A travel destination that can change your life in an instant, Las Vegas is a place where you can get married on a whim by day, and become an on the spot millionaire by night.

Vegas is home to many of the world’s top casinos, offering an endless array of slot machines, craps, baccarat, roulette, blackjack, and poker, so whether you’re a high roller or a virgin (to gambling!) you can be sure Vegas has a game for you.

Vegas may be known as Sin City, but the real sin would be to never experience this crazy yet beautiful city. While there are over a hundred casinos scattered throughout the Las Vegas area, this article will introduce you to some of the finest.

Not surprisingly, most of the top casinos and resorts in Vegas are situated on the roughly 4-mile long Vegas Strip, and it’s worth using a casino games guide to visit the perfect locations for your taste.

Visiting Vegas and wondering where to start, or which casinos not to miss? We’ve got you covered! 

Book a bus to Las Vegas, and then to get between them all, you can book a local limo through a service like Limo Find.

Your Guide to Las Vegas’ World Class Casinos (Best Casinos to Hit on the Strip)

The Venetian & The Palazzo

The Venetian Resort and The Palazzo are sisters, sitting side by side and operating under one gaming license, both owned by the Las Vegas Sands Corporation. And what better way to kick Vegas off than with the world’s second-largest hotel?!

Featuring the Strip’s largest standard accommodations, you’ll find over 4,000 rooms and 3,000 suites between the two. When it comes to the world’s largest hotels, only Malaysia’s First World Hotel eclipses The Venetian & The Palazzo of Vegas.

Enjoy blackjack, roulette, craps, Pai Gow poker, baccarat, and over 1,000 slots just at The Venetian. You’ll also discover two daily poker tournaments at The Venetian.

It should come as no surprise that The Venetian was inspired by Venice, Italy, thus you’ll be constantly surrounded by a number of famous Italian landmarks including the Rialto Bridge, Piazza San Marco, and the Lion of Venice Column.

TAO Nightclub features a 20-foot-tall Buddha statue alongside an infinity pool and a 40-foot-long terrace offering exceptional views of the Vegas Strip.

Over at the Palazzo

Over at The Palazzo, you’ll find the tallest completed building in Nevada which was awarded the AAA Five Diamond Award in its very first year of eligibility. The Palazzo features one of the largest rooftop solar-energy systems in America, providing hot water for the resort’s pools.

Their Drinks2U service means you can order drinks directly from the slots and maybe propose to your significant other on a gondola ride through the Venetian and Palazzo’s Grand Canal.

The resort only ditches its Italian theme during the Chinese New Year when you can catch an authentic dragon dance among other impressive Chinese-themed displays.

Don’t miss the Canyon Ranch SpaClub, offering 150 + services including the Strip’s only Aquavana experience. You’ll also find fitness classes such as yoga and Pilates, a 40-foot-tall rock-climbing wall, and a salon.

Wynn Las Vegas

Named by Condé Nast Traveller as one of the “Top Hotels in the World”, Wynn Las Vegas is named after Steve Wynn, the man responsible for the construction and operation of other famous Vegas casinos including The Mirage, Bellagio, and Treasure Island.

Over 110,000 square feet of gaming space offers up a 27-table poker room, state-of-the-art race and sportsbook, and plenty of table games.

Together with its sister hotel Encore, The Wynn boasts over 5,000 luxury hotel rooms, suites and villas. It is also home to the Wynn Golf Club which has been recently revived after being closed for the last two years.

Although plans were in place to have the course bulldozed and turned into convention center, hotel, and lagoon, it managed to survive and is back better than ever. The pro shop’s giant TVs allow you to keep up on your sports wagers or you can make a friendly wager with your friends out on the course.

Pro tip: Don’t miss the Wynn’s main attraction, a giant waterfall behind a mountain that cascades into a 3-acres lake.

Oh and if you have a ton of extra money to blow, try ordering the Wynn’s $10,000 Cocktail called the Ono which pairs Louis XIII’s Black Pearl Cognac with exclusive Piper-Heidsick’s Charlie champagne.

The cocktail’s garnish, an 18k gold, diamond, and Tahitian black pearl necklace along with a pair of 18k gold Mont Blanc cuff links.

Image credit: Wolfgang Staudt (CC BY 2.0) via Flickr

Caesars Palace Las Vegas Hotel & Casino

Escape to ancient Rome at Caesars Palace, where a giant 20-foot statue of Augustus Caesar will be waiting to greet you. This is classic Vegas at its finest where many legendary musicians have performed including Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr., Dean Martin, and Elton John.

Caesars Palace is a sports betting dream, offering boxing matches since the late 1970s and one of the best sportsbooks in Vegas.

Place wagers on athletes and your favorite teams and bask in the glory of their 138-foot LED video wall that is made up of half a dozen oversized screens, a dozen 50-inch plasma screens, and a 20-by-50-foot LED board with the latest betting lines across all matchups. This allows you to easily keep track of countless sporting events all at once.

Ceasars Palace’s upscale atmosphere makes it attractive to the wealthy, and there are plenty of high limit games on offer to help you get rid of your enormous wealth or help you win big in order to purchase yet another beachfront property.

There are a a wide array of games including the skill-based Cannonbeard’s Treasure which combines cards, skill and naval warfare. In addition to betting, Ceasars Palace is one of the best retail, dining, and entertainment venues in the city.

