After 4 days of poker, the $1,000 Women Championship will crown a winner in the present day after a frenetic Day 3 at Horseshoe and Paris Las Vegas diminished the sector to simply seven finalists.
All the time an occasion assured to ship compelling storylines (see PokerNews reporter Gabby Barredo who captured a hand the place a participant pushed all-in together with her husband’s ashes yesterday), the WSOP’s flagship feminine occasion has drawn 1,368 entrants this 12 months with Japanese star Shiina Okamoto in pole place to win again to again titles and preserve her stranglehold on the occasion.
But in addition including to the richness of the sector this 12 months was a contact of true Vegas royalty within the form of September Sarno, the daughter of the person dubbed the ‘First Emperor of Vegas’.
Vegas Royalty & the Delivery of Caesars Empire
You’ll have heard of Jay Sarno; you could not have. However in case you’ve ever been to Paradise, Las Vegas, you’ve seen and felt the legacy of a person whose imaginative and prescient raised the glass monoliths that now line the world-famous boulevard the place the Horseshoe and Paris stands.
When Jay Sarno opened Caesars Palace on August 5, 1966, it modified the Las Vegas panorama perpetually. The opening ceremony price $1 million (round $9.6 million in 2025) and featured two tons of filet mignon, 300 kilos of Maryland crabmeat, and 50,000 glasses of champagne.
“It’s totally thrilling that my dad was a pioneer right here in Vegas. He was thought-about the founding father of the primary theme resort,” Sarno says. “The whole lot was fundamental earlier than he began, and after him, all of the motels had themes. Steve Wynn was form of like a protégé. When my dad opened Caesars in 1966, there wasn’t one other large opening till the Mirage 20 years later.”
“When he first got here, he noticed nothing however mediocrity. He got here right here to construct a greater resort.”
Sarno, who completed one hundred and tenth to earn $2,182 in her second money of the summer time, added, “It was very thrilling, very enjoyable, however like most success tales, there was a fly within the ointment.”
“Our father was an issue gambler and just about gambled his fortune away.” Jay Sarno offered Caesars Palace simply three years after its lavish opening ceremony in 1969.
Despatched to boarding faculty at 17, September Sarno later left Las Vegas for Los Angeles, enrolling on the College of Southern California earlier than constructing a extremely profitable profession as a wealth supervisor.
“I wished to know the whole lot there was about cash, and I constructed my very own empire,” she says. “That was the upside to watching what occurred to my father.”
Nonetheless, Sarno is reflective about his struggles. “If he have been by no means a gambler, he would not have come to Vegas to construct a greater class of on line casino. When he first got here, he noticed nothing however mediocrity. He got here right here to construct a greater resort.”
Enjoying the Women Championship
Sarno is glowing as she talks in regards to the enjoyable she’s having on this 12 months’s Women Championship.
“It’s totally enjoyable. The ladies are fiercely aggressive, and I am enjoying with a variety of champions, individuals who have received bracelets,” she tells PokerNews.
“I am having a lot of enjoyable telling jokes on the desk as a result of I do some stand-up comedy as a retirement interest.”
Regardless of her household hyperlinks, Sarno would not choose up the sport of poker till a lot later in life, saying, “I wasn’t interested in poker till a lot afterward. Just a few years in the past, a boyfriend taught it to me, and I performed just a little on-line, and now I play a weekly dwelling recreation with some poker sharks, they usually received me adequate to play in these tournaments and money.”
And as for the thought of profitable a gold WSOP bracelet? “I imply, once I heard there was jewelry concerned, I stated signal me up,” she says, laughing.
Eliot Thomas
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