Resorts World closing poker room amid Vegas tourism collapse

Resorts World is a dumb name. It doesn’t explain who they are or what they do. Their marketing was/is crap. I had to do some online research to figure out what the heck it was.

Their marketing has always been bad. I was only aware they existed because of their annual summer poker series and even then, I never went to it because I didn’t understand their whole concept.

When looking at a place like Vegas with a lot of options, making yourself more complex is a bad strategy. If people’s bandwidths are already taxed from option paralysis, they aren’t going to want to investigate something further to determine whether or not to add it to their list of potential options. They’re just going to scratch it off the list.

Whenever I hear Resorts World, I immediately think of...

First high rollers despise the masses and would prefer casinos did not let them in. The big problem with high rollers is there are not enough of them to support all the current casinos in Las Vegas.

Holy projection..

A long time ago when I opened my first poolroom I was only 27 years old. I did not have a beer/wine or liquor license and everyone told me I'd go broke depending on young kids for my business. Most of my business consisted of teens and early 20's. The kids loved the place with not so many older folks coming in there. What I learned was they all had a few dollars in their pocket and would spend it with me. We were busy every day and packed on the weekend. It was the kids main hang out in Bakersfield, CA.

I was the youngest member of the Downtown Businessmen's Association and the older guys laughed at me behind my back. Meanwhile I ended up buying a house in the nicest neighborhood, owned new cars and a custom motorcycle. Plus had cash to spend on whatever I wanted, including playing in the biggest card games in town.

Vegas casinos are heading in the wrong direction with their business tactics. They are shooting themselves in the foot with how they treat their clientele who are there to be entertained and so some gambling. Some casino owners will wise up and go back to focusing on good customer relations. They are the ones who will survive.

Unfortunately this is a problem facing most businesses in the western world. Their input costs are increasing every year due to the amount of money governments are printing for themselves. They have to deal with this with unfortunate choices like cutting costs themselves or by raising prices for the customers at the same rate. The other option is to lower the quality of the product they are providing. The customers themselves also feel squeezed with the cost of their lives increasing due to the same pressures, they have less money to spend having fun.

The high quality gambling and tourist experience which lots of us remember from decades gone by is just not possible in todays environment. It will only return when the drastic inflation of the money supply stops imo.

There’s merit to your thoughts, but I’d also add what contributed to Vegas downfall was the massive consolidation of the casinos into just 2-3 companies (MGM, Caesars) and the unsustainable amount of debt they took to get there. It’s why they’ve all been in and out of bankruptcy. Hard to “take care” of your customers like the old days when you’re in bankruptcy and every nickel spent is watched like a hawk from pissed off shareholders, bankruptcy courts, etc.

Had a gig at Bellagio. One hour walkaway lunch. Closest to the convention area was the poolside restaurant.

$27 Cheeseburger
$10 Fries
$8 Ice tea
+ tax
+ BS charges
$53
before tip

did you ask for extra shredded iceberg salad or is it normally served like that? i don't know what's more absurd, the price or the display.

The funniest thing about RW LV is when you take an outside look at the hotel, you can't even tell that it's called Resorts World. Whoever thought that making the Title font the same size as the surrounding brands was an idiot.

That wig of lettuce is how it comes.

I always find it funny that random people on the internet think that they have all the answers/better answers than the Vegas casinos with respect to how to run their business. These companies spend tens of millions of dollars hiring employees, board members, and consultants whose expertise is in running a corporation and/or a casino resort for profit. Are they perfect? No. Do they have all the right answers just because they have an MBA? No. But I guarantee you that every single argument ITT has been carefully considered and rejected.

As limon said, the current Vegas business model isn't an accident or an oversight. It is an intentional strategy that rational actors have deployed because they've determined it's their best option given social and economic conditions. That means that Vegas is going to be less fun/have less value for a lot of folks, and that sucks, it really does, but let's not pretend that it's all just a big whoopsie by the Vegas corporations and if they just analyzed it the RIGHT way we could all go back to $1.99 shrimp cocktails.

For my part, I don't think it's all that bad. Resort fees are just part of the cost of the room; they've been widespread for 20+ years now, and they're not even limited to Vegas. If anyone is legitimately surprised by resort fees, that's on them. Even with resort fees, rooms are still dirt cheap if you do a reasonable amount of -ev gaming. And if you don't participate in -ev gaming, Vegas probably isn't the right destination for you. I can't think of anything Vegas does better than another destination (including poker) for a non-gambler. High-end food options are not really that much more expensive than high-end restaurants in other cities, and there's ample cheap eats if you look for them; it's really the mid-tier food that's stupidly overpriced (like the burger and sandwich posted above ITT). It's definitely an overstatement to say that Vegas is just for the ultra-wealthy now, but it's definitely harder now for someone looking for a cheap/value vacation.

