4,500-chip, four-color starting stack at Stratosphere.
The Stratosphere’s quaint 10-table poker room sits in the back of the casino, past a row of slot machines, craps tables, another row of slot machines, down the ramp past Roxy’s Diner, near the escalators to the Top of the World restaurant — just before the Double Down Pit and Back Alley Bar. On Thursday, there was a sole 1-2NL table of action about 30 minutes before the nightly tournament.
You’d hardly know that this room has supposedly become the new Sahara when it comes to Las Vegas’ most popular small buy-in dailies — with the 7pm event drawing consistent fields of 50 players or more.
I approached the podium and purchased a seat for the event. The buy-in is $45 for 4,500 in chips, plus a $20 add-on that gives you 4,000 more chips, which you can purchase any time within the first hour. (There’s also an option for unlimited re-entry within that time frame.) With 20-minute levels, that add-on is necessary, especially considering there are no automatic shufflers in the tournament tables.
Check it out. This story in PokerListings is probably a bit too kind without any LOLs. But hey, as a guy who’s key flaw in his plan to offer Pokeratizens the best low-stakes action in Vegas was not learning how to fold more often pre-flop, I’ll take the love!
While it is true that nowhere in Vegas could you “run it twice” in a 1/2 game before Pokerati NLH/PLO came to town, now plenty of poker rooms hardly blink when two or more players get it all-in and want to reduce variance by seeing more than one river … just like they used to do it on High Stakes Poker.
So crap now the secret of the Pokerati Game’s success is out:
Offer games people want to play, at stakes they’re comfortable playing
Give preference to poker rooms with skillful, supportive staff (and maybe a really big sign)
Treat low-stakes players no differently than high rollers (h/t Benny Binion)
Suck out often to keep the nits away
That’s pretty much all it takes to host a game that attracts tourists and locals alike. And now that I can expect casinos everywhere to be spreading Pokerati-style live action, I suppose my pioneering days are over and I can go back to being just another poor-man’s Jean-Robert Bellande.
Stumbled across this vid on Youtube — the time-lapse construction of the welcome desk @AviatorCasino in Delano, Cali. I can 100 percent say that Aviator is my favorite poker room in California’s Central Valley … (where Bakersfield is the big town some 30 miles away, but is also just a $15 flight from Vegas on Allegiant! $40 after taxes, but still … airplanes!)
That’s the whole theme of the Aviator Casino … airplanes, airports, and pai gow. That’s why at least some non-poker people see this creation of an info station at a California poker room as less about tourney registration but not too much less because it is still “functional art”:
More about this awesome little poker room — the coolest I’ve ever seen in the area — at TheAviatorCasino.com.
Though not so sure it’s the sexiest table ever, guess I’m glad to see the Hard Rock design team moving away from Ed Hardy styles in favor of something akin to … um, an Excel spreadsheet?
Still, fancy lines aside … as something of a new guy in the attaching-blog-names-to-Nevada-tournaments racket, kinda cool to leave one’s mark at least in a small way on the fabric of licensed-and-regulated corporately overseen real-money Vegas.
The Detox Poker Series is right around the corner, starting Friday Aug. 13 with a $100k Guarantee for a $350 buy-in with two day ones, re-entry allowed. The spankin’-new small-stakes/big-action festival comes at a whispery time around the home room to the Pokerati NLH/PLO game … with a new crew of top-level casino brass combing through the Hard Rock’s books while walking through various gaming areas with tape measures … raising uncomfortable questions about the fate of the $12 million, two-year-old poker lounge that has seen its ups and downs without yet fully realizing its potential.
Of course that’s kinda the point of bringing in an internationally renowned tourney director. Or at least it was initially. Kinda still works, but for different reasons …
First things first … Savage has guaranteed the guarantees — $350k worth. This is despite a misleading tweet just two weeks ago from @hardrockpoker saying there’d be $1 million in guaranteed prize pools. [/shaking head] It coulda just been a hyperbolic typo, but an amusingly ironic one then considering the Hard Rock’s image problems after a few overpromises that these tourneys were to help put to rest. But according to Matt himself on 2+2, he’s got the $350k locked up by contract no matter how few players show.
Beyond that … expect an extra-partytime atmosphere around typical Savage series stuff (deep structures, quality dealers, friendly intelligent floor, good internet coverage, etc.) to liven up the joint: He’s in charge of providing ultra-improved tournament action while the Hard Rock promises to provide good music and a guaranteed flow of nipple-friendly eye-candy stumbling past the poker room.
The Hard Rock Poker Lounge is getting its weekend poker orgy underway — this is the “relaunch” of the poker room there … under new management, with new ideas, and more action than usual …
They’ve got a full slate this weekend — beyond just the free food, splashed pots, a 20k guarantee Friday tourney and stuff like that … they’ve got a whole slate of events, including a Sharon Osborne celebrity charity event (Trash Talk Championship of the World they are calling it), a party for the launch of Victory poker. Currently filming (for ESPN 360, I believe, is a $100/$200 NLH cash game. $50k buy-in … with Antonio Esfandiari, Andrew Robl and others on the table … we’ll have some more names for you. And I think that’s The Maven waiting in the wings for a seat.
