Las Vegas, NV: The Orleans Hotel & Casino will host the 2009 Orleans Poker Open from May 9th – 19th.  The 2009 Orleans Open is highlighted by two Championship Events, the $540 Omaha Hi-Lo Championship on Saturday, May 16th and the $540 No Limit Hold’em Championship on Sunday, May 17th.

The starting chip amounts shown below include the 2,500 extra chips for the $10 Staff Bonus.  All 12:00 noon events have 45 minute blind levels, 7:00PM events have 20 minute blind levels. Satellites begin on Saturday, Mat 9th at 5:00pm. 

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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.

official site / TPA

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.

official site / TPA

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.

official site / TPA

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LAS VEGAS–I ran into Felicia Lee (the Susan Powter of Poker?) and her lovely husband Glenn. I was prepared for her to say somethng along the lines of, “hi, how’s it going you bad-blogging, sexist no-good motherfucker?” — because that’s how she rolls/shows she cares — but in fact she was pleasant and delightful, particularly for someone who recently busted out of a tourney.

She had just come from the Orleans … which seems to be smartly capitalizing on the influx of poker players in town.

OK, that may apply to everywhere in V-town this month. But the Orleans, for all its relative Vegas nothingness, knows its poker. And its offering games that cater to the people who want to play big tourneys for hundreds of dollars, as opposed to thousands. Felicia and Glenn had just played an Omaha event with 600 players, many of whom were “second tier” pros. (Tom McEvoy, for example.)

To make the action even more appealing, the Orleans has supposedly cut the juice on tournament buy-ins in half. And they are running hour-long (or maybe 50 minutes?) blind levels. And they are giving you more starting chips than usual.