withdrawals, etc. For today’s standards, it was a little inconvenient but that was the best casinos could do back then.
As online gambling started to gain momentum and become more popular, more laws and regulations had to be implemented. Unfortunately, the USA was one of those countries with the strictest regulations. They pretty much banned most software providers in their region, they limited bonuses, and, naturally, set huge winning taxes for those lucky enough to win at casino games.
With these new regulations, most online casinos (even new ones that come out today) simply gave up on tacking the USA online casino market – but not Grande Vegas! Grande Vegas swallowed hard and bent the knee to USA gambling laws. And it paid off. Even today, many US players flock over to Grande Vegas to scratch that gambling itch. Even though the casino is lacking a lot when compared to other online casinos, such sacrifices had to be made to welcome players from the West.
Casino Bonuses
Just like any good online casino, Grande Vegas draws its players by offering a good amount of bonuses and a VIP program. Players outside the USA can actually get $25 to spend at the casino absolutely free as part of the welcome bonus. US citizens actually have a special bonus made exclusively for them which awards them with a 150% match bonus (players outside the USA can also claim this bonus just not as a first deposit.
Other than that, there is also a cashback bonus for any deposit made at the casino, a bi-weekly raffle, and a VIP system. The VIP system brings lots of benefits to loyal players but it might be expensive for some to maintain their VIP status.
Games
Unfortunately, this is where we have some bad news. As we mentioned before, back in the day, players used to have to download the entire casino to their desktop PC in order to play. While you can still do that today, that isn’t the optimal way to play online casinos.
In the case of Grande Vegas, their main website is still functioning but seeing how it was never designed to run casino games, players are redirected to a different website instead where they can play all the casino games using their browser.
This is a much simpler solution than downloading a casino. The instant play website works really well but it is still a little distracting when you have to navigate between two websites.
As for the actual games, there are around 150 titles. Out of those 150 titles, around 120 are slots while the rest are table games. This is an incredibly small amount of slots compared to other online casinos (that feature games in the thousands), however, you have to remember that all of these games are available in the USA (and not many of them are).
The slots and the table games all work really well. Slot games have a lot of varieties when it comes to themes and gameplay. Unfortunately, since many of them were done by the same development team, expect to see similar designs in the UX and UI.
For Blackjack, Baccarat, Roulette, and other table games, there are several categories that host them. There is also a good amount of video poker games and other poker variations.
Many avid online casino players have probably noticed that we haven’t mentioned Live casino games and there is a good reason for that. Grande Vegas does not have any live casino games at all. This is a huge letdown, especially since there are live casino game providers that are allowed in the USA but Grande Vegas chose not to host their games regardless.
Available Payment Options
In the early days of online casinos, credit cards were the only way to deposit and withdraw real money from casinos. Nowadays, there are plenty of options to make transactions easier and faster.
Thankfully, Grande Vegas has been keeping up with the times and thus they started accepting:
- e-wallets (like PayPal, ecoPayz, etc.)
- prepaid cards (Paysafecard)
- Bitcoin
Players need to make a minimum deposit of at least $25 in order to start playing. Before players can withdraw their funds, they need to go through a mandatory KYC check which is standard procedure for most online casinos.
Grande Vegas Casino Summary
Online casinos come and go but few remain active for more than a decade. Grande Vegas Casino is one of those few. While it is certainly showing its age, there is still a good amount of content here to warrant a visit, especially if you are a US player. Grande Vegas continues to stay relevant and, hopefully, it will continue to do so in the years to come. Thank you for reading our Grande Vegas Casino review!
