Vegas casinos compete for poker popularity

LAS VEGAS, Nev., November 30

Caesars Palace will open its first poker room in at least 12 years.

That's in response to the growing popularity of poker, while Bellagio and Bally's Las Vegas are considering expanding their poker areas.

The MGM Grand is also opening a poker room.

Many properties on the Las Vegas Strip still do not have poker rooms or closed their poker rooms years ago, preferring to install more profitable slot machines. But operators say a proliferation of television coverage on poker has changed that equation.

The poker room at Caesars will be about 15,000 square feet and open this spring.

More like they need a to a place for the husband to learn poker at the 10/20 table while the wife fires a months play into the slot machines.

Poker is not a money maker, just another way to get you in the front door.

What a joke these claims are, in most rooms all it does is add yet another 3-6 or 4-8 game to the already overcrowded landscape. What the casinos are doing these days is trying to find ways to make it so you leave the building as little as possible. The new Wynn property and the future MGM Mirage "City" concept aim to make it so you do everything on site and then leave town without spending a dime at competitors. Vegas goes through cycles where management thinks they can do this and where they admit they can't do it. Seeing many places like Caesars Palace starting to think they can come close to getting it. They might have higher limit games just due to their clientele, but I have seen so many new rooms on the Strip last 18 months or so and not one has offered anything other than yet more low limit hold-em games and maybe a $100-200 buy-in NL game. The Palms opened up a second poker room and have a sign saying "high limit", but all it offers is a NL game with up to a $500 buy-in. Not exactly "high limit" game.

Look for the MGM to take the WPT tournaments away from the Bellagio in the future.

Good point GD, the Bellagio gets way too crowded hosting those events. Then again I don't think they want to market the MGM Grand as the place for poker either, it just doesn't fit the demographic there so well I think. I think they will look to build a poker facility in one of the casinos and sort of make it a signature thing. I have heard Harrah's is thinking of dedicating a part of the Rio for such a project so they can do the WSOP well.

It costs Bellagio too much money by moving out table games to make space for the bigger tournaments. MGM will have 58 tables in their room and has TONS of space.