Owned and operated by Caesars Entertainment, the Empire Casino is a Las Vegas-style casino built on the site of the former Empire Ballroom in Leicester Square in the West End of London. Occupying a total of 55,000 square feet, spread over two floors, the Empire Casino opened, at a cost of £16 million, in 2007; it was, and still is, the largest casino in the British capital city.

The main body of the casino, which shares the ground floor with a separate, dedicated poker room, features 30 or so gaming tables offering classic games, such as blackjack, punto banco and roulette. The main casino floor also includes the majority of the state-of-the-art slot machines and electronic roulette machines, although a smaller number of electronic gaming machines is also available on the second floor and in the poker room.

Unsurprisingly, granted that the Empire Casino hosts the World Series of Poker Europe (WSOPE) and offers customers opportunities to qualify for the World Series of Poker (WSOP) Main Event in Las Vegas, the Empire Poker Room has a WSOP theme. Nevertheless, players of all abilities can enjoy playing cash games or tournaments, for small or medium stakes, twenty-four hours a day, in a modern, vibrant, but nonetheless professional, setting. Capable of accommodating up to 80 players at any one time and with its own, dedicated bar, the Empire Poker Room is widely regarded as one of the best in London.

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.