Spate Of Poker Room Closures Hit Las Vegas

This month, the Circus Circus Casino closed its poker room “indefinitely,” as the casino located on the north end of the Las Vegas Strip failed to attract sufficient action to its tables.
In recent years, the live poker scene in Las Vegas has been suffering a dramatic decline and last year generated $123 million in revenue, a 6.54% decline compared to 2011.
That total was the lowest amount reported since 2004, and this year the figure is likely to be equally as disappointing as a number of other Las Vegas poker rooms have also closed their doors in the past few months. These include Riviera, which closed its poker room in June; and the M Resort which closed its poker room only last month.
Despite the spate of recent closures, the news may not be all bad for the poker community. Many of the venues shut are actually small poker rooms catering to low-limit players, who will now likely end up playing at some of the more popular casinos, instead, such as The Venetian, The Mirage, and Caesars. In fact, as a ruffpoker.com article entitled ‘Why the recent rash of poker room closings is a good thing’ pointed out recently:
“What I want is the 50-100 players playing at these tiny, out-of-the-way, casinos to head over to the Bellagio, the Venetian, the Wynn, and other poker hubs and play the low limit games there. Let the money stay in these poker eco-systems instead of a table full of random tourists losing to some local low-limit grinder at Circus Circus who grinds out the $1/$2 NLHE tables day in and day out, because once that money is in his pocket it’s never coming out.”
In addition, it would seem the poker room closures are not all one way traffic and for every room that shuts, another opens in Sin City. The LVH (formerly Las Vegas Hilton), for instance, opened a new poker room in July with five tables offering low buy-in tournaments and cash games.