Sit-n-Go-Away: The Tropicana Poker Room tried everything, but just couldn’t get enough action to stick.

I went to the Trop poker room Wednesday night, about 10:30, to see if a few friends might be working or playing. The room was totally dark but for a single flickering light. No dealer in a box, no suit at the counter. It seemed odd, but the room had been growing noticeably quieter in recent weeks.

Sure enough, the new Tropicana Poker Room, which opened on Black Friday and briefly enjoyed a stretch as the Jamie Gold Poker Room, is closing tomorrow. Supposedly for good, with its current space, next to the CantorGaming Sportsbook, slated to be transformed into a special area for slot tournaments.

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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.

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This is Pokerati’s new Las Vegas poker room column, and I’m the hired hack on the beat.

As a journalist who recently emigrated from the other side of the Mississippi River to divide his time writing and grinding in Las Vegas, the poker capital of the world, I hear a lot of buzz around town. Much of it is just noise, sometimes it’s early rumblings of actual news, and occasionally it’s just really good FYI for Vegas live-poker-room regs.

We hope to have a little bit of everything here for you. Some of the topics I’m looking to explore:

* Just about every casino has a daily tournament — some just a short-handed sit-n-go while others play like a mini-multitable bracelet event. Where can you get the most play for your buy-in? And what’s really going on with the juice?

* Different rooms have different rules. Some, like Tropicana’s Jamie Gold Room, are throwing many of the standards out the window. Which rooms have the strictest rules? Aria, for instance, has a rule against talking to gain information in a heads-up pot. Why?

* More and more casinos are offering rakeback-type promotions. The “get paid to play” trend sweeping through town varies from place to place. What rooms have the best deals? Is it possible to be a live rakeback grinder? What kind of players do these promos attract? What are the upcoming promotions to look out for?

* How should you go about finding the best action, or any action? Is it Venetian’s updated online list of cash games or Bellagio’s Twitter feed? What should you do to get a seat at the juiciest table in the house? Where should you be playing on a Friday night? Can you find a good game on a Monday?

Whether you play every day or visit Vegas once a year, I’m here to keep you informed about what’s happening in the games around town. Whether you’re a tournament grinder, cash game specialist, or maybe even just a live-poker bonus whore, we’ll scope out the action. We’re at the table right beside floor managers, dealers, locals and tourists, and we can’t help chatting it up.

Las Vegas is a 24-7 poker hot spot like no other — what happens here sets standards around the world —  and we want to help you maximize your time on the felt.

Bookmark Dave’s column here; and you can Twit-follow his ramble along the Vegas Strip @RandomPoker.

For those of us that like to eke out every percentage point of value out of VIP programs/Rakeback/dumb fish, Full Tilt certainly made an effort to change the game with the Black Card system. But is this really good value for poker players? Lets find out.

Before we can even talk about black card, there were two other changes to Full Tilt’s system that are worth mentioning. One is the change to how points are gained within Full Tilt. Before, you’d get 7 FTPs per $1 of tournament rake and 1 FTP per $1 of cash rake. Now, the value has been increased from anywhere to 10-500% depending on how you play. You now get 10 FTPs (up 43%) per $1 of tourney rake, and anywhere from 1.1 in Full Ring, through 1.5 for 6-max, all the way up to 5 HU FTPs per $1. This increase makes it obviously easier to gain Black Card status or the Iron Man status of old, and there certainly isn’t a problem here.

Where things start getting murky is how FTP has changed rakeback. In the past, you basically could have played like an uber-nit and let the fish give you 27% for every dumb hand they played in the dealt system. Now, they have moved to the “weighted contribution” system, which essentially means you only get rakeback for the rake you put in the hand. Much anger has been spewed on 2p2 over this, but in reality this system is technically the most fair of them all.

Think about it: rakeback pros no longer get a percentage of your rake for all-in hands you take with fish, and conversely if you fold pre-flop with 72o you shouldn’t feel entitled to rakeback if things get crazy at the table. That said, the fact the rake percentage hasn’t changed is a little problematic, as people will in general be potentially getting less than usual, which is going to hit at the nerves of many players. They are still shelling out the same amount of money, just now its only for the people that deserve it, and for some that still isn’t fair.

So more FTPs but a rakeback system that may or may not give you more money, how does this fit into Black Card?
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