The short answer is taht the Sahara poker room is closed. The seven-table room dealt its final hand on November 16, 2024, and the property has not announced any plans to bring poker back.
If you’re seeing it listed as an open room, you’re reading an old page. Here’s the story, and where to find a game on this end of the Strip.
The unluckiest timing in Vegas poker
The Sahara room deserves to be remembered for its opening date alone: February 2020, weeks before every casino in Nevada was ordered shut by the pandemic. A brand-new seven-table room, on the rebranded north Strip property that had just shed the SLS name, opened its doors and almost immediately locked them.
It reopened with everything else and grinded along for roughly four years, a small, friendly, low-stakes room that mostly served hotel guests and locals who wanted a quieter alternative to the giants a mile south. It never had the traffic to be more than that, and in November 2024 it became the first of three Strip rooms to fold in a 20-month stretch.
Why it closed
Seven tables on the quiet end of the Strip is a hard business. Poker rooms feed on walk-in traffic and on players moving between nearby rooms, and the Sahara had neither: the north Strip’s foot traffic has never recovered to boom-era levels, and its only poker neighbor, Resorts World, was struggling with the same problem before closing its own room in March 2026.
With Planet Hollywood’s closure in January 2026 in between, the Strip lost three rooms in under two years, part of a longer contraction that has taken more than 40 Las Vegas poker rooms since 2011, from roughly 60 rooms at the peak to 17 today. The Sahara was the canary: small room, thin corridor, first to go.
Where to play instead
With Sahara and Resorts World both gone, the north Strip has no live poker. From the Sahara’s front door, your options:
- Wynn (52 tables): the nearest major room, a short ride south, and the Strip’s tournament flagship. Worth the trip for any serious session.
- Westgate (7 tables): the spiritual successor to what Sahara’s room was, small, low-stakes, and unhurried, a short hop east by the convention center.
- Venetian (50 tables): ten minutes by rideshare, open 24/7, with a major series running most weeks of the year.
- Downtown option, Golden Nugget (13 tables): if you’re heading to Fremont Street anyway, downtown’s only room reopened brand new in the Rush Tower in July 2026.
Our full comparison of every open room in Las Vegas is here.
