JACK Thistledown Racino Review: What Is On the Floor and On the Track

JACK Thistledown Racino is a racino in North Randall, Cuyahoga County. Its gaming floor opened in 2013. Thoroughbred racing at the site is far older than the gaming floor, and the track is the home of the Ohio Derby, the only graded stakes race in the state. The licence permits terminals only: there is no dealt table on this floor and cannot be.

The venue holds an Ohio Lottery Commission video lottery terminal licence. Which of Ohio’s two licence classes a venue holds is the only thing that settles whether a table can be dealt here.

Thistledown, With the Spelling Corrected

The property is JACK Thistledown Racino. The address of this page keeps an older misspelling, which is a deliberate choice: the address is the one people and other sites already use, and changing it would break links that work today.

It is a racino, licensed for video lottery terminals by the Ohio Lottery Commission. No dealt tables. For those, JACK Cleveland Casino is roughly twenty minutes away and holds the county’s casino licence.

Racing at North Randall

Thoroughbred racing is the older half of the site by a long stretch, and the racing calendar is independent of the gaming floor’s hours. The two operations share a location and little else in scheduling terms.

The gaming floor opened in 2013. The racetrack is far older, and this site keeps those two facts in separate fields instead of collapsing them into one founding year.

Where It Fits

Cuyahoga County has two gaming venues and this is the racino of the pair. Add MGM Northfield Park just over the Summit County line and northeast Ohio has the densest cluster of venues in the state, three of them racinos.

Operator and Missing Details

JACK Entertainment operates the venue. No street address appears in the material this site works from. The gaming-floor figure is the operator’s own published number.

The minimum age is 21, and the Ohio Problem Gambling Helpline runs around the clock on 1-800-589-9966.

Why This Page’s Address Is Misspelled

Readers who know the track will notice that the web address of this page spells the name wrong. That is deliberate, and worth explaining once. The address has been in use long enough that other sites and saved links point at it in that form, and changing it would break every one of those.

So the address keeps the older spelling and the page itself uses the correct one. It is the less tidy of the two options and the one that keeps existing links working.

The Densest Corner of the State

Northeast Ohio holds more gaming venues than anywhere else in the state, and three of the four nearest to this one are racinos. JACK Cleveland Casino is the exception and the only place in the immediate region licensed for a dealt table. For a visitor, that means the region offers plenty of choice in machines and almost none in tables.

57,000 Square Feet, Second Smallest in the State

JACK Thistledown Racino has a gaming floor of 57,000 square feet. Only Belterra Park is smaller among the ten Ohio venues that publish a figure, and MGM Northfield Park, under the same class of licence, is more than three times the size.

A small floor is not a worse floor for every visitor. It is a shorter walk, and the racing side of the site is the older and larger half of the operation.

Who Runs It and Who Owns It

JACK Entertainment operates the racino and VICI Properties owns the property. The distinction matters more here than at most venues, because the racing licence, the gaming licence and the freehold have not moved together over the site’s history.