San Manuel Holds Las Vegas’s Only Open Tribal Casino

The Yuhaaviatam of San Manuel Nation still runs the only open tribal-owned casino in Las Vegas, the Palms Casino Resort on Flamingo Road. Mohegan is already gone from Virgin Hotels. The Seminole Tribe’s Hard Rock rebuild sits dark until late 2027.

That is a vacancy, not a rush of new tribal owners. San Manuel bought an off-Strip locals house. The other two tribal names either walked or shut the doors to pour concrete.

Mohegan Walked and the Mirage Went Dark

Three tribal names touched Las Vegas casino floors in the early 2020s. Only one of those floors is still open under tribal control. Connecticut’s Mohegan Gaming & Entertainment ran the casino inside Virgin Hotels Las Vegas under a lease, the first tribal operator in the city, but it never owned the building. Florida’s Seminole Tribe, through Hard Rock International, bought The Mirage from MGM Resorts International in 2022 for $1.075 billion, then closed it. San Manuel, through the San Manuel Gaming and Hospitality Authority, bought the Palms and still takes the bets.

THE THREE TRIBAL BETS IN LAS VEGAS

Mohegan and Virgin announced the split in May 2024. Ray Pineault, then Mohegan’s president and CEO, thanked guests and staff and said the tribe’s role would come to an end. Cliff Atkinson, then president of the hotel, told Nevada regulators the lease with Mohegan “simply did not work.” The Nevada Gaming Commission in December 2024 licensed C&C 4455 LLC, a company Atkinson formed with finance chief Chad Konrad, to take the 60,000-square-foot casino. The handoff was done by early 2025.

Hard Rock closed The Mirage on July 17, 2024, and started tearing the old showpiece down the next day. San Manuel did not gain share from that closure. It gained a title because two other tribal-linked operations left the floor, one for good and one for a multi-year rebuild on the Strip.

Palms, a Locals House on Flamingo

San Manuel paid Red Rock Resorts $650 million in December 2021 for the Palms and Palms Place, the first time a tribe both owned and operated a Las Vegas casino. Red Rock had bought the same resort in 2016 for $312.5 million and then spent $690 million on a renovation that reopened in April 2019. Kaos, the giant nightclub from that spend, lasted seven months. The statewide pandemic shutdown in March 2020 lasted 78 days. Red Rock never reopened the Palms. San Manuel did, on April 27, 2022, with 766 rooms and suites.

Latisha Prieto, chairperson of the San Manuel Gaming and Hospitality Authority, told an interviewer in July 2024 that the tribe had hoped its entry “would create a pathway for more tribes to want to be in Las Vegas.” After the Nevada Gaming Control Board approved the Mirage purchase in December 2022, the Palms put a congratulations message to the Seminoles on the giant LED wall. “We were super excited there was going to be more tribal presence in Las Vegas,” Prieto said.

There is more tribal capital in the city. There is not more tribal casino operating. The pathway she described is a single open door on Flamingo, and a closed lot on Las Vegas Boulevard.

THE ROAD FROM THE SALE TO THE GUITAR

1. May 4, 2021: San Manuel agrees to buy the Palms for $650 million.
2. December 2021: The Nevada Gaming Commission licenses the deal and the sale closes.
3. April 27, 2022: Palms reopens after two years dark.
4. 2022: Hard Rock, owned by the Seminole Tribe, buys The Mirage for $1.075 billion.
5. May 2024: Mohegan says it will leave Virgin by year’s end.
6. July 17, 2024: The Mirage closes for the Hard Rock rebuild.
7. Early 2025: Mohegan is out; C&C 4455 runs the Virgin casino.
8. May 1, 2026: The 42-story guitar tower tops out at 660 feet.
9. Late 2027: Hard Rock targets its opening, which would end San Manuel’s solo run.

Cynthia Kiser Murphey, the longtime MGM executive hired to reopen the Palms, left at the end of June 2024. Prieto called her exit expected and said Murphey had helped create the opening. Kevin Glass, who had come back in 2021 as vice president of hospitality, became general manager in September 2025 after a stop as assistant general manager.

How Club Serrano Ties Highland to Las Vegas

The Palms was never meant to copy a Strip megaresort. It was bought to extend a Southern California player base that already filled Yaamava’ Resort & Casino in Highland, about 60 miles east of downtown Los Angeles, on the Nation’s 1,100-acre reservation. Prieto said in 2024 that Yaamava’ held more than 7,200 slot machines and 150 table games in a 432-room hotel, a much larger gaming floor than the Palms even though the Las Vegas building has more rooms.

She put the Palms mix at 40 percent locals, 40 percent California visitors, and 20 percent from other markets. Club Serrano, the shared loyalty card, lets a Highland regular spend comps on Flamingo and a Palms regular do the reverse. Billboards on Interstate 15 sell both buildings to the same drive. Glass later described the same pipe in plainer terms: San Manuel owns what he called arguably the most successful casino in California, and that database feeds Las Vegas.

The Nation has 316 members, a figure Prieto gave in that 2024 interview. The Palms is a commercial, Nevada-licensed casino, not a reservation hall under the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act. That is the whole point of the purchase. The tribe stepped off its own land and bought a state license in the most watched gaming city in the country.

A License Hearing Spelled Out the Model

When Glass went before the Nevada Gaming Control Board in July 2026 for his license recommendation, he did not pitch a tourist palace. He said the Palms had spent four and a half years becoming more of a locals house than the Maloof-era original, which mixed daytime neighborhood play with a famous nightclub circuit.

