Goodbye Sahara

March 11, 2011

Pretty soon this will be just another memory.

I read just a little while ago that the Sahara hotel and casino out in Las Vegas is closing down. I can’t say I’m surprised to hear the news. The Sahara was already in the late stages of decline when I first made my first trip to Vegas in 2004, decades after members of the Rat Pack made it one of their regular drink-filling stations on the Strip and almost as long after The Beatles stayed there.

I do have fond memories of the place, though, namely playing in the cheap daily poker tournaments there. So far as your low-end Vegas tourneys go, the Sahara’s were about as good a value as you could hope for. Not that I ever did particularly well in any of the ones I played, mind you – like most of my Vegas tournament experiences, the Sahara ones usually ended with some variation on the old good-decision-bad-result. My good memories of the Sahara are much more about the quality time spent with friends there. When we took Charlie Tuttle on his poker pilgrimage to Vegas in ‘05 we trekked from our lodgings at the Westward Ho! – which preceded the Sahara in oblivion just a few years ago – to play in one of the dailies. In 2008 as the WSOP was getting going the PokerListings crew hit up the daily and, IIRC, Marty Derbyshire ended up making the final table. And of course there were a few trips to the Sahara during poker blogger gatherings – never a common destination, but rather the kind of place where four or five hardy souls who just wanted to break away from the pack could find a little action.

Vegas isn’t a regular destination for me these days so I doubt I’ll make my way back to the Sahara before its doors are closed for good in May. It’s okay – I never had a lot of luck there anyway, and online poker is a lot lighter on my meager bankroll for a good tourney fix – but I still thought it was worth noting the passing of another locale from my memories of Vegas.

The post Goodbye Sahara by Jason Kirk, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

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