With all the stories of The Tartan Army drinking Boston dry for FIFA, I was reminded of a story of Vegas running low on beer during a past rugby match. Can you jog my memory on that or any other times Vegas almost ran out of booze?
Not quite.
When the annual USA Sevens was held at Sam Boyd Stadium in 2016, a joke went around that rugby fans "drank Las Vegas dry." Rugby sevens has a well-earned reputation for "enthusiastic" (meaning in part thirsty) fans, especially those from Britain, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. And even though attendance reached more than 80,000 over the Sevens weekend, we dare say that organizers and concessionaires were accustomed to stocking beverages of choice for large, even very very large, crowds.
It's possible some individual concession stands at the stadium temporarily ran out of certain brands during busy periods; that happens at almost every large sporting event. But that's a far cry from the entire city running out of beer.
A similar story surfaced last year, though not in Vegas. During the 2025 Rugby World Cup, the England-Australia match in Brighton saw stadium concessions run short of beer. And Scottish soccer supporters at the 2026 World Cup overwhelmed several Boston bars, which ran out of their flagship beers and had to arrange for emergency deliveries.
Here, nightclubs run out of a premium vodka. A sportsbook bar might run out of Guinness on a busy Saturday. A casino exhausts its allocation of a rare bourbon or champagne. And certainly, a stadium concession stand sells all of its beer before the game ends. But these are operational, not citywide, shortages.
It's almost unimaginable that Las Vegas could run out of beer on any occasion, no matter how much is consumed. Las Vegas has one of the country's largest hospitality supply chains; distributors keep enormous inventories to supply the casinos' insatiable demand; multiple wholesalers can transfer stock between properties if necessary; and hotels often substitute brands rather than tell customers they're completely out.
Furthermore, casino beverage managers are necessarily conservative when preparing for the demand at big events. They'd much rather have a few extra pallets of beer left over than become the property that has to tell 15,000 Australian or Scottish rugby fans, "Sorry, we're out." That's the sort of operational embarrassment they work very hard to avoid.
So. The rugby legend is exactly the kind that grows in the retelling. A bartender tells someone, "We drained our last keg at right after the start of the second half." That becomes, "The casino ran out of beer." Ten years later, it's, "Las Vegas ran out of beer during the rugby tournament." Like the old game of telephone, stories like there tend to improve with age.