We’ve made a lot of changes over the last 4.5 years and the local business is our wheelhouse. We’re predominantly a locals casino.

Kevin Glass, general manager, Palms Casino Resort, to the Nevada Gaming Control Board

He told Board Chair Mike Dreitzer the model is value, hospitality, and a clean room. When guests leave, he said, they should feel they did not spend $10 on a bottle of water. The old nightlife bet is gone. Glass has said the Palms is not in the nightclub business anymore. Ghost Bar remains as an ultra-lounge. Pearl still books concerts. More than 60 workers who were there on opening day in 2001 came back after the two-year shutdown, a return he treats as proof the building still has a staff culture worth keeping. San Manuel’s first instinct after the sale, including a back-of-house remodel the tribe flagged to regulators in 2021, was the part of the building customers never see.

WHAT SAN MANUEL PUT ON THE FLOOR

• Slot count: The casino now lists more than 1,700 slot machines, with table games and a high-limit room beside them.
• Smoke-free room: In August 2026 it opened a 7,300-square-foot enclosed non-smoking gaming area with 224 slots, a full bar, and a taco truck on the patio.
• Shared card: Club Serrano works at Palms and at Yaamava’, so the Highland database and the Flamingo floor spend on the same account.
• Public face: “This Is That Vegas” branding includes 55 Stories of Fame, photos of guests thrown onto the 55-story tower, which debuted August 7, 2026.

Glass told the board his job is to steer the next three to five years. That window is the same stretch in which Hard Rock is supposed to turn the lights back on a mile east.

Hard Rock’s $4 Billion Guitar Ends the Wait

The Seminoles are not a tribe that left Las Vegas. They bought the middle of the Strip and shut it to rebuild. Hard Rock International Chairman and Seminole Gaming CEO Jim Allen has called the Mirage site “the Strip’s 50-yard line.” The new complex is budgeted at about $4 billion. Plans call for about 3,600 hotel rooms, including 675 inside the guitar, and about 175,000 square feet of gaming space, plus a 5,000-seat Hard Rock Live and a 2,000-seat West Theater.

Crews placed the last beam on the 42-story, 660-foot guitar on May 1, 2026, nineteen months after ground broke. By late summer the blue glass was nearly wrapped around the tower, with LED “string” mounts going in on the front face. Interior work is running around the clock. Hard Rock is still aiming at a late 2027 opening, several months later than first sketched, which keeps Palms alone on the tribal operating ledger until then.

When that resort opens, San Manuel will no longer be the only tribal name taking casino bets in the city. It will still be the only tribe that owns an off-Strip locals plant, which is a different product from a guitar-shaped Strip hotel. The sole-operator title was always going to be temporary. The temporary stretch is now measured in years, not months.

Forty Years From a Bingo Hall

The Nation, which reclaimed the ancestral name Yuhaaviatam in 2025 after decades as the San Manuel Band of Mission Indians, marked 40 years of tribal gaming in 2026. The first hall opened in 1986. The anniversary materials call Palms the first and only Native American-owned and operated casino in America’s gaming capital, a line that is true for an open floor and will stay true until Hard Rock opens.

THE NATION’S OWN LEDGER

• National tribal gaming: The National Indian Gaming Commission put Indian gaming at $46.2 billion in fiscal 2025, up $2.3 billion, or 5.3 percent, from 545 operations run by 246 tribes in 29 states.
• Not that system: Those 545 statements are reservation gaming under federal rules. Palms is a Nevada commercial license owned by a tribe, so it sits outside that count.
• The Highland engine: The Nation says its gaming and government work generate more than $3.2 billion in annual economic impact, support nearly 8,000 team members, and pay more than $627 million in wages and benefits.
• Giving: San Manuel Cares has directed more than $450 million since the early 2000s.

On May 29, 2026, the San Manuel Investment Authority closed on The Mission Inn Hotel & Spa in Riverside, a National Historic Landmark, and hired Pyramid Global Hospitality to run it. Chairwoman Lynn Valbuena called the inn a living institution the Nation would steward. That buy is hospitality without a casino. The Vegas casino remains a one-property bet.

Carla Rodriguez, vice chairwoman of the gaming authority, has said new artwork at Palms is there to show “who we are as a tribe.” “Being the first in Nevada, we’ve got to put our mark and personality on it, right? This is the start of doing that,” she said. A Pow Wow Exhibition on October 13, 2025, drew more than 500 guests across two 90-minute sessions. Co-organizer Tom Ramos hoped the night would “make room for more.”

Other Tribes Have Not Opened a Second Floor

Prieto said in 2024 that the authority still looked at other deals, including Northern Nevada, and would consider managing a casino for another tribe, the way Hard Rock already manages tribal properties in Northern California and Oklahoma. “We’re focused on Palms and Yaamava’. But we’re always open to how we can help other tribes understand and learn,” she said.

No second tribe has since opened a Las Vegas casino. Mohegan’s lease is over. The Seminoles are building, not dealing. Palms is the proof other nations can study: a $650 million off-Strip buy, a shared California card, a locals pitch, a smoke-free room, and a title that exists because the other tribal operators left the floor.

Hard Rock still lists a late 2027 opening. Until those doors move, the Palms is the only tribal-run casino taking a live bet in Las Vegas.