Cubicle poker
Station Casinos has reopened three of its Las Vegas-area poker rooms. All three – Red Rock Resort, Boulder Station, and Santa Fe Station – opened at 9:00am on Monday and will remain open around the clock.
They are all decent-sized poker rooms, as well, which bodes well for those who want to get in a game, though perhaps not so well for those who want to get in a game and avoid COVID-19. Red Rock is the largest of the three with 20 rooms, followed by Santa Fe Station with 14, and Boulder Station with 10.
Station has installed plexiglass barriers between every seat at the poker table as well as in front of each player, all to make sure there is a windshield of sorts protecting everyone from moisture particles. From pictures posted online, it appears that there are staff on hand to clean the plexiglass when a player leaves. Everybody is required to wear protective face masks.
Pack ’em in
Interestingly, the maximum capacity of the tables in each casino is eight, just about as full as a poker table can get. The original plan was to go six-max, but the casinos appealed to the Nevada Gaming Control Board (NGCB) and received permission to increase the seating.
The Venetian, The Orleans, South Point, and Golden Nugget were the first Las Vegas poker rooms to reopen, doing so on or shortly after June 4, the first day casinos were allowed to welcome back guests in Nevada. The initial rule was that poker tables could only be four-handed at most, but like the Station casinos, the “first four” asked the NGCB if they could up the cap, so they opened their poker rooms with five players per table.
Clearly, four players maximum per table was not a sustainable situation. That’s just not enough players for the poker room to generate any money. For whatever reason, though, while four-handed was pretty much a non-starter for poker players, five-handed was doable.
Then, just a couple weeks later, the Venetian became the first Las Vegas poker room to hold a multi-table tournament. On June 19 and June 20, the casino held $250 buy-in shootouts with no re-entries. They both sold out, hitting their 80-player max, which meant 16 tables with the five-handed games.
Nevada one of many U.S. hotspots
Despite the health and safety measures, it remains to be seen if the casinos reopening their poker rooms will be able to keep COVID-19 at bay. Poker rooms are the perfect place for a virus to thrive, with players crowded around tables and touching chips and cards for hours at a time.
Confirmed COVID-19 cases in Nevada have risen significantly since the state’s casinos reopened. Where before June 4, the number of new cases per day rarely went above 200, the state is now at the point where four-figure days are the norm. Since late June, new daily case counts have been close to or above the 1,000 mark.
