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Billionaire Poker Player Makes Offer For Mirage

MGM Turns Down Phil Ruffin's $1.3B Offer For Casino

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Treasure Island owner and high-stakes poker player Phil Ruffin last month had his $1.3 billion offer to buy the Mirage casino from MGM Resorts turned down, according to a report from the Las Vegas Review-Journal.

Ruffin, who has been featured on GSN’s High Stakes Poker and competed at the World Series of Poker, acquired Treasure Island from the Las Vegas casino giant in 2009 for $775 million and recently has been looking to add to his Las Vegas Strip investments.

MGM recently decided to put the Mirage and nine other of its casinos into a publicly traded real estate investment trust (REIT) so that the properties could be leased back to the parent company to operate them.

“We don’t have any interest in The Mirage now because we don’t pay rent," Ruffin told the Review-Journal. “The value is in the land."

Ruffin has an estimated net worth of $1.4 billion, which was of help in a huge call he made against David “Viffer” Peat during the seventh season of High Stakes Poker.

 
 
Tags: Phil Ruffin