The gaming tournaments, aside from providing fun and excitement for the players, also serve to promote the hotels and casinos that host them. They help to bring new faces to the scene, people who will return at a later date for another vacation. Wherever you decide to play, remember to obtain the schedule and rules well in advance, enter as early as possible, have fun, and, hopefully, good luck! Casino sponsored gaming tournaments are relatively new on the gambling scene, whether they're in Vegas, Reno, Tahoe, or Atlantic City. For the longest time, visitors came to these resorts mainly to play the usual casino games. But now the hotels have a lot of competition with each other, and must tempt visitors with something new. Thus, tournaments came into being.

Poker Tournaments

Actually, for the past ten years there hove been poker tournaments, the most notable being the World Series of Poker sponsored by Binion's Horseshoe casino in downtown Las Vegas. Today this is a million-dollar tournament in which all kinds of poker games are played over a period of about four weeks. They start off with smaller pots like $25 to $100,000, moving all the way up to a $1 million game. This has brought in many crack poker players from all over the country, because the contestants get a good break when they enter the tournaments. It's very festive, attracts a lot of spectators, an

d the sponsoring hotel is giving something to the tournaments. For example, in Binion's all the entry fees go into the pot to be won by the players. In some cases the entry fee is $10,000. Binion's is profiting only from the publicity it will receive by sponsoring the tournament and providing the arena for this impressive contest. The other well-known tournament, the Amarillo Slim Super Bowl of Poker conducted at the Sahara Tahoe casino-resort, is much like Binion's. There are many other smaller poker tournaments going on throughout the year, attracting the most skillful players from every state and even from other countries such as England, Ireland, and France. For the astute player, or for the player who feels he is a bit beyond average (the best, perhaps, in his own group at home), these tournaments are a real boon. In such tournaments sometimes even amateur players can walk away with a lot of money.

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