Pocket poker room guide for Las Vegas
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While much of the poker community’s focus during summer in Las Vegas is on the Rio as host to the World Series of Poker, there is no shortage of poker rooms in town worthy of your attention. Here are my picks for the top seven other poker rooms you must visit while in Vegas.
#1 Bellagio – The 7,000-square-feet room holds a great variety of games and limits among its more than 40 tables. Be warned, though, that this room is often considered among the toughest in town as it frequently has the best players at each of those limits. The Bellagio poker room also features weekly $500 and $1,000 buy-in tournaments with first-place prizes often in the five figures. The casino is offering the Bellagio Cup this summer for the fourth year, running in July.
#2 Binion’s – Come to the place that started it all. Here you can view framed pictures of the Poker Hall of Fame and Gallery of Champions from the WSOP. Binion’s still features one of the largest poker rooms in town, even if most of the tables sit unused except for larger tournaments. The second annual Binion’s Poker Classic should fill them up again. The casino is planning an expansion soon and the tournament area will be moved into the old sportsbook area.
#3 Venetian – This is perhaps the most comfortable and largest poker room in town. With 11,000-square-feet in a great placement at the front of the casino, the 40-table room features a wide-open environment with plenty of space between each parcel of felt. Like the casino itself, the poker room is luxuriously designed and adorned. It’s also home to the semi-annual Deep Stack Extravaganza.
#4 Mirage – When Mike McDermott hopped into that cab at the end of “Rounders”, this is where he was headed because it had the biggest games in town before the Bellagio opened down the street. The action here is still brisk with lots of no limit and high limit hold’em action mixed with some stud and Omaha. The 30-table room features a number of multi-hundred dollar tournaments throughout the week.
#5 Wynn – Although this poker room is not large by Las Vegas standards, it makes up for in luxury what it lacks in square footage. You knew that when Steve Wynn was building his namesake casino that he wouldn’t skimp on the poker room. While the city’s biggest games didn’t move over here as Wynn had hoped, the poker room is still home to plenty of high limit and no limit games, as well as the now annual Wynn Classic series of tournaments. The room is located conveniently near the parking garage and you can even get paged from you room for games.
#6 Caesar’s Palace – The poker room here is among the most comfortable in town, with room between tables and a relaxed environment. It also features a separate tournament room that is the home of the National Heads-Up Poker Championship in the spring. Situated between the sportsbook and nightclub Pure, the room offers a variety of games and limits (including many of the HORSE games and the likes of Lowball and Badugi).
#7 MGM Grand – The poker room here is one of the few decent ones on the South end of the Strip. The room is near the center of the casino so it draws a lot of foot traffic, and it open up into the casino and therefore draws the railbirds. There’s plenty of good low blinds no limit action here.
