This was the second time I decided to take a poker vacation in Las Vegas to just play low stakes tournaments. Three years ago, I wrote about how it would likely be a once-in-a-lifetime experience. Fortunately, I was wrong. The pull of tournament poker in Las Vegas was just too tough to resist!
This time I played almost exclusively at the Horseshoe, which in my view is the current mecca of low-stakes No Limit Hold’em tournaments in Las Vegas. They run six (6!) daily tournaments at 9am, 11am, 2pm, 5pm, 8pm, and 11pm. Buy-ins range from $100-$200, you get either 15K or 20K in chips to start, and blind levels are between either 15 or 20 minutes long. There is no add-on but one can rebuy as often as one wants to.
I tried to play in at least three tournaments per day. Three years ago, when I played my week’s worth of tournaments at Caesars Palace, a typical daily tournament attracted 45-60 players on any day of the week. Turnouts at the Horseshoe typically attracted 20-30 people on Monday, with that number increasing to above 60-65 people by Friday.
Impressions of the Poker Room and the Poker Players
The tables and chairs are all of a very high quality. Leather chairs with adjustable backs and all tables equipped with automatic shufflers and USB ports. The daily poker tournaments bring together a collection of novices, home game enthusiasts and people hopping in for a quick poker session before their tee time at the links, as well as college kids who feel lucky.
The dealers are all professional, with some dealing faster and some dealing slower, yet all have seen a thing or two. One dealer related a few anecdotes. He said that he was dealing a cash game that week and one guy got so upset at his bad beat that he bent two chips he had in his hand and threw it at the table. He said one guy was so drunk last month that he started to urinate against the wall, without opening his zipper. In both cases, security had to be called. There’s nothing like a good poker story, and good dealers have tons of them!
Playing at the Horseshoe, begged me to bring my horseshoe card protector. After a while, some players remembered me from previous days’ tournaments simply because they remembered my unique card protector.
Well next month I’ll be at the Horseshoe in Vegas and will let you know if the Horseshoe disqualifies my horseshoe
— Hank Nussbacher (@HNussbacher) February 11, 2025
How Well Did I Perform at the Felt?
No single tournament I played in made it to the four-hour mark, and the final table was reached pretty consistently after about three hours of play. That said, making the 9-handed final table didn’t guarantee that you’d cash in the tournament, so whenever I made it to a final table (it happened on more than one occasion), I always suggested that we put a bit of money aside for the eventual player to bubble.
With blinds and antes increasing so swiftly, due to the nature of the game and variance one could in principle even go from chip leader to eliminated within a couple hands. This quite literally happened to another player during one of the tournaments I played in on the trip. Once we made it into the money, if we ever reached a point of near equal chip stacks (someone will always be 30% larger than the others), I always suggested a chop. Sometimes the players agreed.
I ended up playing 15 tournaments (14 at the Horseshoe and one at the MGM Grand) for the week and made it into the money (ITM) 40% of the time. My total return on investment (ROI) was a whopping 53%, which was an improvement from my previous week long tournament binge at Caesars Palace in 2022, (36% ITM and 30% ROI, respectively).
At the outset of this article, I mentioned how I played almost exclusively at the Horseshoe. That almost was because on the final night of my trip the tournament I had planned to play in was cancelled, as the room was overrun with cash games. So I Ubered to the MGM Grand for a late entry into their nightly tournament, but busted just short of the money in 14th place out of 43 players (top 8 cashed).
I had a great time, and of course posting those great stats helped. I can’t recommend Horseshoe Las Vegas enough. It’s the perfect place for an enjoyable low-stakes tournament, and I hope that a third once-in-a-lifetime poker trip will be in the cards in my future.
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