A middle-aged local approached the Treasure Island poker room supervisor early Sunday evening, inquiring about how many hours he had played.

“I want to make my $50,” he said.

At the start of the year, the room announced its latest promotion on signs around the casino, flyers outside the room’s entrance, and business cards on the supervisor’s counter — “GET PAID TO PLAY POKER!”

The 8-table room at TI pays back players with money collected in the rake. For every 10 hours of play (up to 60 hours), a grinder can earn as much as $599 in extra cash each week. This good-for-players promotional trend is catching on around Vegas. Whether it’s called “rakeback” or advertised as an hourly rate, it pays close to a minimum-wage job.

A similar promotion started last month at the Tropicana offering players as much as $10 per hour for play between 11a and 7p. The Trop, which re-opened their new room on that infamous poker date of April 15, 2011, and recently re-coined it the “Jamie Gold Room”, has their $80-a-day rakeback as one of several promotions going in an effort to keep players in the seats at all hours.

Poker room operators say they want to keep the rakeback promotion going as long as they can. Many players love the idea of topping off their stack at the end of a long grind. But that can’t continue if the bulk of players simply auto-fold for 8 hours, hoping to collect their $80 payment each day. And if you swing by the Tropicana room regularly, you might see a few of the same faces doing just that.

Poker room supervisor Andy Cobb told me the other day that management altered their raffle ticket promotion to boost pots. He said the room had been losing money when too many people played uber-tight and the pots didn’t get big enough for the house to take a full $6 rake (half of which goes back to players).

Live Rakeback: the Fine Print

NOTE: All hourly benefits mentioned here are for cash games only, and are current as of press time.

Treasure Island: Earn $50 for 10 hours, $125 for 20 hours, $200 for 30 hours, $300 for 40 hours, $400 for 50 hours and $599 for 60 hours. A player’s hours are tracked between 12 a.m. Sunday and 11:59 p.m. Saturday each week. They can pick up their cash at 10 a.m. on Sundays, and have 30 days from the time it was earned to collect.

Tropicana: Payments received at cash out. You must play betwen 11 a.m. and 7 p.m. to earn rakeback, and you must play at least 3 hours to earn any extra cash. For the first 3 hours, you’ll get $15. At 4 hours, you earn $28, at 5 hours, you earn $45. Play 6 hours and collect $10 per hour.

Palms: Payments made Mondays at 11 a.m., with 24 hours allowed to collect. Those who play at least 13 hours but don’t make the top 10 are entered into a drawing, in which 5 people win $100 each.

Wynn: Beware of your time at the table and grab your cash whenever you hit 25 hours. You must collect your money by March 15.

As a former full-time player himself, Cobb says he relates with the grinders, and wants to keep the players happy.

“You need that extra equity of something when you’re playing 1/2 or 1/3,” Cobb said of the rakeback promotion. “If you’re trying to build a bankroll, it’s a big deal.”

Farther north on The Strip, Wynn is offering it’s Winter Rakeback Promotion through January 31. For every 25 hours of play, you can earn $50.

With 26 tables, Wynn’s poker room is the largest we know of that offers rakeback. There’s a $4 max rake, the lowest among the rooms offering such promotions, and they also offer tournament entries and cash prizes for those who play the most hours.

How they rake ‘em

TI: House takes $1 at $10, $2 at $20, $3 at $30, and $4 at $100. With the money returned to players, $1 is taken at $10 and $2 is taken at $30.

Trop: For every pot, the house gets $1 at $10, $2 at $30, and $3 at $50. Money paid to players is collected at $1 per flop, $2 at $20 and $3 at $40.

Palms: House takes 10 percent per pot up to $4, plus a $2 jackpot rake.

Wynn: $4 max rake, with $1 taken for every $10 up to $40 in 1/3 games. In 2/5 games, the house collects $1 at $10, $2 at $20, $3 at $50 and $4 at $80.

On Flamingo Road, the 6-table Palms poker room launched a promotion this month where players can earn $8 per hour and get paid weekly. But there’s a catch: the max one player can earn each week is $300 (lowered from the original cap of $599). And the room only pays out $3,000 weekly in rakeback. During the first week, they paid the 10 players who played the most hours.

