Goodbye to Cash at Poker Tables in Las Vegas

Cash or chips at the table, which do you prefer? Both clearly have advantages and disadvantages; on the one hand, chips are easier to handle, make it simpler to figure out your opponent's stack, etc. On the other, however, playing with cash makes reloading way simpler and some amateur players may enjoy seeing and feeling the actual money instead of clay betting disks.

Las Vegas has been one of the few places in the States that still allows cash on the tables, together with an odd casino here and there around the U.S., but it seems that practice will be coming to an end soon. According to a 2+2 thread and Chris Grove from Online Poker Report, after April 1st, MGM will no longer allow cash at its poker tables.

While MGM confirmed the information, it seems that other venues will be following suit, including ARIA, Mirage, Bellagio, Mandalay Bay and more. According to Grove and numerous posters on the forum, one of the reasons behind the decision is to thwart money laundering practices.

Being able to simply put cash on the table offers an opportunity for poker games to be used for large amounts of money to be transacted without being tracked. Using money without first converting it into chips means that there is no paper or electronic trail of any sort and casinos need to protect against the potential abuse of this system.

As for community reactions to the news, the majority seem to agree that the new policy is good for poker. Handling wads of money at the table can be difficult and makes it hard to know how much money players have in their stacks.

Several posters have also reported experiences with angle shooters and cheaters who short-changed other players by inserting small denomination bills inside their wads. As one poster explained -

There are some legitimate concerns that this could lower the overall amount of money that enters the economy because amateurs will have an opportunity to think twice after getting felted and will have better control over the amount of money that they decide to put in play.

The general consensus seems to be that not having cash at the tables will be favorable, as positives outweigh the negatives in this discussion. Some hobby players may not be thrilled that they will no longer be able to just put a pile of money at the table, but they will certainly get used to it after a while.

And the game will go on.

Photo: thebudgetingtool