I never said I "expected" anything. I actually was given free rooms in Vegas for awhile just from having played poker in Atlantic City. I was surprised by that, but happy to take advantage of the deals. I don't know why you think it has anything to do with a sense of entitlement, it is just a huge change in actual price charged, and nowhere near the rate of inflation.

Honestly I don't see how the problem with the issue is very much related to the search sites at all; the search sites changing wouldn't reduce the actual prices or help me in any way. While we can't know what will happen for sure, I think passing legislation likely would lead to lower total prices paid, as Vegas properties will still want to be able to offer "comped" rooms to some people, and rates that at least sound low to others.

But the airlines never really stopped, they just changed how they obfuscate the fares. In the past, you paid your fare and that was the extent of your expenses for the flight. Now, in addition to your fare, depending upon which airline you fly, when you get to the airport you have to pay a fee to check your luggage, a fee if you want anything to eat or drink, perhaps a fee to carry on a small bag, a fee if you don't want to board last, a fee if you don't want a middle seat, a fee if you want a few inches of leg room, etc., etc.

I understand your point, but your figures are off. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Inflation Calculator, $25 in 2000 is the equivalent of only $34.46 in 2015.

So now that it's over, is your attitude, "Well, I knew that would never last," or "They're jacking the prices on me!"?

Oh, right.

You're complaining about the inflation rate on a non-equilibrium room price. If you get rooms through comps, or comped rates, the expectation of what you pay is based on their expectation of your donkage. Only if you're buying things off the free market is the expectation of what you pay based on what you actually paid X years ago.

Because transparency allows the companies to set equilibrium prices based on what they deliver rather than what they can con people into thinking they deliver.

For the lower end hotels, that's going to be a downward pressure because nobody stays at the IP because they think it can deliver $50/night worth of goods. They only get to charge that because they conned people into thinking they were getting $30/night worth of goods for $20/night.

OK, maybe changing the search sites could reduce the prices. I hope so. However, the last time I booked something on Orbitz, while the lower price for casinos showed up in the arrange by price list, it was clear that more would have to be paid to the casino on arrival, and they even told you exactly how much.

And anyway, I am not really just complaining about it, I am just staying elsewhere for the most part. Although the last time I got "comped" rooms I had to pay $30 a night for, I was annoyed, just at the level of BS. If my offer had been for $30 a night with no fees, I would have still taken it, and not been left with a bad taste in my mouth. I just posted here because someone said "it's expected inflation", and no, it's not. The increase is way higher than inflation of anything else.

Do you know anybody that made $15 an hour in those games in Vegas recently?

Trooper in his thread made $10 an hour after 1,000 hours at 1/2 and 1/3 and I've rarely seen players at 1-2 that are much better than him.

I made more than that at 1/2 and 1/3 when I was living in Vegas full time from 2010-2013, although I was only a part-time player (50-60 hrs/month). However, the money was insignificant to me other than as a gauge for how well I was doing, so it may not be comparable with someone grinding full-time and worried about not being able to pay bills if they hit a downswing. I now play 2/5 in SoFla.

I enjoy Trooper's videos and have watched every one as I follow his adventure trying to make it as a full-time poker player in LV. But with all due respect, how would you (or anyone for that matter) have any idea how good a player he is given that he rarely talks about his sessions other than to say how much he won or lost? Or do you have real life experience playing with him?

Playing 10-15 "good" hours a week is something totally different than 50-60 hours/week. That hourly rate includes Tuesday 4PM (or 4AM) when the games are basically dead, long sessions where you are 5 hours past your A game and those nasty couple weeks in the winter where you only want to get back to bed because of your bad cold.

You can't compare a winrate from someone who plays 3 evenings a week to that of someone who spends 6 days a week at the poker room. Doing the latter at 1/2 is just a sad life in my opinion. But to each their own.

Yes, I'm aware of that, which is why I alluded to the difference in my earlier post. However, just for the record, I don't normally play what one would consider "good" hours. I usually play during the day rather than evenings. In fact, it's currently 11:30 am Friday morning and I'm sitting at a 2/5NL table at Gulfstream Park in Hallandale Beach, FL. My last session was Monday morning/afternoon from 11:20 am to 3:50 pm at Magic City in Miami.

THIS x1000

It always amazes me that some of the pros around here never invest in their game and get stuck at the same limit for literally years. Why would you want to grind 1/2 for 50 hours a week when you can just work on your game and move up? 50 hours at 1/2 is still going to make you much less than 20 hours of pure A game at 5/10. People are just dumb I guess

I actually tried to do this during February 2014 down in Vegas. I just graduated college and I had saved up 10k to that point so I decided to take a shot at staying in Vegas to play poker every day for a month to see what it was like. I stayed at The Quad the entire trip and the daily resort fees killed me, they doubled the cost of my stay, I ended up paying $1.6k staying there for 4 weeks straight. What other people said in this thread is true, it is near impossible to be profitable playing low stakes full time. I actually spent more time playing tournaments at the Venetian for their Deepstack Extravaganza and played in a $400 buy in tourney and a $200 buy in tourney nearly every day. I played 1/2 cash for about 1/3 of my time playing. Long story short the variance for tournaments is WAY too high and I was on the wrong end of it. I cashed in 23% of the tourneys I played in down there and still lost $4k due to a bunch of mincashes and bad runs at final tables. I am a strong player - I track my results and I have stepped up to 2/5 now and my winrate is $25/hr for 2015. But that is playing weekends and promo nights part-time. There is a HUGE difference between playing peak hours only and full time. I ended up losing $7k that month in total including expenses. I don't regret it for a second as I enjoyed the hell out of it, but it basically proved that it is impossible to profitably do it staying in a hotel down there.

