Poker Room Review: Sunset Station, Henderson, NV.
Sunset Station is another of the 'Station' casinos that includes: Green Valley Ranch, Red Rock, Boulder Station, Texas Station, a couple of Fiestas and several others. This means that Sunset Station participates in the all property bad beat jackpot that starts at $150,000 and pays out to every player seated at a poker table (in the same game) when it hits. Yes, if you are playing a $2/$4 Hold'em table at Sunset and the bad beat jackpot gets hit at Red Rock you get paid. Also the various Station properties run a joint freeroll where qualifiers who play 75 hours in a three month period get a seat in a 3,000+ event, which pays $70,000 for the win. All of the station properties share a lot but Sunset has its own unique qualities.
The first thing you will notice when you enter Sunset Station is that it is not just one big casino. The floor is divided into smaller sections that wind around the long casino footprint. I appreciate that Sunset isn't like every other property I see. However, some players have told me the poker room is hard to find. Look for the Orange Hooter's landmark, either park right outside the Hooter's restaurant or look for it once you are inside the casino; just to the right, down a short hallway, is the nine table Sunset Station poker room.
While like most rooms the game here is Hold'em, there is some variation in the Sunset tournament schedule. On Monday and Tuesday mornings, the tournament is a limit hold'em event . Wednesdays through Sundays, the room holds no limit tournaments in the morning. Mid-week on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday there is an evening no limit event and on both the 2nd Sunday and last Sunday of each month they run a Ladies Only limit hold'em tournament. Entry fees start as low as $35 for the limit events up to $77 for the evening tournaments.
They are running a unique promotion at Sunset Station currently; they call it the Moonlight Monthly High Hand tournament. To qualify you need to play between midnight and 8 AM any day of the month. You also have to hit one of the three highest hands during that time period. So, basically three players qualify each night for the monthly freeroll. If you hit the highest hand of the night you will begin the freeroll with 1300 in chips, second hand gets you 1200 and the third 1100. If you hit a high hand on more than one night then you can add an additional 300, 200 or 100 to your starting stack. The best part of the Moonlight Freeroll is that it is scheduled for the first Wednesday of the following month at 3 AM!
I like both the cash games and the tournaments at Sunset Station and I find the room nicely appointed and player friendly, once you can find it. Lots of space, and lots of light fills the room. So it's all good at Sunset? Well no. I hate the tables. I don't know who decided where to locate the auto-shufflers and the player card readers and the bad beat drop slot or the electronic read out screen but whoever made those decisions has never played one hand of poker. All of those items are located out in front of the dealer; the center of the table is a maze of metal and slots with barely enough room for a flop. Now I am not opposed to the auto-shufflers and I like the electronic comp log-ins at the tables but not when all the gadgets turn the felt into a bad high-tech minefield, it is just too much. Lots of rooms have those tech innovations well placed so as to cause minimum interference with the cards, Sunset Station apparently hired Rube Goldberg to design its tables.
