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BILOXI, Miss. — The Gulf Coast woke up and got down to the work of cleaning up from Hurricane Isaac on Friday, heading out under cloudy skies to find groceries and then returning home to fill trash bags and pry plywood from windows.

But here on the floor of the Beau Rivage Resort and Casino, the wheels of fortune spun and the lucky doubled down. The party had already begun the night before.

The 1,740-room hotel and casino, half of which sits on a barge jutting into the Gulf of Mexico, was the first of the Biloxi casinos to reopen, welcoming three poker players to a table just before 6 p.m., the last effects of the storm still blowing outside. Five of the 12 casinos on the coast here managed to open later Thursday night, when many businesses were still dark. The rest were scheduled to be opened by Saturday.

Seven years ago, when Hurricane Katrina pulled the Beau Rivage slot machines and craps tables into the ocean, it took $550 million and a year to reopen. On Thursday, in a feat that seemed as coordinated as a sophisticated military operation, it took just under five hours.

It would be hard to overestimate the economic importance of getting the coastal casinos back in business. In July alone, they took in $110 million. The state gets 8 percent of that, and the cities and counties get 4 percent. Every day that the casinos were closed, the local government lost $100,000.

“Why are they open?” asked Jordan Brooks, a retired school administrator playing a video poker machine on Thursday night. “There is no secret,” he said, rubbing his fingers together and making the international sign for money.

MGM Resorts International, which owns the Beau Rivage, initially did not want to shut down operations as the storm approached. No mandatory evacuations were in effect, and the building was designed to withstand a good-size hurricane.

Of course, the Labor Day holiday was on everyone’s mind. Almost all the hotels here had been fully booked. Poker tournaments and special shows were scheduled. Every hour that the resorts stayed closed meant dozens of cancellations for the weekend.

Besides, shutting down a casino and hotel is not a simple matter of locking up millions of dollars and turning out the lights.

Although the Gulf Coast gambling industry is not as big as the ones in Las Vegas or Atlantic City, casino jobs are the Mississippi River of employment in this part of the country.

At the Beau Rivage alone, 3,000 people collect paychecks, said Mary Cracchiolo Spain, the resort’s spokeswoman. And that does not account for businesses that supply prime steaks for the high rollers, fancy oils for the spas, and thousands of other products that flow to the region every day.

The Mississippi Gaming Commission ordered the casinos to shut down by Tuesday morning as the slow-moving storm was approaching the coast of Louisiana and Mississippi. The few hundred hotel guests left in the 29-story Beau Rivage were told that they would have to leave by the morning.

The casino flies about 90,000 people a year in and out on a private 737. That plane would have to be moved, so it was packed with employees who could recreate the casino’s call center at its sister property upstate.

The executive chef, Joseph Friel, a veteran of the Plaza Hotel and the “21” Club in New York, drained all the fryers and packed food from the hotel’s 19 kitchens into walk-in freezers and a refrigerated truck across the street that would all run on generators.

Slot machines and A.T.M.’s were covered in plastic. Chips were moved to a vault. In the counting room, where workers wear coveralls with no pockets and everything from the tables to the trash cans are made of clear glass or plastic, the last of the money was accounted for.

Brink’s made a last pickup, and the gaming commission made a last check of the computer systems that run the slot machines and counted the last of the dice and the cards. The flood walls went up, and everyone abandoned ship, save for a dozen workers who stayed to ride out the storm.

Immediately, George P. Corchis Jr., the president of regional operations for MGM, started thinking about when to reopen, making repeated calls to the gaming commission, his staff and the meteorologists the company keeps on retainer.

Like many people on the Gulf Coast, he woke up early Thursday expecting the storm to be over. But it was still raging outside, and the coastal highway was still partly underwater, so he postponed the decision. But by 1 p.m., he was ready to take the gamble. He would have the doors open before 6 p.m.

Employees were called in. The kitchen was fired up. Silt was washed from the bus lobby, which, except for slot machines hit by a few leaks, was the only part of the building that took on water. What Mr. Corchis called “a very large Brink’s truck” filled with money arrived.

Since the power had not gone out, the gaming commission did not need to check each of the 2,200 machines. That made the job easier. As a craps dealer loaded $750,000 worth of chips onto a table and a bartender readied his station, the O.K. was given.

With it, the marketing team leapt into action, posting messages on Twitter and Facebook and calling every special guest they could with the news. The casino was ready.

Waiting at the door were three poker players, who headed right to a no-limit Texas Hold ’Em table. Like poker players everywhere, they were not showing much emotion over the speed with which the gambling industry on the coast had managed to get back into business.

“I tried to go to a movie, and it was closed,” Ismail Birben, who drove in from Gautier, Miss., said with a shrug. “This was the only place that was open.”