(Full disclosure: The Palms poker room hosts a weekly Pokerati half hold’em and half Omaha hi game. Come work on your PLO and take a stab at me or my editor — preferably my editor.)

Every serious player wants to maximize his hours, and a little cushion certainly helps. I plan to hit them all, and see if I can’t bring in some $1,400 extra dollars a month while working on my ideal strategy for game-selection.

One of the new things with this latest World Series of Poker (as significant as ESPN’s live coverage, imho) was the introduction of sports-book bets on WSOP outcomes. Think about how much effort went in to making that possible — first, changing the law such that Nevada sports books could expand their offerings to include non-athletic contests … then running specific bets through Nevada Gaming regulators … all so non-Caesars casinos could spread action on the WSOP? That’s not exactly the kinda thing done on a whim … especially when the introduction of “live” TV coverage adds a whole new element of necessary oversight for GCB enforcement.

The Wynn seems to be wanting to take the lead on spreading such non-athletic “exotics”, with Race and Sports Book Director Johnny Avello establishing himself as the go-to guru for entertainment-based wagers — having set for-entertainment-only odds (with remarkable accuracy) for the Oscars, beauty pageants, Dancing with the Stars … even fashion at the British Royal Wedding, and the breed of dog to win the Westminster Dog Show.

Read below for more official word on Wynn Las Vegas/Encore’s WSOP offerings:

Wynn Las Vegas Accepts Bets on the $10,000 No Limit Texas Hold’em Poker Main Event Championship for the first time in gaming history
Odds are set on the nine players participating in the November final table

LAS VEGAS, July 20,2011—The Race and Sports Book at Wynn Las Vegas is now accepting wagers on the $10,000 No Limit Texas Hold ‘em Poker Main Event Championship to be held November 5 – 7 in Las Vegas. Wagers can be placed on each of the final nine players to win the event or on the top two finishers (quinella).

New Nevada gambling regulations this year allow casinos to offer wagering opportunities on non-sporting events. On July 15, the Nevada Gaming Control Board provided approval to accept wagers on the $10,000 No Limit Texas Hold ‘em Poker Main Event Championship.

Wynn Las Vegas became the first Las Vegas casino to offer wagers on non-sporting events in early July, when the Race and Sports Book accepted bets on the preliminary rounds of the No Limit Texas Hold ‘em Poker tournament. Lines included whether a woman would finish higher than 40th and whether poker legends Johnny Chan, Allen Cunningham or Erik Seidel would win money in the event.

“This is a great event for wagers,” said Wynn Race and Sports Director Johnny Avello. “Not only will gamblers be betting on other gamblers, but non-gamblers who just have a love of poker and follow this event every year can get in on the action too.”

Wynn Race and Sports Book Director, John Avello, has been providing entertainment odds on the Academy Awards, the Emmys, the Golden Globes, beauty and other popular reality competition shows for more than three years.

• Players from one of two groups of 13 to last longest
• Will at least one player from a box of 3 make the money
• Will a woman finish in the top 40
• Will at least one of a group of 7 men last longer than all women
• Age of the winner

Kinda a strange bunch of props imho … but hey, they do seem to support Rule #2 of Poker Life, which is, of course, “Never Stop Gambling.”

Should be interesting to see what kinda action Caesars wants to wrap around these newly approved fully legal prop bets … and what additional props show up in future lines.

All this became possible, btw, in January of this year, when Nevada Gaming approved and adopted amendments to Regulation 22, allowing the state’s casinos to offer wagers on events other than just horse races, greyhound races, and athletic events. So now, you can bet in Nevada on the outcome of non-sporting events such as The Academy Awards or American Idol … or whether or not one man out of a group of seven can outlast all women in a $1,500 no-limit hold’em tournament.

UPDATE: @OskarGarcia was all over this one last week, and noted that the Wynn became the first ever Nevada casino to offer non-sporting bets in their sports book with the above wager options on the WSOP. He also talks to a regulator who says this new practice should have big implications for betting on the November Nine.

