|
The Bellagio Hotel and Casino
3600 Las Vegas Boulevard South
Las Vegas, USA
Tel: (702) 693-7290 (poker office)
Or (888) 987 3456
Official Website
Card Room Capacity: 300
Tournaments:
$1000 + $60 Saturday and Sunday
Location & Accessibility (max 5/5)
Prime location in the centre of the strip, opposite Ballys, Aladdin and Paris hotel casinos, a $40 taxi ride from the airport sees you ensconsed in the lap of luxury, wall to wall gambling as you’d expect in the most luxurious of surroundings.
Card Room & Casino Ambiance (5/5)
Home to the “Big Game”, Bellagio is without doubt the best poker room in Vegas as well as the largest. The centre rear of the main section of the poker room is taken up by the glass walled salon privee, where you’ll normally see some or all of the main superstars of poker, Doyle Brunson, Jennifer Harman, Chip Reese, Phil Ivey, Barry Greenstein and Johnny Chan are all to be spotted playing regularly in their $4000/$8000 limit hold’em game.
Card Room Staff (10/10)
Over the course of around 20 hours of solid cash game action, I can’t recall a single misdeal from the tremendous dealing staff, which says it all really. Table waiting lists were handled promptly and efficiently by the card room supervisors and manager, no mean task when every single table was full and a queue of players waiting at all but the earliest part of the day.
Waiting Staff (5/5)
It is easy to be gushing when an endless supply of free Coors Light was being delivered to the table, but these girls were tremendous, never stopping, always smiling and generally keeping the tables well stocked with drink continuously.
Level of Play (1/10) [10 being good]
Wow. If I hadn’t seen it for myself, I’d never have believed it. The players were absolutely shocking, with the odd solid player just filling his or her boots. Multi-way raised pre-flop pots, calling pot raises on gutshot draws, were all normal, it really was just wait for a monster and counting your chips. If you can’t win here, you can’t win anywhere.
Tournament Selection (3/10)
The one area that Bellagio is lacking is their tournament selection, but then if you can keep filling the cash games with a $4 rake per hand, why would you need to bother, and there are plenty of other card rooms all running reasonably priced tournaments at all times of the day to suit the tournament player. Bellagio is for cash games!
Cash Game Selection (5/5)
I doubt if even the multi-tabled Commerce Casino can really compete with the Bellagio. Although expensive in comparison to some, with a minimum sit down of $4/$8 Limit or $2/$5 No Limit, there are plenty of games and choice, and it’s nice over the course of a weekend to have some regular faces to get to know and avoid, and concentrate on the vast schools of fish that continually pop through the doors.
Total: 34/50
If The Home of Poker ranked bad play as 10 and good play as 1, then Bellagio would score highest, we may need to address that failing of ours, because quite simply, apart from lack of tournaments, there is no better place to play poker anywhere, and that’s without seeing 99% of the world’s poker rooms.
If you haven’t been, then this place is a must - book your flight to Vegas now!
|
