veeRob’s Blog

Yesterday was the most upset I’ve been leaving a poker room after cashing in a tournament that I can recall, and I’m ready to blog about it to give you all the details.

There’s a company called World Poker Showdown that runs one to two week tournament series for poker players that have smaller bankrolls — anywhere from $100 to $500 events with main events that are a few thousand.  Friday started their series at the Hard Rock in conjunction with the Canadian Poker Tour, who they partnered with in the Dominican Republic for a similar series earlier in the year.   As I had no poker tournament scheduled for this month, I was excited about the prospect, though hesitant about what the turnout might be.

On Friday I played event #1, a $300 buyin, which got 93 runners.   I busted out short of the money and ended up heading back on Saturday for event #2, a $500 buyin.  This tournament got a dismal 31 entrants.  I ended up taking 4th place for a paltry $1500 after 14 1/2 hours of play.  Prior to playing the tournament, I read all of the flyers in the poker room to understand what they were offering and how everything works.  The flyer they were disseminating showed a $340 buyin and a $550 buyin for events #1 and #2.  Compared to the Venetian’s most recent Deep Stack series, the Hard Rock’s $340 buyin was slightly higher than the Venetian’s $330.  When I showed up to the cage, I learned that there was a $10 “optional” dealer add-on that wasn’t listed on the flyer, so it ended up being a $350 tournament.  Venetian also has this option.

My real problem lies in the fact that Hard Rock, WPS, and CPT hid the fact that they were removing 3% for dealer staff without telling anyone.  Not one of the promotional flyers I have seen, nor the payout structure sheet inside the Hard Rock poker room, lists this 3% fee.  Further, the payout sheet shows the breakdowns for a 31 person tournament as paying 5 places and adds up to 100% payout, not 97%.  My 4th place finish was listed as 10% of the prize pool, which should have been $1550 ($500 x 31 = $15500 x 10%).  When the floor explained to me about the 3% fee, he could not show me anything that explained this.  He had to call the owner of the WPS to find out that it was listed on a separate sheet in the back of the poker titled “fact sheet.”  Even still, they apparently decided to “round down” the payouts to make a few extra bucks, as $1500 x 97% = $1503.50, not $1500.  Yes, it’s only a few dollars, but where is it going?  The other players aren’t as observant as I, so I estimate that the Hard Rock will make an additional $30-$80 per tournament if they keep rounding down like that.  I only hope that the dealers and floormen are pocketing this money and not the Hard Rock corporation.

Now I’m sure I’ll come off as a complainer by posting all of these facts, and that’s fine, I am definitely complaining.  But to clarify, my issue is not that they’re taking out 3%.  My issue is that this fact is hidden and not listed upfront.  On top of that, they’re still doing poor math, which I can only hope was a brief oversight for my one tournament.  On top of THAT, they’re charging more than “industry standard” for their $300’s.  I guess that’s the way things are going, however, as the posted buyins for the next Venetian Deep Stack show $340’s taking the place of $330’s.  Perhaps Matt Savage can explain to me why it’s costing more to run a lower priced buyin event.  I again commend Venetian for giving out $10 food comps with every tournament entry, which effectively lowers their buy-in price by $10 as I am usually at a tournament long enough to need to eat a meal.

I will say that though this is the first real tournament series the Hard Rock is running, they’re doing a good job of it so far.  The floorman I dealt with (I apologize for forgetting his name) was very reasonable and understood my concerns about the 3% as well as other issues, like introducing unscheduled breaks that prolonged the tournament.  The dealers were overall pretty good, though not well-versed with the TDA Rules as they are primarily a cash game room.  My advice to the TD’s is to educate their dealers a little better on this, especially concerning collusion as a lot of these players seem to play together on a regular basis and talk a lot about playing their favorite hand or other forms of unintentional collusion.

I had said last night that I will not be playing any more of these tournaments.  After discussing it rationally with my roommate, I was reminded that the players are bad and there is still good value in them, even if I feel lied to since the fees were not listed up front.  I may play more of these, but I will certainly be scaling back in the number of them that I will play.