No food, no dice Atlantic City casinos will reopen on July 2 after more than 100 days in timeout because of the COVID-19 pandemic, but Borgata will not be one of them. After New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy reversed course and announced on Monday that indoor dining would not be allowed to restart, Borgata officials… Read more »
Casinos ask for licensing pause With casinos continuing to reopen across the United States, it appears that two North Las Vegas casinos may stay closed for another year. According to Eater Las Vegas, Texas Station and Fiesta Rancho, both Station Casinos properties, have no plans on reopening any time soon. Eater’s evidence, despite no confirmation… Read more »
Reverse merger Golden Nugget announced on Monday that it will taking its online gambling business unit, Golden Nugget Online Gaming, Inc. (GNOG), public. Once the process comes to fruition, GNOG will become the second “pure” online casino company, as the announcement put it, to be publicly traded. GAN was the first, going public in early… Read more »
As Las Vegas slowly begins to restart their casino gaming industry and Florida gets back to action, Pennsylvania and Illinois have been rather slow in getting back in the game. That will change in the next week as Boyd Gaming, who own properties in both states (and Nevada, for that matter), looks to restart operations… Read more »
Getting ready to take their wares totally online for the first time in their history Caesars Entertainment, the World Series of Poker and GGPoker have announced the schedule for GGPoker’s segment of the 2020 “online WSOP.” The 54-event schedule is replete with Texas Hold’em style tournaments, with a smattering of Omaha tossed in, but not… Read more »
The state of Nevada and, in particular, the city of Las Vegas have been devastated by the COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting shutdown. For more than two months, the industry that drives the economy of Nevada, the casinos, have sat silent. On June 4, some of those casinos reopened for customers but, as writer Jeff… Read more »
Time to start taking things seriously Caesars Entertainment is finally doing something it should have done before it reopened its first casino: it has made the waring of protective face masks mandatory for everyone who steps foot inside one of its properties. The company announced the policy change on Wednesday, June 24. It took effect… Read more »
PocketRocketsAA420 won’t win a bracelet If this was any other year, we would be firmly in the midst of the World Series of Poker right now. But alas, the COVID-19 pandemic is raging and the live WSOP in Las Vegas has been postponed. In its place is the World Series of Poker Online, to be… Read more »
Poker players will have to wait On Tuesday, the Massachusetts Gaming Commission approved the health and safety guidelines for reopening casinos. The main takeaway for our readers: there will be no poker for a while. No date has been set yet for when Encore Boston Harbor, MGM Springfield, and Plainridge Park Casino will be allowed… Read more »
Closed indefinitely More than three-quarters of the casinos in the United States have reopened after closing for at least two months because of the COVID-19 pandemic. The problem with celebrating being “OPEN FOR BUSINESS” is that you expose more people to the virus, especially in a crowded, closed environment like a casino. Now, I’m not… Read more »
When I saw the e-mail from PokerStars on Monday about a new tournament series called the Stadium Series, I raised an eyebrow (let’s pretend I can), intrigued that the poker room was launching a new live tournament event. After all, it’s called the Stadium Series. Thankfully, since we are in the midst of a pandemic,… Read more »
At long last More than three months after closing because of the COVID-19 pandemic, Atlantic City casinos finally have a reopening date: July 2. New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy announced the date on Twitter Monday afternoon. Murphy minced no words, saying, “If any visitor refuses to comply with our simple safeguards, they’ll be escorted out,”… Read more »
With the number of people that have been flooding back to the online world due to the shutdown of live poker, there are some old arguments that have come to the fore once again. There’s plenty of people talking about how “online poker is rigged” or that there is a “doom switch” for those who… Read more »
In a third amendment to the policies they established for the reopening of the Nevada gaming scene, the Nevada Gaming Control Board has taken a step that may be a significant change for some participants. After initially not mandating their usage, the latest update from the NGCB will mandate that, if table games are played… Read more »
During the coronavirus pandemic, we have done almost everything from home. For many, one of those activities has been poker. Live poker rooms have only just started to reopen in the last few weeks, so even now there is not much opportunity to go play poker with other people in person. And hell, I wouldn’t… Read more »
Pandemic has taken its toll Live poker has already taken a series of blows to the midsection during the COVID-19 pandemic, but even when more casinos open and poker begins its comeback, it will not fully recover. Genting Casinos has decided to discontinue its live poker operations in the United Kingdom. This is not a… Read more »
Last Thursday night, the wee morning hours of June 11, a man robbed the main cage of the newly-reopened New York-New York casino on the Las Vegas Strip. He was apprehended less than two hours later, but until Monday, not much was known about what happened except that nobody was injured. Las Vegas police have… Read more »
Breaking the seal Though the coronavirus pandemic has been a boon to online poker (silver lining of the crisis, I suppose), it has devasted live poker. For two months, there was no live poker anywhere in the United States, as some poker rooms have final begun reopening in recent weeks. But the few poker rooms… Read more »
I have never charged my cell phone at a public charging station. I think it’s cool when they are available – there was even one at my nearby urgent care clinic the last time I had to take my kid (he’s fine!) – but I have never needed one. If I did, though, I don’t… Read more »
Now featuring daily leaderboards In March, I wrote the following: “I would suspect that partypoker is eventually going to settle on a structure for its Cash Game Leaderboards and stick with it for a while….” I guess “a while” means about three months, as partypoker has reworked its cash game leaderboards once again (I’ve made… Read more »
While the status of the 2020 World Series of Poker is up in the air, Daniel Negreanu is ready to draw some attention to it. In a Tweet on Friday, the Poker Hall of Famer put a challenge out that he would win a bracelet in 2020. He also stated that it didn’t matter if… Read more »
While the live poker world takes its first tenuous steps towards trying to return to some semblance of normal, the World Poker Tour is trying to keep their people busy over the summer. Joining up with partypoker, the WPT will offer the inaugural WPT World Online Championships, a series of poker tournaments with guaranteed prize… Read more »
The announcement this week that Caesars Entertainment would provide an 85-tournament slate of events under the “World Series of Poker” banner was met with a mixture of enthusiasm, regret and outrage. Because of some of the restrictions on the events – not by Caesars and the WSOP, mind you, but by current laws and regulations… Read more »
MGM feeling confident Las Vegas has been “reopened” for a week, so it is just about time to reopen it some more. On Tuesday, MGM Resorts International announced that Luxor, The Shoppes at Mandalay Bay Place, ARIA, Mandalay Bay proper, and Four Seasons Las Vegas will be the company’s next properties to welcome back guests.… Read more »
The World Poker Tour (WPT) and partypoker have announced yet another team-up for an online poker tournament offering, this time with a one-off tourney instead of an expanded tournament series. The new “WPT Online Poker Open powered by partypoker US Network” is open only to players in New Jersey on BorgataPoker.com, BetMGMPoker.com or NJ.PartyPoker.com. Participants… Read more »
