It really is amazing what the people of Texas have built in Oklahoma. Not only is WinStar now the third-largest casino in the world*, but also Choctaw (the “other” casino for Dallas people) is undergoing an expansion that will make it the 17th largest in the world.
* Third is my number, btw, based on Business Week data, despite WinStar’s claim that they are just 5th.
At 110,000 square feet, the Choctaw Casino in Durant, Okla., will have the same amount of gaming space as Wynn Las Vegas, and slightly more than Wynn Macao.
There are 50 poker rooms in Las Vegas, so we thought you might appreciate the assistance of fellow degenerates in narrowing down the possibilities of where to play when you come to town. The votes have been tallied … and four places stood out above the rest … In what may or may not become a recurring tradition around these parts, Pokeratizens say the Best Poker Rooms in Vegas are:
Gold Medal The Venetian
Great regular tourneys, Deep Stack Extravaganzas, plenty of all-but-the-highest-stakes action, bottled Fiji water, and maybe the escalator that dumps off drunkenly clad party girls coming out of Tao right in front of The V’s poker room make it far and away the favorite of this website’s readers/players/dealers.
The separate tournament room really is cool, if not the best in town, and the comfortable multi-tiered cash game area never seems short of action appealing to the masses of big little-stakes players. Great freerolls for regular cash players, too.
Still home to the biggest games in Vegas (in terms of buy-ins), thereby drawing the most pros and the players who want to challenge/sit near them. Everything Bellagio is always luxe, of course, and their regular $500 and $1k tourneys makes the chance to play for baller money an in-town constant.
A common question I’m getting these days: “So are you playing much? How’s it going?”
In a nutshell, at the tables, not particularly well. (Especially compared to last year, whence I shocked myself by making more money playing during the WSOP than actually working during the WSOP.) I’ll see if we can’t whip up a visually compelling WSOP bankroll chart/graph … but in the meantime, it’s not like you have to be able to read music to get a sense of what the following — which is all the poker I have played over the past two weeks — would look like:
A Las Vegas poker-room development … Starting last week (or maybe a few days before) the Mirage has changed from 9-handed tables to 10-handed.
No confirmation on what the rationale was behind the decision to change. But you can think originally that 9-handed offered a faster game on more tables … i.e. more rake … and perhaps a better player experience, too. Let’s say you had 81 players wanting action … great, nine tables of nine does everyone better than eight tables of 10 with one alternate, right?
But I suppose if there isn’t a constant influx of new players, then 10-handed is better because it presumably slows the pace of tables breaking down.
The World Poker Tour will be announcing its Season 7 schedule next week, and according to some recent banter around the high-stakes tournament tables, at least two (not-so?) major events will be, er, disappeared — the WPT Mandalay Bay Poker Championship and the WPT Mirage Poker Showdown.
A company spokeswoman could neither confirm nor deny, but did say that WPT Enterprises has “really looked at the market and listened closely to feedback from players.” So I suppose we’ll see next week when the official press release comes out.
In the meantime, here’s Pokerati’s super-undercover investigative reporter Tom Schneider with the report:
Gold Medal
Silver Medal
Bronze Medal
