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Poker Palace is a small casino located in North Las Vegas which offers deal to the bottom $1 Blackjack, $2 breakfast specials, sports book, and a disproportionately large 8 table poker room. For such a low brow, downtrodden property, the poker room is quite expansive, though 5 of the 8 tables get no use whatsoever and one of those 5 is used as a desk for the floor man to sort out tournament registrations. Make no mistake; Poker Palace does not make any effort to pretend to be better than what it truly is: A very low budget locals’ casino with bottom of the barrel table game limits, slots, and a daily poker tournament.
The poker room itself is sectioned off from the rest of the casino with a half wall, allowing a separation between the poker room and the sports book. The room is expectedly cluttered, dirty, and dilapidated, much like the entire property. Obviously, none of the tables have autoshufflers, electronic table management systems, or anything remotely high tech. This is the equivalent of a mom and pop card room; with strict hours of operation (room does not open until the 6PM tournament).
The room does not have a dedicated cage or even a management podium, really. It has a counter that is attached to the south wall that the floor man uses to sell chips, and basically run the room out of. The daily $17 tournament is really the only reason this room even exists, and the room caters itself to this tournament and these players. The tournament often spawns a single table cash game of either the NLHE or 3/6LHE variety, but that game historically does not last more than a couple hours, and often does not even spread during the week (vying more toward the slightly higher brow weekend crowd).
The room is non-smoking, though most players smoke between hands by simply standing up and walking to either end of the room without missing a hand. Aesthetically, there is little that can be said about this room other than the simple bare bones description already given. All furnishings are well worn, the felts are in dying need of replacement, and the chips and cards have seen better days.
Approaching the room, it does strike this reviewer that this room is actually more of a room than a few Strip casinos, as it has a proper half wall on two sides, and two permanent walls on the other. Similar to the Rio, this room was carved out of the Sports Book, and still has abandoned sports writer counters against its west wall. It is more of an actual room than a few other poker area type establishments, but due to the obvious dilapidation, hours of operation, and lack of any sort of consistent cash game action, the room quality of Poker Palace is very low.
Overall, this is easily the one of the lowest quality card rooms in all of Southern Nevada, whose singular draw is the fact that it offers one of the only <$20 evening NLHE tournaments in all of Las Vegas. This is a casino only, with no attached hotel, which is just as well, as realistically, no tourist of any kind would venture to stay here unless truly desperate.
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