Poker Room Review: Palace Station Las Vegas
The "Station Casino" chain of poker rooms is growing again. The current list includes: Palace Station, Texas Station, Boulder Station, Santa Fe Station, Green Valley Ranch, Sunset Station, Red Rock Resort, Fiesta Rancho, Fiesta Henderson and the under construction Aliente Station in North Las Vegas. There are several other properties in the Station chain but none of them, as yet, have poker rooms.
Is this important to a review of the Palace Station Poker Room? Yes, it certainly is; because the entire Station Casino operation has just been purchased for $5.4 Billion. You can be sure that even more changes that will affect the poker rooms are coming soon to all the Stations.
You see the Station orientation is changing with the addition of the bright new properties at Red Rock, Green Valley and the new Aliante Casino. These are properties centered near the huge Sun City developments of Anthem, in the south, and Summerlin in the Northwest and next year Sun City Aliante in the north will also get its own Station property. These are properties far from the Las Vegas Strip that cater to a very different population, what we might call the "new, affluent, retired locals."
Palace Station, on the other hand, is on Sahara Boulevard just a few blocks from the Strip. The Palace Station poker room is also a "locals room" but of a very different sort. The players at Palace Station are old school locals, they know one another, they have been coming to this room for years and the game is very solid. There are no tournaments at Palace Station. Let me repeat��no tournaments. The house game is $2/$4 Hold'em with a half kill and in the evenings there is often a $3/$6 Omaha8 table. On the weekends or by request a $4/$8 Hold'em also with a half kill will be spread.
There are two factors to consider when you look at who you might be playing against at the Palace. First, there is the running Station Freeroll event. As always you need 75 hours of play over three months to qualify for this tournament. Let me just say that "every" local player at Palace Station qualifies. Some of them could qualify in a single month. Second, the Palace Station plays host to a lot of seminars and local meetings during the week, which means that in the evening you often get relatively new or inexperienced players dropping by the cardroom after a meeting. These two groups make up 80% of the players at the Palace Station; the remaining players are guests at the hotel.
For my driving locals poker buddies, park in one of the surface spaces just before you get to the Hotel main entrance. When you enter through the Casino entrance by those parking spots you will be standing at the entrance to the poker room. Easy in, easy out.
A couple more tips concerning the Station Jumbo Jackpot. This is the texas hold'em bad beat jackpot that you should have heard about by now. Shared by all the Station poker rooms (its $140,901.22 as I write this article) you can find it updated every 2 hours on any Station casino website. When it hits, everyone at any hold'em table at any Station property gets paid. As you might guess the bigger it gets, the fuller the seats get in all the Station properties. When it hit $300,000 the last time, there were slot players sitting at poker tables posting blinds and waiting for the jackpot to hit (it paid $600+ to each player). Waiting lists can get very long at all the properties when the Jackpot gets high but here's a tip. I was able to get a seat at Palace Station in 20 minutes when the wait at other properties was over an hour and a half.
You didn't hear that from me, I was never here.
Palace Station
2411 W. Sahara Ave
Las Vegas, NV 89102
