No visit to Las Vegas is complete without a tour through the Bellagio’s poker room. What Lord’s is to cricket, the Bellagio is to our favourite game. It is a place where the notion of celebrity gets redefined in a suitably poker-centric manner.

To wit, not long ago Doyle Brunson was sitting alongside Leonardo DiCaprio and Tobey Maguire at the Bellagio. According to Eli Elezra, fans ignored the film stars and gravitated to Brunson. Which, one can argue, is as it should be.

The Bellagio, after all, is where the legendary Big Game is usually spread and the poker room there brims with significance. So much so that when the otherwise flawed Texas hold’em flick Lucky You was scheduled for production at the same time as the room’s renovation in 2005, director Curtis Hanson arranged to buy every discarded fixture and reconstructed the room on a sound stage. Pros who served as extras felt right at home.

STARRY-EYED SURPRISE

On certain nights at the Bellagio you will see the likes of Brunson, David Benyamine, Barry Greenstein and Elezra camped out, usually plying their trade inside the famed Bobby’s Room. A luxe poker room within the poker room, it is a high-stakes, high-ceilinged enclave with just two tables, where the world’s biggest game is held behind walls of bevelled glass. Bobby’s Room is detailed with leather panelling, it boasts its own lounge area, and a 0,000 painting by LeRoy Neiman centrepieces the space.

The minimum games spread there are ,000/,000 limit or 0/0 no-limit, and spectators can watch through the glass but go no further. Unless you’re the big fish – for whom special dispensations are made – the house rule is that only spouses and girlfriends are allowed to sweat action within these sacred walls.

Even on the perimeter of that big- money clubhouse, it is easy to be star- struck. My first night at the Bellagio, back in the pre-boom days of poker, I remember being bowled over by the sight of Johnny Chan blowing through, wearing a gaudy sweater and questing for action.

Then Phil Hellmuth, at a time when he routinely played cash, passed by, sporting his signature shades and a blinding smile. I was there to get a quote from the then little known Johnny ‘World’ Hennigan. I’d heard about a six-figure golf match he’d been involved in and needed some details. Looking horrified, Hennigan blew me off and proceeded to his table where stacks of ,000 chips were fortressed at his seat.

POKER PRIORITIES

For all its importance in the card- playing world – this is, after all, where Texan billionaire Andy Beal first got filleted by the Corporation, the site where, in one recent week, five separate pots exceeded million, and the spot where the late Chip Reese played his final hands – the Bellagio opened in 1998, a time when featuring poker in a Las Vegas casino was hardly a no-brainer.

‘I always put a poker room at the top of my list,’ says Bobby Baldwin, four-time WSOP bracelet winner, MGM Mirage’s chief design and construction officer, and the man for whom Bobby’s Room is named. ‘It supports the race and sports book, brings in business in the middle of the night when the rest of the casino is gone, and generates revenue throughout the property. So it makes business-sense to have a poker room.’

Seven years later, though, in 2005, hold’em was the rage, and it made all kinds of sense to clear away tables in the pit in order to expand the Bellagio’s poker pavilion and build a lavish high- roller suite. Baldwin never doubted the value of keeping his high-stakes pros happy. ‘Professional players, of which there are many, create the environment for the amateurs,’ says Baldwin. ‘They start the games, they finish the games, they are catalytic to creating the poker room atmosphere.’

How far the Bellagio goes to keep from alienating influential Big Game superstars can be seen in a situation that involved Chip Reese, who thought he had left a couple of 0k chips in a pair of trousers that had been dropped off at the dry cleaner. ‘Chip offered a reward to the dry cleaner, but the chips never showed up,’ remembers poker room manager Doug Dalton. ‘So Bobby put a hold on our 0,000 chips for two months. In the end it turned out that two of the chips were missing. Bobby authorised us to give Chip 0,000 in cash and discontinued the [series of] chips.’

CONTROL ROOM

Bobby’s Room has some unique aspects. Players control the environment, the flat-screen TVs and the music. Walls there are adorned with photographic portraits of the game’s greats – Brunson, Reese and Ivey among them. Players who get hungry can order food from any restaurant in the Bellagio (though, contrary to popular belief, they do pay for their meals, taking the money out of a kitty that builds up over the course of the night).

It makes for major feasts, with steaks carted in from Prime, groaning trays of Chinese from Noodles and piles of Kobe sliders from Fix. ‘Sometimes,’ says Dalton, ‘the players want stuff from In-N-Out Burger. I’ll drive over there and bring back Double- Doubles and French fries. I’ll do anything within reason for those guys.’

Don’t get the impression, though, that the Bellagio is exclusively for high-rollers. Beyond Bobby’s Room, the 7,000-square-foot room provides 38 tables for the rest of us (this includes a semi-secluded, elevated section for medium-high stakes). What everybody gets at the Bellagio, regardless of bankroll, is comfy swivel chairs, impeccable felts, seasoned dealers, fair floormen, and terrific cappuccinos to help get you through those late-night blasts of raising and re-raising.