Archive for December, 2019

Officially known as the Rio All-Suite Hotel & Casino, the Rio is situated on West Flamingo Road, a mile or so west of the stretch of South Las Vegas Boulevard known as the ‘Las Vegas Strip’, in central Las Vegas. The Rio opened in 1990 but, nowadays, is probably best known as the home as the World Series of Poker, which it has hosted, in May each year, since 2005. Aside from a large, dedicated poker room, offering 30 tables, the Rio includes a long, winding casino floor – unsurprisingly, based on a Brazilian Carnival Mardi Gras theme – covering 117,300 square feet, or just over a hectare, in total.

The casino floor houses over 90 popular table games, including, but not limited to, baccarat, blackjack – single, double and full shoe versions – craps and roulette, together with poker variants such as Caribbean stud, pai gow and three card. Slot machines galore are also present. Table minimums, on the whole, tend to be a little higher – mostly $25 for blackjack, for example, compared with $10, or even $5, elsewhere – than in nearby casinos. Lower-limit tables are located in the outlying areas of the casino but, for ‘high rollers’, a high-limit room has table minimums starting at $100. The Rio also features 1,200 traditional, spinning-reel and video slot machines, some of which offer progressive jackpots, with stakes ranging from $0.01 to $500 a spin, plus over 350 state-of-the-art video poker machines.