The Bellagio card room in Las Vegas is the epicentre of live high stakes poker
No visit to Las Vegas is complete without a tour through the Bellagio’s poker room. The lavish Italian-themed casino in the heart of the strip is a place where the notion of celebrity gets redefined in a suitably Hold’em-centric manner. To wit, everyone from Leonardo DiCaprio to Tobey Maguire has lined up to play with poker legends such as Doyle Brunson and Daniel Negreanu. The area given over to this exclusive high stakes action is the legendary Bobby’s Room, which is where Vegas’ Big Game currently resides. For the average punter there’s still an opulent floor of tournament and cash game action with stakes to suit all bankrolls.
The Poker Room
The Bellagio has the second biggest cardroom in Vegas (after the Venetian), with 40 cash tables on the main poker floor, plus two in Bobby’s Room and five more in a semi-secluded, elevated section for medium-to-high stakes players. What everybody gets at the Bellagio, regardless of bankroll, is comfy swivel chairs, impeccable felts, seasoned dealers, fair floormen and terrific cappuccinos. And if your mind wanders from the action there are also eight 32-inch television monitors and 11 42-inch plasma screens throughout the room, mostly showing sports 24 hours a day.
In terms of games, Hold’em (limit and no-limit) still rules, but Omaha is proving an increasingly popular choice and 7-Card Stud is also available. Being one of the classiest cardrooms on the strip, the stakes are higher than most, with limit games starting at $4/$8 or $8/$16 and no-limit $2/$5 and $5/$10. Daily tournaments get under way at 2pm with buy-ins of $330 (Sun-Thur) and $540 (Fri and Sat), but there can be as many as four or five World Poker Tour festivals a year held in the Bellagio. For each of these a multitude of tourneys are crammed into one or two weeks, with buy-ins generally ranging from $1,000 up to the $25,000 WPT World Championship.
Room With A View
On certain nights at the Bellagio (especially during the WSOP) you’ll see the likes of Doyle Brunson, David Benyamine, Barry Greenstein, Patrik Antonius and Phil Ivey plying their trade inside the famed Bobby’s Room. A luxe poker room within the poker room, it is a high stakes, high-ceilinged enclave, with just two tables, where the world’s biggest game is held behind walls of bevelled glass. The minimum games spread there are $1,000/$2,000 limit or $100/$200 no-limit, and spectators can watch through the glass but go no further.
In addition to its semi-private setting, Bobby’s Room has some unique aspects. Players control the environment, the flat-screen TVs and the music. Walls there are adorned with photographic portraits of the game’s greats – Brunson, Reese and Ivey among them. Players who get hungry can order food from any restaurant in the Bellagio. It makes for major feasts, with steaks carted in from Prime and piles of Kobe sliders from Fix. ‘Sometimes,’ says poker room manager Doug Dalton, ‘the players want stuff from In-N-Out Burger. I’ll drive over there and bring back Double-Doubles and French fries.’
World Poker Tour
The Bellagio has hosted at least three or four of the WPT’s festivals every year. The $25,000 World Championship, which takes place in April, has over the past few years been won by Carlos Mortensen (2007), David Chiu (2008), and Yevgeniy Timoshenko (2009). But the cardroom’s signature tournament – the Bellagio Cup – has been running for five years now, and plays out at the same time as the WSOP Main Event for those pros who fail to go deep in the Big One. In each of the last three years it has been won by a well-known pro – Team PokerStars player Alex Gomes in 2009, online star Mike ‘SirWatts’ Watson in 2008 and Kevin ‘BeL0WaB0Ve’ Saul in 2007.
