May 20, 2026

Last Call at Resorts World: Another Poker Room Goes Bust, We Blame F1

Stop the presses! Or at least, stop shuffling the deck. A nervous official at Resorts World has coughed up the truth: their little card sanctuary is closing its doors on March 30, 2026. That room has been operating since the whole resort awkwardly opened its doors back on June 24, 2021, which feels like two decades in Vegas time.

This news is bringing up all sorts of awkward dinner party conversations, mostly because Planet Hollywood just cashed out its own poker room after a measly eight months. Eight months! Clearly, nobody told them the secret handshake.

Now, here’s where you need a calculator: we’re down to a whopping eight poker rooms left on the Strip. If you expand your sorrow to the entire glorious Las Vegas Valley, you get a grand total of 17. Do the math: over half of all Las Vegas poker venues have evaporated since the year 2000. We’re not economists, but the timing feels suspiciously linked to when they decided to turn half the town into a high-speed parking lot for extremely expensive cars. Yes, we blame F1.

The leak came courtesy of a player named Chris Murray, who apparently organizes games there. Organizing games? At a casino? Who knew people were allowed to coordinate things without the casino taking a hefty cut first? Anyway, after his little Tweet dropped, yours truly did the adult thing and called Resorts World to confirm, because apparently, we’re the actual news source now.

A stern representative confirmed the March 30 date and then immediately followed up with the required corporate boilerplate about “dynamic, high-quality experiences.” Translation: We’re putting in a fancy smoothie bar that costs $18.

Frankly, this isn’t shocking. We actually smelled this impending doom wafting from the casino floor way back in November 2025. We even tweeted that they were debating whether to close the room or hand the keys over to a third party. We were dead right on the drama, just a few months off on the final execution date. How do we know all this deeply irrelevant information? Don’t look at us; we just report the gossip.

Now, let’s be crystal clear: this closure is a bummer for the sad sacks who enjoy staring intently at cards for eight hours straight. But we have to address the elephant in the room, which is the same reason every other venue has quit hosting poker: it doesn’t make enough money.

Poker rooms are the equivalent of the hotel spa—a nice amenity you advertise but secretly resent paying the labor costs for. Unlike slots or blackjack, where the house prints money, poker is player vs. player. The casino just gets a little nibble—the “rake.” Sometimes, a very busy hot dog cart generates better revenue per square foot than a room full of guys aggressively trying to look calm while holding aces.

Despite this ongoing slow-motion funeral for communal card games, the giant, flashy tournaments like the World Series of Poker still manage to pull in crowds and absurd amounts of cash between May 26 and July 15, 2026. So, expect some of these recently shuttered rooms, like that one at Planet Hollywood, to briefly spring back to life just for the big event, like a zombie coming up for one last bite.

For those of you still clinging to hope, the remaining Strip stalwarts where you can lose your shirt are: Aria, Bellagio, Caesars Palace, Horseshoe, Mandalay Bay, MGM Grand, Venetian, and Wynn. Good luck, you’ll need it more than ever.