Las Vegas ends all social distancing restrictions as of June 1
With a little bit of help from Daniel Negreanu, one of the last major poker rooms still operating with plexiglass partitions ended that era on Monday.
The Venetian Poker Room reopened Monday with no plexiglass dividers in sight. Several other Las Vegas poker rooms already uninstalled the dividers in May.
The plexiglass comes down just in time for the property’s next major live tournament series. The MSPT runs a pair of events over the next two weeks at the Las Vegas Strip property, with the first of those kicking off today.
The MSPT Venetian $1,100 Main Event begins with today’s Day 1A flight. The tournament plays through June 7, with the tournament champion to be decided that day.
Per MSPT Venetian tradition, a $1,600 Main Event plays out the following week. The MSPT Venetian $1,600 Main Event takes place June 10-14.
The COVID-19-era runs of the MSPT Venetian have drawn big player turnout and massive prize pools. The first weekend of 2021 saw an $1,100 Main Event draw 1,009 entries, with the final prize pool ending up at just under $1 million.
Prior to that, Landon Tice took down another $1,100 MSPT Venetian Main Event in November, topping a field of 1,123 entries for a career-high $201,529 winner’s score.
Those attendance figures came before the emergence of the COVID-19 vaccine, and with social distancing protocols still in place throughout Las Vegas.
The final remnant of the pandemic era came down at the Venetian on Monday, and attendance for the pair of upcoming Venetian MSPT events could surge even higher than what we’ve seen in recent months.
Plexiglass free poker rooms in Las Vegas
PokerNews reporter Jesse Fullen visited more than a dozen Las Vegas poker rooms on Tuesday. Fullen reported that all of the venues he visited had reopened, sans plexiglass.
Fullen’s report included major Las Vegas poker rooms like the Aria, Bellagio, Orleans, South Point, and Wynn. While the plexiglass partitions remain intact at poker rooms in some U.S. states, Nevada and Florida are among the first to remove the dividers that became the symbol of pandemic-era poker in 2020.
This past weekend’s Venetian High Rollers series likely marked the last live poker tournament festival at the property with the plexiglass still intact. Negreanu kicked out a portion of the plexiglass at his table after being eliminated from a $25,000 High Roller tournament in that series.
Negreanu, as it turns out, got the jump on getting the plexiglass out of the Venetian Poker Room for good.
Featured image source: Twitter