^^ yea no sh*t

The airlines are charging you for what you use which is a lot different than the crap resort fees are doing.

You also ****ed up. At the time you still could have got total rewards credit card and if you had booked the rooms about a month in advance wouldn't have had to pay the resort fees.

Not really, on most occasions you just can't go without checked luggage and the airlines know that. Also nobody checks the weight of the passenger and behind the checkpoint you can just buy and bring as much as you can carry. It's all the same kind of thiefery.

i take 30-40 flights a year, can check bags for free and still choose not to almost every time. you can very easily travel in most cases without checking a bag and my trips tend to be longer than most people's trips. Most people overpack.

If you're a woman that brings 31 different outfits for a 5 day trip then you need to check a bag.

Then you're prolly one of those guys that everyone hates when boarding a flight or you can go with two outfits for five days.

lol nobody hates me on a flight and i have plenty of clothes for a trip

even when i check bags, it's pretty obvious that at least half of the people on a flight aren't checking bags.

people bring way too much stuff with them and have no clue how to pack.

you can tell the airline you dont want to check a bag in and you don't pay the fee. you can't tell hotels you don't want to use any of the stuff the resort fees entail and not pay the fee (at least not in most cases)

In all fairness, most people use the internet in their hotel rooms for which you had to pay ~$15/day back in the day. (the number of users would probably be on the decline now with highspeed internet on phones)

And lots of people paid for the gym in the pre-resort-fee days.

I'd be OK with something like a $10/day resort fee, but $29 is absurd, especially at a place that charges you $39 for the room.

What really pissed me off at the Vdara was the fact that they charge something like $35 resort fee a night but have to pay extra for apples/bananas at the gym. They charge you $1800 for a week and you can't even get a free apple? That's just greedy.

I was talking about 1/2 NL, not 1/3. I think 1/3 is easier to beat for $15 an hour. Some disagree but I think 1/3 is a bigger game, and that's even more true in games with a $500 max buy-in or higher.

I could see someone combining results for 1/2 and 1/3 and winning $15 an hour in Vegas. But I'd say that if someone sits at a 1/2 NL table in Vegas and sees a winning player at the table, chances are much higher that winner beats the game for $5 an hour or less than it is he beats the game for $15 an hour or more.

I've played with him 3 times, although I will say that each time was very brief.

I was responding to a comment that the average winner at 1/2 NL in Vegas makes $15 an hour. But the average winner isn't going to be a decent TAG in these games. At best, the average winner will probably be a scared nit or a reg who plays straightforward and has plenty of leaks. You can be very tight PF and play ABC and clearly be better than the regs in these games. I guess the poster I was responding to must have meant something like "the average TAG player who studies the game."

Leaving a side the ridiculousness of suggesting that all or most people could travel without checking bags, let's go with your theory and take it to its next logical step: There wouldn't be enough room in the cabin for everyone's multiple carry-ons. The only reason that you can pack a small suitcase and stow it on board now is because most of the other passengers are checking their bigger pieces. Or we can take this one step further: If everyone stopped checking luggage and just carried on smaller bags, then the airlines would simply alter their pricing strategy and start charging you for the privilege of carrying on your bag. In fact, one or two airlines have already resorted to this tactic.

I'm not sure why you want to argue the point that airlines have changed their pricing strategy to obfuscate the total cost of traveling, just as hotels have done with their resort fees.

Actually the airlines have done the opposite of what the resort hotels are doing; they used to charge one higher price that included everything (meal, drinks, checked bags, seat selection), so you got charged whether or not you wanted or cared about those things. Now they have a lower basic price and you can pay for "extras" if you want them.

Resort hotels used to charge fees for the "extras" (internet, fitness center), but now you have to pay for them (via resort fee) whether you want them or not.

IMO the airlines have been moving in the right direction, and the hotels the wrong way.

Last time I was at IP/Quad/Linq(it was a while ago) they charged the resort fee and gave me near dialup speeds. It was another $10 for actual internet.

The reason the airlines now have lower prices overall has nothing to do with meals/drinks etc., they cost very little. They used to be more expensive because they had monopolies or near-monopolies in many areas that have partially fallen, to some extent they also have more efficient engines now. But the fall of the monopolies has hit their margins badly, so they now look for other ways to earn some extra bucks.
Generally speaking every customer likes to have some freebies at no extra cost and hates it if he has to pay extra for everything or has to pay explicitly for things he might not even use, thats why both approaches lead to poor customer satisfaction.

LOL

The airlines didn't lower their prices when they implemented this pricing plan. They simply started charging separately for items and services that used to be included in the basic all-inclusive fare so that the price shown on Internet search engines wouldn't reflect the actual cost of flying. This is exactly what the hotels have done.

I doubt "most" people bought internet back then. Even fewer would buy it now if they had a choice, with the prevalence of smart phones.

I also doubt "lots" of people paid for the gym. 3000 rooms in a big hotel, maybe 4000 people staying there, the gym would be a mob scene if only 10% of the people paid for the gym.