Breaking ten tables
Though Las Vegas is close to getting “back to normal” after being a ghost town for much of last year, not everything is all sunshine and rainbows. To wit: the Planet Hollywood Resort poker room is set to close on July 11. Less than week for the room’s fans to get in their last games, maybe pocket a $1 chip to keep on their desk and remember the good times.
Positioned in the middle of the casino floor, the ten-table poker room isn’t all that particularly well-known in the poker world, but like any poker room, it will always hold a special place in the hearts of many. It isn’t always easy for smaller poker rooms to find their way amidst their giant competitors. In Planet Hollywood’s case, the casino’s location in the middle of the Strip also made it less a destination for hard-core poker players and more of a tourist poker room.
It is by no means a bad poker room, it’s just that it served a specific niche, one which it seems like Caesars, Planet Hollywood’s parent company, didn’t see as worth serving anymore, at least at that location.
A spokesperson for Caesars told the Las Vegas Review-Journal that poker players are encourage to visit the company’s other poker rooms at the Flamingo (where my brother somehow won a daily tournament in 2005 after barely ever playing poker), Bally’s, and Caesars Palace.
As was the case with every poker room in Las Vegas, Planet Hollywood shut down its tables last March. It reopened the poker room in October.
Another one bites the dust
Whether or not Planet Hollywood’s poker room was a true casualty of the COVID-19 pandemic is unclear, but it is not the first Las Vegas poker room to shut down recently. In November, MGM decided to close three poker rooms: Excalibur, Mirage, and Mandalay Bay. None of the three ever reopened after their pandemic closures.
Like Planet Hollywood, all were fairly small, so they weren’t creating a massive hole in the city’s poker industry, but the Mirage, in particular, was a sad closure for many. Mentioned in the legendary poker movie Rounders, the Mirage poker room was once one of the top high roller rooms in Las Vegas, a place an aspiring poker star had to go to prove their worth. But as larger, fancier poker rooms opened at places like the Bellagio and Wynn, high stakes action moved and the Mirage, while still respected, was left as a mid-to-low stakes room without the pizzazz is once had.
Even before MGM’s announcement, Daniel Negreanu tweeted out what appeared to be his condolences for the Mirage poker room in September, posting a picture of Mirage poker chips and the simple statement, “I grew up here.”