Image credit: Tomás Del Coro (CC BY-SA 2.0) via Flickr

The Bellagio

If you fancy a back or neck massage tableside while gambling, look no further than the Bellagio. Arrive in style and help save the planet while doing so by booking an eco-friendly limousine powered by much cleaner compressed natural gas.

You can also eat healthy at the resort, with many of the herbs and other ingredients the restaurants uses being sourced directly from their rooftop garden.

Of course, the real showstopper of the Bellagio is its famous dancing fountains. Over 1,200 water jets shoot as high as 450 feet into the air over the 8-acre lake that sits in front of the property.

The daily water shows are free to enjoy by anyone visiting Vegas and the fountains are choreographed to dozens of songs.

Pro tip: Certain MGM loyalty members even have the opportunity to select songs for the fountains to dance to, or have full access to the fountain’s controls while enjoying a 30 liter bottle of champagne! This will only set you back a mere quarter of a million dollars!

When you’re not trying to decide which of the 2,400 slot machines is ready to pay out, head over to Bobby’s Room for some high stakes games including no-limit Hold ‘Em. You may even find yourself playing alongside a few notable poker pros.

You can catch more professionals, but this time professional Olympic medal winning athletes, as they perform acrobatics in the “O” Cirque du Soleil show.

The Mirage

There’s plenty of adventure to be had at The Mirage, with everything from dolphins to volcanoes on offer. On the gambling side of things, The Mirage caters to both novice and pro gamblers with slots that range from penny per play to over a grand per pull.

The Polynesian-themed resort was built by Steve Wynn and currently operated by MGM Resorts International. You can catch the free tram which runs between the Mirage and Treasure Island Hotel and Casino for even more gambling and entertainment, but there’s plenty enough to explore at The Mirage itself.

Get up close and personal with dolphins and white tigers at Siegfried & Roy’s Secret Garden and Dolphin Habitat, where you can enjoy some yoga with the dolphins or become a trainer for a day.

Pro tip: For more marine life, check out the 16-meter-long aquarium behind the registration desk which contains over a thousand marine creatures. There’s also an atrium filled with palms and rainforest plants, an exceptional sight in the desert.

Don’t miss the nightly erupting volcano show that comes complete with actual sounds of a mountain blowing its top off, and ladies feel free to take your own top off at The Mirage’s Bare Pool Lounge which is a 21 and older bikini top optional pool that lays down some great DJ beats often with great sunsets in the background.

You can also enjoy non-smoking tables if you’d prefer not to risk losing a lung in addition to your savings.

Photo credit: Nan Palmero (CC BY 2.0) via Flickr

ARIA Resort & Casino

It didn’t take long for ARIA to become the central feature of Vegas’s CityCenter, the nearly 17 million square foot mixed-use urban complex which is the largest privately financed development in the United States at a cost of  roughly $9 billion dollars!

ARIA takes up nearly a quarter of CityCenter’s entire space, and is CityCenter’s only casino and tallest structure. So intrinsic is ARIA to CityCenter that the complex has pushed to rebrand itself using the ARIA name, changing the CityCenter Art Collection to the ARIA Art Collection and the CityCenter Tram to the ARIA Tram.

ARIA is often touted as the most technologically advanced hotel ever built. Whether this is true or not is debatable, however, it has been proven to be the largest hotel in the world with LEED Gold certification (this is one of the world’s most popular green building certification programs).

Pro tip: Aside from the gambling, don’t miss ARIA’s fancy water walls and musical fountain which were designed by the same company that created Bellagio’s fountain and the volcano over at the Mirage.

ARIA offers one of the Strip’s largest slot-machine floors with an ultra-exclusive high-limit slot room named SPIN where you’ll find some slots that will cost you $5,000 per pull.

If that seems a bit too rich for your blood, there are around 2,000 other slot machines available to us mere mortals that aren’t in the oil business. ARIA also hosts several slot tournaments per year that are worth looking into.

In addition to a ton of slots, the ARIA presents a luxurious 24-table poker room and sportsbook with 220-inch TVs that makes it pretty difficult to not be able to catch all the latest sporting action.

Red Rock Casino Resort & Spa

Image: John Fowler (CC BY 2.0) via Flickr

In case the Vegas Strip is a bit too claustrophobic for your liking, I thought I’d include one resort and casino that’s far removed from all the action on the west edge of the Valley near the base of the Spring Mountains.

The first billion-dollar resort to be built off the Strip, Red Rock Casino Resort & Spa is a beautiful place to gamble due to its proximity to Red Rock Canyon.

Enjoy a bowling alley, movie theater, 600-seat bingo hall, and keno lounge by night after making some time to see the many panoramic natural vistas along Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area’s 13-mile scenic drive.

Related Post: Nature Lovers Should Take This Day Trip From Las Vegas: The Valley of Fire State Park

The natural area features impressive red sandstone peaks and ancient petroglyphs created by Native Americans. The Rock Canyon Visitor Center is just 6 miles west of the resort and the camping area is close by as well in case you lose everything on the slots and can’t afford to stay another night in your luxe hotel room.

If you’re into golfing, the Arnold Palmer-designed Arroyo Golf Club is just steps from the Red Rock Casino Resort & Spa, allowing you to experience a day in a private golf club atmosphere with its public daily-fee golfing.

Ready to gamble? Which casino is your favorite on the Las Vegas Strip?