Minnesota Has About Twenty Tribal Casinos, No Craps, No Roulette and No Sports Betting. Here Is How to Pick One.
Minnesota's 11 tribes signed their gaming compacts in 1989 and 1991, the compacts never expire, they allow slot machines and blackjack and nothing else, and the tribes pay the state no gaming tax. That is why Minnesota has no commercial casino, no dice table and, after three more failed sessions, no sports betting. It still has some of the best tribal resorts in the country.
Published 2026-11-09.
The Minnesota Department of Public Safety's compact page is unusually candid. The state's 11 federally recognised tribes signed 22 tribal-state compacts, one for video games of chance and one for blackjack each, which "resulted in 20 casinos", and the tribes and the state "agreed to limit casinos to video games of chance and blackjack". The compacts, it adds, "should be effective forever".
That paragraph explains everything about gambling in Minnesota. There is no commercial casino because the compacts gave the tribes the field. There is no craps or roulette because the compacts did not include them. The tribes pay no state gaming tax, only a regulatory fee, because the compacts were signed before states learned to ask. And there is no sports betting because any bill has to satisfy 11 tribes, two racetracks and a divided Legislature, and for three sessions running none has. Our tribal gaming law explainer covers the federal framework; this is how to use the Minnesota version.
What you can and cannot play
Every Minnesota casino floor is slot machines, video poker and video keno, plus blackjack and the house-banked card games the tribes have added over the years: Mystic Lake's table page lists blackjack from $10, a new baccarat room, Three Card Poker, Ultimate Texas Hold'em, Mississippi Stud and Pai Gow variants. Live poker exists at some, bingo at many. What you will not find is a dice table or a roulette wheel, because the compacts never covered them and the state's annual report to the Legislature for 2025 records no request to renegotiate; the only changes were a technical amendment on slot payouts with Fond du Lac and an addendum with the Lower Sioux on card games other than blackjack.
Sports betting has died three years in a row. The 2024 bill expired on the final day of session. In 2025 the Senate committee vote tied 6 to 6 on February 13 and that was that. In 2026 a mobile-only bill with up to 11 tribal licences was introduced in March and the session ended in May without it passing either chamber. There is no sportsbook in any Minnesota casino and no legal app. If that is the point of the trip, Iowa and Wisconsin are the neighbours that have it, and our Iowa and Wisconsin guides cover both.
Smoking is the other thing to check before you book. The state's Clean Indoor Air Act does not reach tribal land, so each tribe sets its own rule, and they have gone in both directions: Leech Lake lifted its smoking bans in July 2023 at every property except Shingobee on the Bay, while Fortune Bay and Fond-du-Luth are fully smoke-free and Treasure Island keeps smoking inside two enclosed rooms. Mystic Lake's site does not state a policy, and we are not going to assert one.
The Twin Cities three: Mystic Lake, Little Six, Treasure Island
Mystic Lake Casino Hotel is the Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux Community's, 27 miles and about 40 minutes from downtown Minneapolis. It opened on May 12, 1992 and has 766 rooms, 180 of them in the Mystic Lake Center that opened in 2018 with 130,000 square feet of meeting space. The card is Club M, and the sign-up package at the time of writing is $50 in slot play, $25 in blackjack play and a $15 dining credit, which is a fair test of a casino's confidence. Hotel guests must be 21. The tribe does not publish a slot count and neither will we. Five miles north, next to Canterbury Park, the 19,000-seat Mystic Lake Amphitheater opened on June 20, 2026 under a Live Nation naming deal, which makes Prior Lake the one Minnesota casino with a real summer concert calendar nearby. Little Six, the tribe's original casino a mile away, is open around the clock with blackjack and Texas Hold'em and a free shuttle, and honours Club M.
Treasure Island Resort & Casino is the Prairie Island Indian Community's, on the Mississippi near Red Wing, 51 miles and about 70 minutes from Minneapolis. It has 788 rooms in three towers; the 246-room Buffalo Tower was rebuilt from the inside out in 2025 and reopened on February 10, 2026. The floor has more than 1,700 machines, 40 table games, a poker room and a 500-seat bingo hall, plus the two enclosed smoking areas, one with 260-plus slots. Outside there is a 16,000-seat amphitheater, a 135-slip marina and a 94-site RV park. The card is Island Passport, the hotel charges a $10 resort fee, and the whole thing is the closest Minnesota comes to a river resort in the Mississippi casino tradition.