This week we cover another step toward online gambling regulation in the United States, as the announcement came that Poker Stars and Wynn Resorts have reached an agreement to work together! Also, updates on the upcoming iGaming Super Show and the latest from eCOGRA.

Huff, Dan, Jess, BJ, and even Stapleton (with the return of the Tight Laydown?):

The Poker Beat: October 24, 2010

---

• Poker Hall of Fame inductees Harrington and Seidel, age-minimum debates, and comparisons to Rock & Roll Hall of Fame
• Anonymous tables at Ladbrokes
• Crespo’s Illinois online poker lawsuit — significant or frivolous?
• More on WSOP-C’s new power and purpose?
• WPT-Festa al Lago FT, Randall Flowers, and the Jess & BJ Show
• Phil Ivey is gay? Craps + multi-phallus fellatio promises at the Wynn

* 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)

The poker room at the Wynn offers up two daily tournaments at 2:00 PM & 7:00 PM.  The 2:00 PM tournament has a $120 buy-in ($100+20) for 4,000 chips and 30 minutes blind rounds. There is an optional $100/4,000 chip re-buy during the first three levels. The 7:00 PM daily event is a $160 buy-in ($140+20), no re-buys, no add-on, with 10,000 starting chips and 30 minute blind levels. For more information contact the Wynn Poker Room at 702-770-7654.

Monday
2:00 PM – $120 buy-in ($100+20) No-Limit Texas Hold’em
4,000 starting chips, 30 minute levels, One optional $100 re-buy.

7:00 PM – $160 buy-in ($140+20) No-Limit Texas Hold’em
10,000 starting chips, 30 minute levels, no re-buys or add-on.

Tuesday
2:00 PM – $120 buy-in ($100+20) No-Limit Texas Hold’em
4,000 starting chips, 30 minute levels, One optional $100 re-buy.

7:00 PM – $160 buy-in ($140+20) No-Limit Texas Hold’em
10,000 starting chips, 30 minute levels, no re-buys or add-on.

Wednesday
2:00 PM – $120 buy-in ($100+20) No-Limit Texas Hold’em
4,000 starting chips, 30 minute levels, One optional $100 re-buy.

7:00 PM – $160 buy-in ($140+20) No-Limit Texas Hold’em
10,000 starting chips, 30 minute levels, no re-buys or add-on.

Thursday
2:00 PM – $120 buy-in ($100+20) No-Limit Texas Hold’em
4,000 starting chips, 30 minute levels, One optional $100 re-buy.

7:00 PM – $160 buy-in ($140+20) No-Limit Texas Hold’em
10,000 starting chips, 30 minute levels, no re-buys or add-on.

Friday
2:00 PM – $120 buy-in ($100+20) No-Limit Texas Hold’em
4,000 starting chips, 30 minute levels, One optional $100 re-buy.

7:00 PM – $160 buy-in ($140+20) No-Limit Texas Hold’em
10,000 starting chips, 30 minute levels, no re-buys or add-on.

Saturday
2:00 PM – $120 buy-in ($100+20) No-Limit Texas Hold’em
4,000 starting chips, 30 minute levels, One optional $100 re-buy.

7:00 PM – $160 buy-in ($140+20) No-Limit Texas Hold’em
10,000 starting chips, 30 minute levels, no re-buys or add-on.

Sunday
2:00 PM – $120 buy-in ($100+20) No-Limit Texas Hold’em
4,000 starting chips, 30 minute levels, One optional $100 re-buy.

7:00 PM – $160 buy-in ($140+20) No-Limit Texas Hold’em
10,000 starting chips, 30 minute levels, no re-buys or add-on.

Wynn Las Vegas
3131 Las Vegas Blvd. South
Las Vegas, NV 89019
702-770-7000

Tournament Dates & Qualifying Periods

Monday, April 6th at 12:00pm – Qualify between March 30 – April 5
Monday, April 13th at 12:00pm – Qualify between April 6 – April 12
Monday, April 20th at 12:00pm – Qualify between April 13 – April 19
Monday, April 27 at 12:00pm – Qualify between April 20 – April 26

April Free-Roll Payout Structure:

1st Place: $5,000
2nd Place: $2,000
3rd Place: $1,2 00
4th Place: $1,000
5th Place: $800
6th Place: $600
7th Place: $500
8th Place: $400
9th Place: $300
10th Place: $200
11th – 15th Place: $100

We found little … other than that he is still alive and kickin’ hustlin’ for backers in Reno.

