Mac Rating: 5.00 | Votes: 1 | Date: 03/07/2026 00:33:00

The biggest casino floor in Kansas City keeps a proper theatre inside it. Ameristar Casino Hotel at 3200 North Ameristar Drive, on the Missouri River just east of downtown, opened on 16 January 1997 as Station Casino and took its current name after Ameristar Casinos acquired the property in December 2000; today Boyd Gaming operates the complex, whose 140,000 square feet of gaming - 2,800 slots, 57 table games and a 15-table live poker room - lead the Kansas City market. The entertainment engine is the Star Pavilion, a 1,350-seat performance theatre whose alumni list reads like a jukebox: B.B. King, Aretha Franklin, Tony Bennett, the Beach Boys, Lynyrd Skynyrd and Travis Tritt through the classic years, with contemporary bookings running from The Struts and Tyler Hubbard to Dane Cook and full MMA fight cards. The room's pitch is intimacy with production - no seat far from the stage, clean acoustics, tickets through Ticketmaster or the box office that opens at six on show nights, and an 18-plus door unless accompanied. Around the theatre the property works as a full evening: a AAA Three Diamond hotel with 184 rooms and suites, seven dining venues, smaller live-music bars with local and regional acts, and 15,000 square feet of meeting and event space. Free parking and the riverside location off Route 210 keep the arithmetic simple - dinner, show and the casino floor without moving the car, ten minutes from downtown Kansas City. The property's corporate lineage tracks the industry's consolidation - Station to Ameristar to Pinnacle to Boyd Gaming, with the real estate held by Gaming and Leisure Properties - but the local formula has stayed constant: the biggest floor in the market, a theatre that books names the city remembers, and a riverside address fifteen minutes from anywhere in the metro. The former Regal Cinemas that anchored the entertainment wing through 2022 gave way to expanded event space.