Up I-35: the Grand Casinos
The Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe runs two Grand Casinos through Mille Lacs Corporate Ventures. Grand Casino Hinckley is at the I-35 exit 81 miles north of Minneapolis, roughly halfway to Duluth, and that location has made it the state's road-trip casino for 30 years. Its hotel lists 563 rooms, Explore Minnesota's listing adds 50 chalets and a 271-site RV park, and there is the Grand National golf course, a 300-seat bingo hall and an amphitheater. The floor is a little over 2,100 machines and a couple of dozen tables, by the published figures we could find, which are not the tribe's own. Grand Casino Mille Lacs, on the south shore of the lake at Onamia, 93 miles from the city, opened in 1991, a year before Hinckley, and is the quieter of the two. Both hotels were renovated top to bottom in a nine-month project that finished in July 2024, more than 1,100 rooms between them. The card is Grand Rewards and it works at both.
Hinckley is the better choice for a stop; Mille Lacs for a lake weekend with fishing on the side. Neither is a destination for a table player.
The north and the west
Duluth has two Fond du Lac Band properties. Black Bear Casino Resort in Carlton, 21 miles and about half an hour southwest of the city, advertises more than 1,800 slots and a 250-room hotel whose renovated tower rooms are smoke-free. Fond-du-Luth, on Superior Street downtown, is a different animal: open 8am to 2am, 18 and over, machines only including video blackjack, and smoke-free on both floors. It is the only casino in the state you can walk to from a city hotel.
Further north, Fortune Bay on Lake Vermilion near Tower is the Bois Forte Band's 172-room smoke-free resort with live poker and blackjack and The Wilderness golf course, open around the clock on weekends. The Leech Lake Band runs Northern Lights in Walker, Cedar Lakes in Cass Lake, which opened in August 2019 with 100 rooms to replace the old Palace, and White Oak in Deer River; smoking returned to all three in 2023. White Earth's Shooting Star in Mahnomen is the full resort, with a slots-only satellite in Bagley. The Red Lake Nation's Seven Clans casinos are at Thief River Falls, with a 40,000-square-foot water park, Warroad and Red Lake. Grand Portage Lodge & Casino is at the very top of the state, the last stop before the Canadian border on Highway 61, with a lodge, cabins and an RV park.
West of the Twin Cities, Jackpot Junction in Morton is the Lower Sioux Community's, with more than 1,250 slots, 24 tables, a 378-room hotel, bingo and the Dacotah Ridge golf course. Prairie's Edge in Granite Falls is the Upper Sioux Community's, with more than 160 rooms including a 76-room smoke-free wing, and a floor split into smoking and non-smoking areas.
The card rooms, and where the usual advice is wrong
Minnesota's two racetracks are not casinos and have no slot machines, which surprises visitors from states where tracks became racinos. What they have is card rooms. Canterbury Park in Shakopee, a public company, runs poker and unbanked table games at up to 80 tables around the clock, smoke-free, with live racing from May to September. Running Aces in Columbus, north of the cities, is also smoke-free and open 24 hours, with blackjack from $1, a poker room and a Wyndham-flagged hotel; its MSPT Winter Poker Classic runs December 1 to 13 with $500,000 guaranteed. For a table player in the Twin Cities who does not care about slots, the card rooms are a better night than most of the casinos, and the poker is certainly deeper.
The usual advice is to go to Mystic Lake because it is the biggest. It is the biggest, and the right pick for a convention crowd, a concert at the new amphitheater or a Club M member. But if you want a poker room, a marina or a cigarette at a machine, Treasure Island is the one; if you want a lake and golf, Hinckley or Mille Lacs; if you want to play 18 and over or walk from a downtown hotel, Fond-du-Luth; and if you want a dice table or a parlay, you want Wisconsin or Iowa. The thing that makes all of this possible, perpetual compacts that charge the tribes nothing, is also the thing that keeps the games the same as they were in 1991. Our tribal comps piece explains why the cards here tend to be generous with free play and stingy with rooms. The state list with distances is on Minnesota casinos, and casinos near Minneapolis and near Duluth rank them. Minnesota's own helpline is 1-800-333-HOPE, and 1-800-GAMBLER works too; if gambling has stopped being something you decide the cost of in advance, both are free and confidential.
Topics
- minnesota
- minneapolis
- mystic-lake
- tribal
- midwest
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