Sahara

After a much needed extended day sleep, I decided that I would take it easy and simply stay on property today and maybe later play in one of the Sahara poker tournaments. I am pretty familiar with this room, their dealers and some of the regular players as I have stayed here for three one week stays already this year, and a few times in the past. I like the property and it is one of the best deals located on the strip, in my opinion. I believe it is now the oldest resort casino remaining after the slew of demolitions and refurbishments. It has several large pictures of 50's movie stars, Elvis Pressley, Buddy Hackett and other headliners that performed here in its heydey. It is located pretty close to the dealer school that I have attended and also has the Nascar cafe, $3 blackjack 24/7, and anchors the north end of the monorail. The rooms are simple, the food basic, the decor dated, but it has a friendly poker room. Unfortunately, most of that will change soon, as the ownership of the casino has changed hands for the first time in decades. The previous owner seemed to protect the regular low-limit gambler clientele with much the same business strategies as the Fremont Street properties downtown. But he passed away last year and his wife earlier this year, so the estate has sold the property to a group that wants to refurbish the whole thing and attract the more affluent crowd. It is rumored that the roller coaster and Nascar cafe's days are numbered.

The 16-table poker room is largely a small buy-in tournament house. Three times daily they have a $42 NL Holdem tourney with a single $20 rebuy (actually it is an add-on), but you can re-enter during the first hour, space permitting even if you bust out after using the rebuy. You get 3500 starting chips and the 20 minute blind structure is reasonable through the first two hours. The blinds do get pretty aggressive at the end and final table action is usually a push-fest, if the prize money isn't chopped up. You can add-on 2000 more tournament chips at any time before the break. The entire add-on goes into the prize pool, but only $35 of the entry fee does (at one time, this fee included an optional dealer toke, which now seems to be incorporated without option). The dealers are either well-trained or vague in response to how much of the entry fee goes towards them, but its unclear to me how any of them make much in this room. They show up en-masse for the tourneys, there is usually one or two utilized as brush/tourney support, but they are let go as the tables break, so it seems unlikely that many get full shifts. Even during the heavy march madness activity, I have never seen more than 3 cash tables in action (and usually there is only 1 or 2). It seems that there are 40-50 regular dealers on staff, so its hard for me to see how any get enough hours or paid much. Still, there are many quality dealers here (several from California poker rooms) and few seem to annoy me or have major problems. Consistency is pretty high, but several are quite slow.

The 11am and 11pm tournaments regularly draw 80-100 players and the 7pm tournament can go 13 tables, eleven-handed with another 30 or so on an alternate list. The cash games here are usually 1/2 NL and 2/4 Lim holdem. I've never seen more than a couple thousand on an entire cash table at one time. The room is non-smoking, but it is simply a bullpen in the casino and smokers are unfortunately allowed on the rail. The area just outside the simple fence can get pretty thick during tourney breaks.