Las Vegas: BCA World Championships

Fly in, play a lot of pool, eat a lot of food, gamble a little, watch Catrina get launched into Oz, fly home.

About the BCA World Championships

The BCA Pool League World Championships, run by CueSports International (CSI), is the largest amateur pool tournament in the world. The 2026 edition ran February 18–28 at the Westgate Las Vegas, with the 8-ball team event specifically playing Wednesday Feb 25 through Saturday Feb 28. The tournament brings in roughly 10,000 players from BCAPL-sanctioned leagues all over the world and turns one of the biggest ballrooms on the Strip into a sea of 9-foot tables for nearly two weeks straight. There are singles and team events in 8-ball, 9-ball, scotch doubles, and various brackets split by skill level and player demographic, plus pro events running alongside in the Predator Pro Arenas.

For a league team, the format is: show up, play your scheduled matches, live and die by the bracket, kill time in between. The "kill time in between" part is what most of a Vegas BCA trip actually is, and Vegas is obviously designed to help with that.

Home base: the Westgate

Staying at the host hotel was the right call. The alternative — crashing somewhere else on the Strip and making a daily pilgrimage to the Westgate — trades short walks to your matches for long Ubers and the risk of being late for a scheduled start time. Living in the building is simply how the trip is supposed to work.

The Westgate itself has more history than its current branding lets on. It opened in 1969 as the International Hotel, then the largest hotel in the world, and was the site of Elvis Presley's famous residency — 636 consecutive sold-out shows between 1969 and 1976. It became the Las Vegas Hilton in 1971, hosted a young Barry Manilow opening for Bette Midler, was where Liberace and a long list of other Vegas headliners played, and was eventually rebranded as the Westgate in 2014. You can still feel the vintage Vegas bones of the place if you know what you're looking at. It's off-Strip in the sense that you can't walk from it to the Bellagio, but it's directly next to the Las Vegas Convention Center, which is why it's a natural fit for a 10,000-player tournament.

The tournament

Our team entered both the 9-ball and 8-ball team events.

9-ball: Both of our teams made the final bracket, which in a field this size is a real result. 9-ball is the faster, more volatile game — more early rewards, but also more ways to lose on a lucky miss or a run-out from two balls deep. Making the money round in a tournament where the field is in the hundreds of teams is something to be proud of, even if the bracket stops being kind to you eventually.

8-ball: We came up short. Different game, different pace, different defensive structure — you play more safety battles, the matches run longer, and stamina matters. Sometimes that works in your favor and sometimes it doesn't. This time it didn't.

You play pool long enough, you understand that some tournaments are yours and some aren't. We played well. We'll be back.

Food

A pool tournament involves a staggering amount of standing around, watching, chalking, waiting, and low-key adrenaline with nowhere to put it. The food ends up being one of the most important logistical parts of the trip. A few standouts from this one:

Hash House A Go Go (The Linq). Hash House's whole brand is "twisted farm food" served in portions that are borderline hostile in size. The sage fried chicken and waffles plate is the one everyone knows about — it's as big as your head and has a sprig of rosemary the size of a small tree stabbed into the top. It's been a Vegas breakfast institution since the original location opened on Sahara in 2000, and the Linq location continues the tradition. Excellent before a long day of matches. You will not be hungry again until dinner.

Junior's (Resorts World). This is the Vegas outpost of Junior's, the legendary Brooklyn restaurant that has been claiming the title of world's best cheesecake since 1950. The full diner menu is great, but the cheesecake is the thing. Getting a slice of the original plain cheesecake at breakfast is, frankly, one of the more enjoyable ways to start a day.

The Peppermill. A true Vegas survivor. The Peppermill opened in 1972 on the Strip just south of the Sahara and has barely changed since — neon-and-pink decor, oversized portions, the adjacent Fireside Lounge with its sunken seating and fake flaming pool. It's the kind of place that shows up in a lot of "vintage Vegas" lists and listicles, and for good reason. Breakfast there feels like stepping into a time capsule of a Vegas that mostly doesn't exist anymore.

