For things a poker room should not do: “promote” good dealers. There’s ~20x as many people with the skill set to be a good floor and a room can never have enough good dealers.
No more than 1 must-move table. No button straddle.
Bomb pots are fun and great if you are in a solid market, they might wipe people out fast in a weaker market.
Definitely agree with NBZ that rules being consistent is important, last week a reg lost his fucking shit over a $200 side pot because the floor made a ruling different from how it has always been done.
This is your inner nit not what the vast majority of casual players want. Most casual players want to gamble and have fun not play in a tiny game with 8 people playing 15% vpip and bitching cause someone straddles.
That said, I agree consistent rules is very important.
I like the button straddle though, or at least when other people do it. I think I’d be OK with a “no straddles at 1/2 rule.” It can be confusing, but there is probably something to making a safe space for small bankrolls at 1/2. When 5 & 10 dollar straddles come out, the person who only has $200 to play suddenly has a shortened lifespan. I’m not sure if this would work in practice but in my theoretical ideal room you could have a 1/2 $200 max game and I’d be fine with no straddles and other nit friendly rules, and then maybe a 1/3 and larger games with larger or uncapped buyins and more gamble friendly straddle rules. That way both bankroll nits and deep pocketed gamblers have a game to play.
My home casino (Firekeepers in MI) actually had 1/2 and 1/3 running side by side. 1/2 had a $400 max, but had plenty of shortstacking nits in it. 1/3 started out at $500 max, but after the first hand it became “match the stack” which was a fun gimmick, and many players came with the intent of playing 2K+ deep. Straddles in this game were common, and it often played bigger than a 2/5. I haven’t been back since they reopened, but it sounds like they dropped the max at 1/2 to 200, nixed the 1/3 games, but have 2/5 running more frequently. While I like 2/5, I’m a bit sad at the drop of the 400 cap at 1/2 and the loss of 1/3.
You can’t save people from losing money in a casino. If they want to lose they will find a way and no pit boss at table games is telling them that’s too big of a buyin
What I’m saying is that giving players everything they want isn’t necessarily healthy for the room.
I would not be shocked if the player pool for this room in this location is incapable of supporting more than one table above 1/3NL on a regular basis. If so, trying to make the room a place for bigger games is going to fail. If there is a bigger non-hold em game running, I would not be shocked if it ended up being something like 20/40 O8 rather than PLO.
About 15 years ago, I played in the Cincinnati area with a middle-aged guy who said he ran a good 08 home game in the Indianapolis area but he didn’t play in it himself because there were a bunch of young guys capping every hand preflop and he didn’t want to deal with that. So, it’s not only old nits who play that game.
…15 years ago. That’s literally like peak boom. You still had rebuy tournaments as the mainstay of what sites and live places did. PLO was not on the map then. A bomb pot didn’t exist. Youtube was one year old, had basically no videos with over 1 million views, and you couldnt upload anything longer than 10 minutes.
The Midwest seems to have casinos with once-a-week 08 games. Horseshoe Council Bluffs in Iowa has one. I think there was one at Caesars Southern Indiana, but I don’t know if it runs anymore. Firekeepers. Obviously, Canterbury.
I’m not saying O8 is more likely than PLO to run, just that it would not shock me if it did.
If you can convince them to only run low and mid limit limit games it will keep the room viable for a long time.
NLH cash games were probably the worst thing to ever happen to poker. Bad players can keep chugging along in 4-8 hold 'em indefinitely if they have a job. Hard to fade multiple thousand dollar losses in NLH and keep coming in to play.
It’s hard to convince a room to do that though, and I know the customer ‘wants’ NLH. But it really is detrimental to a room’s longevity, unless it’s in a high-tourism spot. I’m going to guess Indiana isn’t known for a lot of poker tourism.
“The worst thing to happen to poker is it got popular.” A poker room running one table of 4/8 FL will get axed. It’s not making enough rake to stay there over a machine. Without NL poker would be dead outside of Vegas and home games. A game where the rake wins but also can’t pay the hourly of floor+dealer is awful.
Limit games drop more than NL games. NL games are astronomically slower than limit games. Any room running 1 table of poker, regardless if limit or NL is getting axed.
Low limit poker supported a lot of rooms for a long time. Rooms started closing a lot faster when NL started busting their players quicker.
The local rooms in WA just starting spreading spread limit NL games a couple of years ago, but were pretty busy spreading low limit limit games.
When I was a dealer, my income dropped immensely when NL became the norm. Cut my hands by 25% to 50%.
Its the same here in Stones (california). The 1-2 is 40 min 200 max. The 1-3 is 60 min table max. One 1-3 table yesterday was 4k eff (as in that was the smallest stack).
Thats terrible for recs. Add the constant straddling for 15 and you got random recs playing closer to 10-20 with their 200 buy in.
The correct way should be 40-200 for 1-2, 150-600 for 1-3
Back when I was a 3/6 LHE player, the games were great when NL players sat down while waiting for a NL seat and just started taking bet-bet-bet lines and going on tilt because someone hit the river against them.
Eventually, I won enough at 3/6 to build a bankroll for NL (and then PLO), but I still feel comfortable sitting in at small stakes limit while waiting for a seat at a bigger game.
The fastest, most action game I’ve played is late night short-handed 8/16 at Canterbury. It took some adjustment to go from that back to slow, slow PLO.
I mean, this is because 20 years ago places valued variety more than a strict bottom line. They thought every casino should have poker out of virtue of being a casino.
Worrying about people going broke is silly. You shouldn’t allow stuff like yuv is railing against, being able to buy in for 1k+ at 1/2 is dumb. But you’re in a casino. People can bring 2k to blackjack or baccarat.