ALL-OUT! Sahara Will Be 7th Vegas Strip Casino to Fold Poker Room in 5 Years

Posted on: October 24, 2024, 09:24h. 

Last updated on: October 25, 2024, 03:00h.

Corey Levitan Read More
Expertise: Commercial Gaming, Entertainment, Expert Insight, Las Vegas, Restaurants, Las Vegas Myths.

The Sahara will close its poker room on November 16, replacing the space with more slot machines.

The Sahara’s seven-table poker room will close on November 16. (Image: Sahara)

“When it debuts in mid-December, the enhanced offerings will include dedicated slot banks where players can be some of the first in Las Vegas to play the newest test games from top gaming content providers,” read a press statement from Sahara GM Paul Hobson.

The Sahara’s original poker room closed in April 2011. When the SLS took over the property in 2014, it didn’t include a replacement. After the property reverted to the Sahara again, though, it opened its current poker room in February 2020.

This will make the Sahara the seventh Las Vegas Strip casino to permanently fold its poker tables in the past five years.

Here’s a timeline:

March 2020: The Excalibur closes its poker room due to the pandemic and never reopens it. It now uses the area for slot tournaments. The Tropicana and Mirage follow suit, never reopening theirs.

June 2020: Harrah’s closes its poker room, initially turning it into a nonsmoking slot area and later, into space for electronic table games after the pandemic.

July 2021: Planet Hollywood closes its poker room, transforming it into space for more slots and games.

November 2021: The Flamingo closes its poker room, converting it into a sportsbook fan zone.

Elsewhere in Las Vegas over the same period, Binion’s, the Cannery, Silver Sevens, and Club Fortune also closed their poker rooms, and Green Valley Ranch converted theirs into a sports viewing area.

Earn and Turn

It’s not that poker is no longer popular. Although it doesn’t draw like it did at its peak two decades ago, most rooms on the Strip are reported to be at least half-full every night. The Sahara currently runs four poker tournaments daily, which it wouldn’t be doing if no one showed up.

The issue is that poker doesn’t earn as much for casinos as table games or machines do. And that’s because the game provides no edge to the house. Casinos don’t directly benefit from player losses and, instead, earn rake, a small percentage taken from each pot in cash games, or tournament fees.

Per square foot, poker is a losing proposition for casinos, relatively speaking.

Food Hall-Adjacent

What most tourists see as an unrelated simultaneous trend — casinos replacing beloved (formerly cheap) buffets with expensive food halls — isn’t all that unrelated. Buffets are on their way out for the same reason: they’re not money-makers, whereas food halls are.

Poker rooms may even be more of a target than buffets because they draw players away from the casino floor for hours at a time. Those are prime gambling hours when players could be losing to casinos instead of only to one another. And once players finally exit poker rooms, most do so cash-poor, exhausted, and with little urge to gamble more.

This is believed to be the real reason the Venetian moved its poker room far away from its casino floor this summer, to a hidden corner on the second floor of the Grand Canal Shoppes.

Great Caesars’ Poker Ghost

As if this isn’t bad enough news for poker players, many industry insiders believe that Caesars Palace will be the next casino to evict its poker room, which would make it the fourth Caesars Entertainment property in five years to do so.

Caesars Palace has never not had a poker room since it opened in August 1966, by the way.

Although Caesars Entertainment said it closed its poker room in August to make space for slot machines while renovating its high-limit slot area, no reopening date has yet been set.