Published on: October 24, 2024, 09:24h. 

Last updated on: October 24, 2024, 09:29h.

The Sahara will shut down its poker room on November 16 and replace it with more slot machines.

“When it debuts in mid-December, the enhanced offerings will include dedicated slot banks where players can be some of the first in Las Vegas to play the newest test games from top gaming content providers,” read a press statement from Sahara GM Paul Hobson.

The Sahara’s original poker room closed in April 2011. When the SLS took over the property in 2014, it did not include a poker room. After the property became the Sahara again, it opened a new poker room in February 2020.

This will make the Sahara the fifth Las Vegas Strip casino to permanently fold its poker tables in the past five years.

Here’s a timeline:

March 2020: The Excalibur closes its poker room due to the pandemic and never reopens it. It now uses the area for slot tournaments.

June 2020: Harrah’s follows suit, turning its never-reopened card room initially into a nonsmoking slot area and later into space for electronic table games.

July 2021: Planet Hollywood closes its poker room, transforming it into space for more slots and games.

November 2021: The Flamingo closes its poker room, converting it into a sportsbook fan zone.

Elsewhere in Las Vegas over the same period, Binion’s, the Cannery, Silver Sevens and Club Fortune also closed their poker rooms, and Green Valley Ranch converted theirs into a sports viewing area.

Earn and Turn

It’s not that poker is no longer popular. Although it doesn’t draw like it did at its peak 20 years ago, most rooms on the Strip are reported to be at least half full every night. The Sahara currently runs four poker tournaments daily, which it wouldn’t be doing if no one showed up.

The issue is that poker doesn’t earn as much for casinos as table games or machines do. And that’s because there is no house edge in poker. The casino does not directly benefit from player losses. In poker, all the casino earns is its rake, a small percentage taken from each pot in cash games, or tournament fees.

Per square foot, poker is a losing proposition for casinos, relatively speaking.

Food Hall-Adjacent

What most tourists see as an unrelated simultaneous trend — casinos replacing beloved (formerly cheap) buffets with expensive food halls — is not really unrelated. Buffets are on their way out for the same reason: They’re not money-makers, whereas food halls are.

Poker rooms are even more of a target than buffets, however, because they draw players away from the casino floor for hours and hours at a clip. Those are prime gambling hours when players could be losing to casinos instead of only to one another. And once players finally exit poker rooms, most do so cash-poor and with little urge to gamble more.

This is believed to be the real reason the Venetian moved its poker room from the casino floor to a hidden corner on the second floor of its Grand Canal Shoppes this summer.

Caesars Palace may be the next casino to evict its poker room, becoming the fourth Caesars Entertainment property in five years to do so.

Although Caesars said it closed the room in August to make space for slot machines while renovating its high-limit slot area, no reopening date was ever set, and it’s possible that the company hopes that people just eventually stop asking.