The Slots Hall of Fame Inducts Its 2026 Class Today at the Plaza

DOWNTOWN LAS VEGAS — Baseball has Cooperstown. Rock and roll has Cleveland. And as of today, slot machines — the machines that bankroll most of this town's buildings — have the Plaza. The 2026 Slots Hall of Fame induction ceremony takes place at 1 p.m. this afternoon inside the brand-new high-limit slots room at the Plaza Hotel & Casino, where six games will be enshrined in the hall's second class.

This is the first live edition of the ceremony. The Slots Hall of Fame launched last year from Casinos.com, and it is built on a simple idea: the games that built the modern casino floor deserve the same kind of canon the movies and the music business give their classics. Five inductees are chosen by the site's expert panel. The sixth seat belongs to the players — the People's Choice — and that seat is the whole point.

"A Hall of Fame that only listens to critics is just a list."— Colm Phelan, Casinos.com brand director, on the People's Choice seat

The mechanics are democratic. Players spent a month testing the six nominated titles and leaving reviews, with voting closing Sept. 30. This year's nominees read like a syllabus of the modern slot floor: Gates of Olympus from Pragmatic Play, Big Bass Bonanza from Reel Kingdom, Legacy of Dead from Play'n GO, Dead or Alive from NetEnt, Wheel of Fortune from IGT, and Huff N' Puff from Light & Wonder. For the 2025 class, more than 400 players rated 12 nominated games, and Dragon Link took the People's Choice seat with an overall score of 4.08 out of 5 — a result nobody on the editorial panel could overrule.

Hosting today's ceremony is Desiree Rodriguez, the content creator known as @daybydaydesiree, who represented Casinos.com as a poker brand ambassador this year. The event is open to casino and slots fans — fitting, since the whole premise of the hall is that players get a vote.

The venue choice is the story underneath the ceremony. The Plaza has been betting big on slots for years — general manager Sue Ascanio notes the property has more than 750 machines on its casino floor and says slot business keeps growing, which made the new high-limit room, stocked with the latest and most popular games, the natural stage for today's induction. For a downtown property that has been reinventing itself, hosting the first live edition of a ceremony built for slot culture is a statement about where the Plaza sees itself.

"Slots can get treated as background noise in a lot of gaming coverage, which is strange when they pay for most of the building."— Dan Michalski, executive editor at Casinos.com

That line is the honest thesis of the whole thing. Slot machines account for the overwhelming majority of gaming revenue on the Nevada side of the ledger year after year, yet they get almost none of the prestige. The table games get the movies. The sportsbooks get the hype. The slots get the carpet pattern. A hall of fame — even a playful one — is overdue.

And playful it is. Alongside the six inductees, today's ceremony hands out a slate of awards that read less like an industry banquet and more like a group chat: Best Slot of the Year, Best Land-Based Slot of the Year and Best Studio of the Year sit next to the Toothache Award for the Sweetest Slot of the Year, the Main Character Syndrome Award for Best Slot Character, and the Pineapple on Pizza Award for the slot people either love or can't stand. The hall's own website adds categories like Worst Sound and Music and Best Slot Character — the slots world apparently takes its audio war crimes seriously.

The Plaza is a fitting custodian for the first live ceremony. First opened in 1971 as the Union Plaza on the site of the original Las Vegas railroad depot, it anchors the west end of the Fremont Street Experience with nearly 1,000 rooms, an 80,000-square-foot casino floor, downtown's only bingo hall, Oscar's Steakhouse in the iconic glass dome, and even downtown's first smokefree gaming space. This is a property that has spent the last several years reminding people downtown is not a nostalgia act — see also the CORE Arena and the rooftop pool — and landing a ceremony the Strip never got to host first fits the pattern.

Behind the ceremony is Casinos.com, part of the publicly traded Grandstand Ltd. (Nasdaq: GRSD), which has been expanding its live footprint in gaming culture — it created International Casinos Day, runs the annual International Casino Awards, and publishes player-driven initiatives like Tribal Gaming Month alongside the Slots Hall of Fame. The hall's 2026 review campaign even dangled a $5,000 prize for one slot tester, on top of the glory. Nothing motivates a review like a jackpot.

So at 1 p.m. today, in a brand-new high-limit room at 1 S. Main Street, six games get their plaques and one crowd of slot fans gets to say their hall of fame works differently than everyone else's. The critics get five seats. The players get the sixth. Given who pays for the building, that's probably the right ratio.

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