Not sure when the change happened — presumably in 2008 — but I’ll be staying there for the next couple days, and not having to brush up on my base-3 mathematics makes the game that much more enjoyable.

(Played last night there for 2.5 hours … buy-in: $200, cash out: $268. Not bad, but I left a couple orbits too late, as my stacks were over $500 when I got that leaving feeling.)

No word on whether or not they plan to use confusing å…ƒ3 (three yuan) chips.

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

Hi Dan:

I’m the PR Manager overseeing our poker outreach. We currently have some exciting things going on in our poker room…..

• $100K Free Roll tournament on July 1-2. To qualify for this tournament all you need is 50 hours of live play and the last 10 seats at the final table get $10K
• Daily (Monday-Friday) No Limit Hold’Em Tournaments- beginning at 2p. $100/$20 buy-in and one optional $100 re-buy before Level 4
• Through July 16 we are offering a great room deal for poker players-$199 (Sunday through Thursday) and $239 (Friday-Saturday)

This is more of a rooms thing but it pertains to poker but…we display our wait list on a channel in the guest rooms so a guest can phone the poker room to sign up and watch the list from their room and come down when it is their turn to play. Pretty cool, right?

Please let me know if you would like more information on any of the above points.

Thanks!
Jade

Thanks for the info Jade. I’m sure some of our readers will take you up on the offer(s). And indeed — being able to see the wait list in your room is pretty cool. I’ve stayed at the Wynn once before, and you guys had the most comfortable bed ever. Like literally. It kept me away from the WSOP for two days because I didn’t want to leave it. Of course I did, once, to play some poker. But that didn’t go so well for me because, you know I played like garbage those $3 chips were so friggin’ confusing!

However, I did notice one interesting thing — that Abraham Gray is the leader for “Highest Cash Percentage” [WPT profile]… finishing in the WPT money 57.14 percent of the time. Nice job. You may recall, however, that Not-So-Honest Abe was the dude reportedly arrested in October 2006 by the Nevada Gaming Commission at the Wynn poker tables for allegedly marking cards.

I use all those disclaimers because I don’t know whatever became of his case, and haven’t yet figured out how to check the status of NGC-wrought charges. But still …

The Venetian has 40 minute levels (not sure of the blinds) and a deep stack to start. The Wynn also provides heavy chips, however, the blinds move up so quickly there were at least three pros complaining that it was a crap shoot.

Nonetheless, I had a great time playing at The Wynn Classic. I played with Brandon Cantu, Rene Angelil, Burt Boutin and took advice on the side from David Levi, Steve Wong & Marcel Luske (who was there for a short business trip).

I was eliminated by (the amazing) James Van Alstyne one hand after his nut straight crippled my stack; however, shortly thereafter he was hit by some bad beats as well. I was happy to see David Levi and Brandon Cantu make the final table. David has been playing fewer tournaments and focusing more on his cash games, so this was a nice tournament return with a first place finish. Brandon added another line to his resume taking down ninth place. One more notable was David Plastik who made seventh place in Event 5, no surprise there as he is a solid tournament player.

Before heading back to The Great State of Texas, I made it over to the cash tables. I was growing a nice chip stack when I flopped a set against pocket aces…an “Ace on the River” gave my opponent a bigger set. With just two hours left before my flight I managed to win back most of my money and a little bit of pride.

Despite my sob story…The Wynn is running a nice tournament with a $20 comp to any restaurant (much better different from the Rio Poker Kitchen). There are not a lot of pros here yet but I’m sure they are coming. Today’s sitings included Marcel Luske, Steve Wong (Happy Birthday, Steve!), TJ Cloutier & David Plastik (playing the final table from Tuesday’s event).

I’ve been up for 20 hours now so I should probably get some rest but yet…the sounds, the lights, the energy…I love Las Vegas.