Today the Hilton Poker Room closed for good, and I stopped by to pay my final respects.

The above photo was the crowd at 3pm on closing day.

This room will eventually be filled with slot machines, and according to one staff member there … there will never again be a Poker Room in the Hilton.

Of course that has been said before. Truth be told, this was the 5th Hilton Poker Room since 1979. But they seemed pretty adamant. I thought it had just been my perception, but poker enthusiasm actually is on the decline. It peaked about 2 years ago, and seems to have run its course.

The hardcore players, and people who come to Vegas anyway will still play, but it seems that gone are the days when online players honed their skills in basements across the world in order to make special trips here to play. There isn’t much online poker anymore, and this seems to have correlated with an overall decline in brick and mortar play.

Instead of a yearly increase, this year’s World Series of Poker was smaller than the year prior.

The days of poker celebrities as rock stars is also probably coming to an end, outside of the circle that existed before the online boom really put the game in the mainstream.

I’m not implying that the game is dead by any means, but there just aren’t as many people playing as there used to be. The big rooms will still survive, but the smaller rooms may be on borrowed time.

The closing of the Hilton room was actually quite depressing for me. The day shift manager, Lynda, was my favorite in all of Las Vegas. Rich was my favorite “podium guy/fill in dealer”. Always asked about the kids. Always asked where I had been if a week had passed between visits.

My all-time favorite dealer in town was a girl named “Rachael” who learned to become a dealer from the ground up in this room. She never brought me luck, but we became friends over the year or so that she worked here. I watched her start out as a shaky handed dealer who was easily intimidated by table assholes, to a confident dealer who knew how to handle any situation.

I once had the split ends imperceptibly trimmed off of my ratty hair, and the next day she screamed “You got a haircut!” when I walked in the room. Nobody else had noticed.

Come to think of it, every dealer was nice.

This room really did try. It wasn’t the Venetian or the Wynn, but they tried to accommodate everyone.

I knew many people here. There was a bit of a “Breakfast Club” on Saturday and Sunday mornings as fellow locals tried to get double hours for the monthly free-roll, and it was almost like a small, dysfunctional family.

Some of us outright hated each other, some of us became good friends, but we all knew each other by name … and it was always mentioned when someone didn’t show up on any given weekend. Sure, sometimes it was hoped that certain people had been hit by a truck … but it was mentioned nonetheless.

From the straw-hat wearing Asian lady who wouldn’t call $2 unless she had the nuts, to the Persian limo driver who raised with everything, to the guy who placed sports bets for the mob and went to the bathroom stall to relay lines, to the old fat guy who told us that he taught poker as a full time job during the week even as I beat him consistently. The cast of regular characters was probably the most interesting in town.

We got free donuts and coffee in the morning, and even though there was no stated comp rate, it was rare that locals like myself paid for a meal after an 8 hour grind. The buffet was directly across from the Poker Room, and on an given day would have several local poker players snarfing down their meal after tripling up or busting out.

We would run out between hands to make sports bets, and brag to everyone when we had a winning ticket (something that I rarely got to do as none of my tickets ever won).

I placed in the money in the freeroll only once, but I always enjoyed playing it.

I used to always grab a sub from the adjacent Las Vegas subs after my session was over, and even that has been replaced.

Now it’s all over.

Rich is working in the Hilton cashier cage, and Lynda and Rachael don’t know what they are going to do. Many of the dealers don’t know. Apparently, not many of the rooms are hiring.

I’m really going to miss this room, and the people in it. As soon as I know where my favorite staff members have found jobs, I will play in those rooms.

Most people probably don’t care that this room has closed, but for a certain group of Vegas locals, it really is a big loss.

“It just isn’t bringing in the money the Hilton wants”, said the 35 year veteran employee. Weekday crowds just never materialized on a consistent basis. It often sat empty at noon on Wednesday.

It still hasn’t hit me. I played there just last Friday and everything seemed perfectly normal. When I walk in and see the room gone, it’s going to be a very sad thing.

Anyway, these are the final pictures, taken mere hours before the room was closed forever.