* Third is my number, btw, based on Business Week data, despite WinStar’s claim that they are just 5th.

At 110,000 square feet, the Choctaw Casino in Durant, Okla., will have the same amount of gaming space as Wynn Las Vegas, and slightly more than Wynn Macao.

Check it out:

“Texas hold’em / Ain’t nobody foldin’!” Rockin’!

We all know where that came from, of course:

Ship It!
Texas money headed to Oklahoma

Details on the expansion project (including the number of jobs it will create) here.

The Choctaw poker room will expand from 18 tables to 30, making it the same size as the Mirage and Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas (and slightly bigger than the Wynn). Still nowhere close, though, to WinStar’s 46.

Speaking of WinStar — we’ll say it again, the third-friggin-biggest casino in the world! — Pokerhag (“A grandma who plays poker”) has a good, related post about how difficult it is to find a non-Texas license plate in their parking lot, and what that means in terms of jobs and the economy:

http://pokerhag.blogspot.com/2009/07/texas-is-missing-boat-on-legalized.html

WinStar (aka the Chickasaw Nation) meanwhile, is blowing up … in addition to the 18 casinos they already run and the hotels they are opening up, they are looking bail out struggling horse tracks, and even expand into other countries … including, plausibly, Texas. The casino tribe just bought Remington Park (thanks to its bankruptcy) in Oklahoma City … and perhaps just to hedge their bets should Texas lawmakers ever change course, are making a similar play for Lone Star Park, the (beautiful but unprofitable) horse track between Dallas and Fort Worth.

Hmm, not sure how to take that. WinStar didn’t expand their poker room until after our legalize-poker efforts were defeated in 2007 (HB-3186) … and I hear we gave their poker staff a bit of a scare this year when we got even closer (HB-222) — in part with a move that connected Texas-based poker efforts to Lone Star Park. I guess this is their way of saying, hey, not so fast … if you get poker in Texas, it’s gonna be Chickasaw Poker!

OK, sorry for the semi-rambly post, but it just occurs to me, with that bitchin’ vid, that if you look at the biggest casino realms in the world, in 2010 you’ll be talking about, in order:

1. Las Vegas
2. Macau
3. Atlantic City
4. Oklahoma just barely north of the Texas border

BTW, check out just how “into” Texas WinStar really is … you know, peninsula-wise:

(via ThePokerAtlas)

Gold Medal
The Venetian

Great regular tourneys, Deep Stack Extravaganzas, plenty of all-but-the-highest-stakes action, bottled Fiji water, and maybe the escalator that dumps off drunkenly clad party girls coming out of Tao right in front of The V’s poker room make it far and away the favorite of this website’s readers/players/dealers.

official site / TPA

The separate tournament room really is cool, if not the best in town, and the comfortable multi-tiered cash game area never seems short of action appealing to the masses of big little-stakes players. Great freerolls for regular cash players, too.

official site / TPA

Still home to the biggest games in Vegas (in terms of buy-ins), thereby drawing the most pros and the players who want to challenge/sit near them. Everything Bellagio is always luxe, of course, and their regular $500 and $1k tourneys makes the chance to play for baller money an in-town constant.

official site / TPA

Honorable Mention
Binion’s

It’s the only poker room where I’ve personally witnessed a fellow player spitting on the floor, and maybe that’s part of its charm. Not the best blind structures, but the bang-for-your-buck buy-ins, generally large field sizes, and frequency of starting times (no matter when you show up, there’s bound to be a tourney starting soon) make their events delightfully challenging. Regular HORSE and Omaha tournaments, too.

official site / TPA

Second Tier
still in the Top 25 percent with reliably good action and comforts
The Wynn, The Orleans, Red Rock, MGM, The Mirage, Hard Rock, The Rio

Also-Rans
at least a few readers really dig these places for some reason or another
Mandalay Bay, Golden Nugget, Treasure Island, Planet Hollywood, Hooters

In a nutshell, at the tables, not particularly well. (Especially compared to last year, whence I shocked myself by making more money playing during the WSOP than actually working during the WSOP.) I’ll see if we can’t whip up a visually compelling WSOP bankroll chart/graph … but in the meantime, it’s not like you have to be able to read music to get a sense of what the following — which is all the poker I have played over the past two weeks — would look like:

Day 2, 2/5 NL, Rio, 3 hours:
-$300

Day 6, 2/5 NL, Rio, 2 hours:
-$300

Day 12, 1/3 NL, Rio, 3.5 hours:
-$187

And then this weekend, I played at the Mirage … was stumbling out of the Thrillist Las Vegas JetVegas Launch Party Afterparty at JET (beer + scotch + vodka + random mystery shot)*dancing on table = not pretty) … was about to hop in a cab back to the Rio but decided I needed to sober up even to let someone else drive. So when a random Friday night reveler near the Mirage Poker Room came up to me and said, “Hey, you wanna play a $115 sit-n-go?!?” it sounded like a perfect idea. Upon taking my seat and sizing up the competition, I also paid into a $20 lasts-longer …

My strategy was to pretend I was the drunk guy at the table. I obviously smelled the part, and would pull a Shane with messed up chipstacks to appear really clueless. Ha-ha, they would have no idea what I was up to! It all was working perfectly until the third hand, when I forgot the part about playing differently than the image I was trying to project, and the pair I moved all-in with didn’t catch up against the re-raiser’s flopped straight.

Day 14, 115 SNG, Mirage, 5 minutes:
-$135

While the above may be a once twice-a-Series anomaly, all my Rio play is not. Those cash games are the start of what was supposed to be an easy part-time path to poker glory: Play some cash games and use those winnings to buy into satellites; chop often until earning my way into at least one bracelet tourney; get chips early and go deep; text with Tom for advice on getting to the final table/winning … smile for Flipchip as he chronicles WSOP winners; just don’t get ahead of yourself and even start thinking about Player of the Year …

So clearly I have run into some obstacles, but I still think it’s a workable plan until I run out of money/Harrah’s food coupons.

No confirmation on what the rationale was behind the decision to change. But you can think originally that 9-handed offered a faster game on more tables … i.e. more rake … and perhaps a better player experience, too. Let’s say you had 81 players wanting action … great, nine tables of nine does everyone better than eight tables of 10 with one alternate, right?

But I suppose if there isn’t a constant influx of new players, then 10-handed is better because it presumably slows the pace of tables breaking down.

A company spokeswoman could neither confirm nor deny, but did say that WPT Enterprises has “really looked at the market and listened closely to feedback from players.” So I suppose we’ll see next week when the official press release comes out.

In the meantime, here’s Pokerati’s super-undercover investigative reporter Tom Schneider with the report:

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