As for the actual topic of this thread, poker just isn't popular enough these days to support a poker room in ever casino. Resorts World is too out-of-the-way and caters to the wrong demographic to be an MGM Grand or Caesar's type room that has a smattering of low limit games and tournaments, Aria, Bellagio, V/P, and Wynncore have already oversaturated the market for serious players.

To be fair, the CEO of MGM Resorts recently apologized and admitted on an investor call that their strategy over the last couple years had been bad, essentially saying they had priced the baseline cost of rooms to low but the cost of food and other amenities too high ("you can’t have a $29 room and a $12 coffee").

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/mgm-ceo-just-apologized-guests-173300687.html

Yahoo Finance

MGM CEO just apologized to guests over high prices

The above view is pervasive, but generally not accurate. Of course people get paid to run companies, but CEOs quite often make egregious errors and usually pay by getting fired, which happens more frequently than people may realize. There are many reasons for this, including gross incompetence, political in-fighting, over-shooting targets, mis-reading economic climate, taking on overly risky propositions, etc.

I'm not even discussing the LV strategy going on right now, as there are other factors which seem to be somewhat out of their control. (which should not be a surprise if CEOs did their homework like what they were taught in business school) But fundamentally the situation in LV is such that they made their bed, now they need to sleep in it.

Right, nobody is perfect, and the c-suite gets it wrong plenty. But my confidence in them is still much higher than armchair executives on internet forums.

Given that posters here have the benefit of hindsight there is certainly a bias in determining effective CEO planning/management.

Didn't they have Robbi Jade Lew as their sponsored pro?

Resorts World is a money pit that has gone through several management teams that all try and one up each other with their blatant stupidity. There is no logical reason to have any confidence in them at all.

That's a pretty good summary. I was there the first time in 2014, they already had the resort fees but overall everything was quite affordable and ofc free parking everywhere so pretty perfect to roam around and do whatever you want. I saw the gradual changes over the years and the last time I was there in 2025 for CES I was eating some small mediocre lasagna for 40$ at some mediocre property, I think park mgm. Ridiculous. Basically everything remotely close to the strip was insanely overpriced (minor exceptions apply like In n out burger), the rake had effectively doubled within a decade etc. The only things still cheap were rental cars but ofc they are of limited use with all those parking charges.

Yeah it's a dumb name but it's a very established brand in Asia, they have been in Singapore, Manila etc. for long. Arguably not dumber than many other casino names.

wait, people still don't have Fly on perma-ignore?? Why would you waste you time seeing anything that moron has to say about anything? 😃

Resorts World is super close to Encore which has a busy poker room. I think a bigger problem is people prefer to play at Encore. At first Resorts World tried to be similar to the Wynn room, offering no promotions and the same comp rate ($1.50 an hour).

Later they added a jackpot drop and tried to offer promotions. But if you want promotions I think playing at Venetian makes more sense and that room is also nearby. Or you could play at a locals casino, or some of the other rooms on the Strip. Adding in a jackpot drop doesn’t make a room special especially if the room isn’t busy.

The location does hurt though, with not much foot traffic, and the poker room was in a hidden location in the building.

They were "too" similar to the Wynn daily tournament with the exact same entry fee, time, and structure ($200 noon). They needed to distinguish themselves with a higher ($500?) or lower ($100 good structure/non turbo) because why play the RW noon with a 20-30 field when you can play the same structure/entry at Wynn with 100+?

All those college degrees led to 6 nachos for $24 before tax and tip at FB?
I honestly cant think of any more absurd self-destruction of billions of dollars.

I have a degree in math and I think I would have said at the meeting "you're gonna blow 10 years and $10billion worth of planning, building, and marketing with one single plate of nachos that will forever label this place as a joke"

FB has never recovered.

Even Flamingo charges $20 a beer at the pool.
Flamingo does not have people who can afford $20 a beer at the pool, yet they charge it anyway.

So forgive the random people who think they might know better than the geniuses at FB and other casinos.

Yes, it takes hindsight to realize 6 nachos for $24 and a $20 poolside beer might not be a good idea.