Carmine's (Caesars Palace). The team dinner spot. Carmine's is family-style Italian, portioned for a group, which is exactly what you want when you're trying to feed a pool team that has just finished a long day of matches. The Caesars Palace location has the standard Carmine's playbook — enormous platters of pasta, meatballs the size of softballs, salads that could feed five, a wine list that encourages sharing. It's not innovative cooking, but for a team dinner in Vegas it's basically perfect, and the leftovers go a long way back at the hotel.

Between matches: the Westgate Superbook and casino floor

A lot of the downtime between matches went into the Westgate's own amenities. The Westgate SuperBook is a genuinely impressive room — when it opened in 1986 it was the first standalone race and sportsbook, and at roughly 30,000 square feet with a 220-foot-long video wall it's still considered one of the largest and most famous sportsbooks in the world. It's where a lot of the industry's signature Vegas betting happens: big futures markets, the NFL's Westgate SuperContest, and a crowd that takes the whole thing seriously. Even if you're not betting big, grabbing a seat, watching games on that wall, and killing a couple of hours between pool matches is a solid way to spend an afternoon.

The casino floor itself is classic older-Vegas layout — lower ceilings, plenty of smoke, tables and slots laid out more for locals and regulars than for the Instagram tourist crowd of the newer Strip casinos. That's a feature, not a bug, for this kind of trip.

Fremont Street evenings

We spent a couple of evenings downtown on Fremont Street, which if you haven't done it is a very different Vegas experience from the Strip. The Fremont Street Experience runs for four blocks under a huge barrel-vault LED canopy that stages light shows every hour after dark, with street performers, zipliners flying overhead, and the historic downtown casinos lining both sides. We gambled at three of them:

Binion's. The spiritual home of Texas Hold'em — Benny Binion founded the World Series of Poker here in 1970, and the WSOP stayed at Binion's until 2005. The hotel tower closed years ago but the casino floor is still operating, and it still feels like the old Las Vegas — low ceilings, $1 blackjack, no pretense.

Golden Nugget. The flagship of downtown. The Nugget has been the nicest thing on Fremont for a very long time, with a higher-end casino floor, the famous "Tank" pool with the water slide through a shark aquarium, and a lineage that stretches back to 1946. It's the one downtown casino that wouldn't feel out of place on the Strip.

Circa. The newest of the three by a long way — Circa opened in October 2020 as the first completely new ground-up casino built downtown in about 40 years. It's adults-only (21+), famously has a three-story sportsbook with a 78-million-pixel screen, and is backed by Derek Stevens, who also owns the D and Golden Gate. It's a deliberate attempt to pull some of the Strip's energy back into the downtown corridor, and it mostly works.

Three very different casinos, representing roughly the past, the middle, and the present of downtown Vegas.

Catrina at the Sphere: The Wizard of Oz

While the rest of us were playing, Catrina went to see The Wizard of Oz at Sphere on Thursday. The Sphere is the 366-foot-tall spherical venue off the east side of the Strip that opened in 2023 and has become one of the most talked-about new attractions in the city. The interior LED screen is the highest-resolution screen in the world — it wraps around the audience in a 160,000-square-foot dome — and the venue also uses haptic seats, 4D environmental effects (wind, scent, temperature), and its custom Big Sky spatial audio system.

The Wizard of Oz experience is an AI-augmented reimagining of the 1939 classic, rebuilt specifically for the Sphere's 16K dome display. Original footage has been upscaled, extended, and in some cases reframed so that sequences like the tornado and the arrival in Oz take full advantage of the Sphere's immersive canvas. Catrina came back raving about it. It's apparently one of those experiences where you spend the whole time looking around trying to take in everything happening at once, and you walk out slightly dazed.

She had a great day. The rest of us had a pool tournament.

Final thoughts

BCA Worlds is one of those trips that's half sporting event, half Vegas vacation, and you take whatever mix of the two you manage to come away with. Making the final bracket in 9-ball with both teams was a legitimate result; the 8-ball loss stings but that's pool. The food was great, the SuperBook is still the SuperBook, Fremont Street is still worth doing, and the Wizard of Oz at Sphere is apparently as cool as everyone says.

The nice thing about staying at the host hotel is that when your last match is done, you're already home. No Uber, no traffic, no schlep back from the Venetian at 1 AM. That alone made the Westgate the right call.

We'll be back in 2027.