Of course the game next table over is what really interests me — $1/$2 NLH/PLO … just an option to run-it-2x today, not automatic. But in my jaded opinion, that’s where the real poker is going on. The plan is to keep this game running throughout the weekend — as Super Bowl raffle is currently my 2010 bankroll plan.
More TK throughout the weekend … but here’s a glimpse of surprisingly early Friday night action taking off at the Hard Rock’s big poker weekend:
Rumors of these arrests have floated around the forums the past week or so, but now The Las Vegas Sun reports the arrest of four casino supervisors and managers at the Planet Hollywood Resort in Las Vegas. Johnathan Sanner, Jason Peterson and Thomas R. Kordick, of Las Vegas along with Scott Marshall of Henderson were charged with forgery, embezzlement or conspiracy in the false reporting of $2,201 in high hand jackpots for two instances in August.
As we all know, there’s far more to the World Series than just bracelet events. One of the alt-poker activities going on today and tomorrow and yesterday (Tuesday and Wednesday) is the TDA Summit. That’s where tourney directors from card rooms around the country get together with Matt Savage, Linda Johnson, Jan Fisher, and the other honchos in tournament operations to discuss, debate, and vote on various technicalities of poker rules — as well as to discuss handling new and old situations that inevitably arise.
They also had a specialty non-bracelet tourney today — a $125 buy-in with 60something players (Warren Karp was the “known” name who made the final table) — and I happened to stumble upon the semi-funny sitch captured above … where at a table full of floormen, someone called floor. Ha ha.
Though you can imagine the pressure on the floorguy should he make the wrong ruling, it frankly wasn’t that hard of a decision … But there were a lot of people interested in how it would turn out, particularly because these players, while being trained in TDA rules, where in a tourney being run by WSOP staff, which has its own rules, which are slightly different from the TDA’s.
Click below for a breakdown of the situation, and see for yourself if you woulda made the same decision.
She did the tournament Friday night at 11 p.m. as part of her weekend-long birthday celebration. She was with about 20 friends and had a special section reserved for her, however, the room was not closed and other players cycled in on her table. There was about 50 people in the un-advertised tournament. A DJ was brought in for her and the room had a great party atmosphere and vibe that evening. The buy-in was $100 and she was knocked out in about 45 minutes.
Just got back from Bellagio — not my usual stomping grounds — and noticed that starting tomorrow, March 10, they’re offering something different there on Tuesdays … a lower cost, above-average-stack 2 pm tourney. For a long time, this was a standard $500 weekday event … $500 for 10k in chips. But now it only costs $300, and you get 6k in chips.
They also have 1/2 NLH there now. Apparently they’ve had it for a few months … News to me, though. I still thought their smallest game was a raucous 2/5 populated with monster stacks. Silly me.
From $4 to $5 in most rooms and games. Don’t know the exact casino-by-casino and hand-by-hand breakdowns of what the house takes, but the Rio and Caesar’s Palace both recently put the $1 uppage into play earlier this month.
Beyond just changing the decor, Binion’s is trying to make itself the go-to place for low-stakes grinders with good comps and a noticeable rake reduction. From AC’s Las Vegas Advisor:
The place that was poker before poker was cool has opened a new room. Binion’s has opened a 10-table room that advertises a max rake of $3 on all games, a comp rate of $2-per-hour, tableside food service, and special room rates for players. The room is located near the front of the casino on the old Mint (west) side.
They made a great commercial, but the subscription site Fleet Street Games is closing on October 31, according to PokerNewsDaily.com. Their online poker training site, PokerSchoolOnline will continue to operate, and FSG players with less than $15 in their account will be converted to memberships there.
I know this is more of Dan’s area of expertise, but allvegaspoker.com is reporting that Houston Waldie, the Poker Room Manager of the recently opened room at the Hard Rock in Vegas, “voluntarily resigned”. The post in that forum mentions “darkish rumors” in Waldie’s past, whatever they are. More later from those in the know?
Don’t ask me why, but I am … some dude (at the Hard Rock, quasi-coincidentally) was talking just the other day about the new ShuffleTech machines — the in-table ShuffleMaster knock-off. I don’t know the details, but apparently ShuffleMaster has quite the grip on the automatic poker-table shuffler market. You’ve probably noticed these popping up (literally) on more and more tables these days, and they are all made by the same company. However, you’re kinda shit-outta-luck if you want one for your home/underground game … you can find the tables with the ShuffleMasters pre-installed, however you are screwed because they have to do the maintenance (or something like that).
Anyhow, that’s the half-story I know about this company that seems to be on the forefront of deeply vested in gambling technology. (One of their other products I just saw at Caesar’s last week was a cardless table-blackjack game featuring a video image of a dealer.)
But now ShuffleTech is in the picture, too — not dealing to casinos, but to home users. While I want to say, “Awesome!” … I gotta say, looking at their shufflers makes me think of the first laptops, when they were the size of suitcases. But still, as archaic as their version (which somehow steers clear of patent protections) seems, I can’t see how these won’t become more and more standard in the future … and once we get some robots that can actually pitch the cards … watch out dealers:
(But for now, could you imagine being deep in the tank when the next deck is being set rumble rumble?)
Pokerati: @GlobalGamingBiz generally speaking, of course. A reliable source? An imaginary source? The gov's maid's husband's poker buddy's dog sitter? 4 hours ago
