General Manager, Comanche Nation Casino

Ken Gooden serves as Comanche Nation Casino’s General Manager. He is a member of the Comanche tribe and has worked in the gaming industry for more than 30 years.

At Comanche Nation Casino, Ken is responsible for establishing performance expectations, company organization, implementing policies and procedures, vendor relations and instilling a diverse and collaborative workforce. Over the course of his long career, he has worked with major Las Vegas resorts and several tribal properties in Oklahoma and Louisiana, which makes him a unique asset to Comanche Nation Entertainment (CNE) with a thorough understanding of gaming and tribal properties.

Early in Ken’s career, he served as a Casino Supervisor for both Circus-Circus Hotel and Casino and Luxor Hotel and Casino. During his 10-year career with what is now MGM Resorts International in Las Vegas, he oversaw table games, trained dealers and opened the famed Luxor Hotel and Casino. The Luxor’s successful launch led him to Louisiana to open Cypress Bayou Casino where he worked as a Shift Manager.

Ken’s career brought him to work with CNE in 2000. He worked in surveillance prior to the opening of Comanche Nation Casino in Lawton in 2001, where he opened the property’s entire table games operations in just nine days. He served as Table Games Manager for two years prior to his first stint as Red River’s General Manager, a position he held from 2003-2007.

He then spent nine years, from 2007-2016, working with Apache Casino Hotel in Lawton as its Director of Table Games and GM. He joined Golden Eagle Casino in Apache as GM in 2017 and spent two years there before re-joining Red River as GM in 2019.

As General Manager at Red River, Ken was involved in several major projects at Red River, including the conversion of the International Gaming Technology back office system to the Aristocrat platform and, recently, all COVID-19 related updates at Red River. The conversion affected all of the casino’s 1,100 gaming machines and the COVID-19 updates involved implementing new technology, HVAC systems and sanitization protocols. He was also responsible for successfully restructuring the property’s organization chart and reducing payroll costs by 40 percent. In 2022, Ken assumed the General Manager position at Comanche Nation Casino in Lawton, OK.

Originally from Fletcher, Oklahoma, Ken earned his bachelor’s degree in accounting from Southwestern Oklahoma State University. One of his greatest personal accomplishments is his 23 years of sobriety as of January 2021. He is married to his wife of 22 years with four children and 13 grandchildren.