Hi,

I am going to visit Macau and spend 5 days for Macau Millions and CG.
Is it possibly to pay the buy in with credit card ? Or only cash accepted ?

so im a 100nl 200nl online cash pro, would i bet better in vegas this winter or macau?

I'm surprised by a lot of what I've read here. I don't think a lot of the people posting here are correct.
I know it's an old thread and all but I've known Macau for about a decade now.

Only 2 places I know of that host games right now, Wynn and the City of Dreams. Starworld and Grand Lisboa no longer host games. I've heard rumors about the Venetian last week but never went to verify.

Play is extremely loose. 5x bb opening bets are standard - there will be 1-3 players at each table limping in each pot and rarely folding to a raise. If you have prospective hands you can limp and 2/3 the time nobody will raise and if you have a monster you'll almost always get 1-3 callers despite a big raise preflop.

Bluffing is very difficult, it's not uncommon for someone to call with K high on the river (and you can often really wonder what they were hoping for all along given they had no draw). Don't bluff unless you recognize the guy as a tight or at least skill based player - too many people just don't care.

This can be a little scary though and you can make some bad decisions as a result as certainly people don't always have bad hands. There are a number of times you'll want to strangle yourself for folding a 4 handed pot with a wet board and heavy action and your top pair was actually the best hand. You'll have two pair AJ and the guy shoves all in with an underpair of 88. As a result it can get tricky and you can make a lot of dumb calls. I've learned to accept that conservative play means I'll miss a bunch of silly money but as a result rarely spew.

It's important to realize that for most players this is a game they are relatively inexperienced in and they are playing with money that has the express purpose of being gambled - not money that is going to make much of a difference in their lives. For this reason you'll get someone 3 betting preflop with J8o and calling a shove just because they felt like playing a big pot. These people are not idiots, they are not fish - they just approach the game at a different level. Imagine if your local home game started playing with $1 max buy-ins with $.01/.02 bb and try to imagine caring or taking it seriously? This is more like what bingo is to senior citizens back home than it is like what poker is to us for them. I once played against a guy who owned several fast food franchises throughout China - he ended up having to deal with a crisis at one of his restaurants but every few minutes would just walk up to the table, not even look at his cards and put in a big bet - if there were callers then we'd patiently wait for him to get a chance to again blindly check/raise/call. He didn't even care what his cards were but this kept him entertained for a few hundred dollars while he dealt with a tens of thousands of dollars problem in his real life.

Stakes are not relatively high - in fact it's possibly the cheapest game to play in Macau. Consider that Blackjack tables usually have a min bet of 500 and rarely you can find a 300 min bet table then 25/50 really ain't so bad. Why would you put up a poker table raking a few bucks every few hands at the expense of a Blackjack table where hundreds of dollars will be wagered every minute?

Hotels are cheap, you can get a solid hotel right downtown for like $75 bucks, that's nearly impossible in Hong Kong, Shanghai, Beijing, etc so when you consider that this is pure tourism site it's pretty amazing you can get places so cheap. If you want to go hostel/budget you can get down to less than $50 if you spend a little bit of time online and shop around.

Do not wait to get a place, made that mistake before and ended up not being able to find something available - wound up staying at a rent by the hour place with leopard print sheets - felt dirty for weeks. Other option was a spa - should have done that but held out for a hotel and eventually just got too tired to keep looking.

I'm thinking of traveling to Macau (first time) for the Macau Millions series. Do you have any tournament experience there? I'm assuming the series attract a higher level of play, but I'm still surprised at the quality you describe. Thx for any thoughts

Have never played in any tournaments there but yeah, my assumption is that most serious players in immediate area will be playing. Was going to play in that until I saw the tourney structure. I could have misinterpreted rules but I've never before seen a tourney that knocks you out of the tourney regardless of whether or not you still have chips if you aren't in top 7% by end of day one. In essence kind of makes it a hyper turbo but where bold moves are not made by blinds but rather by time.

Venetian does have poker, confirmed that last week but it's outside a very loud nightclub that doesn't have a door - not so much a poker room as an area to play poker.

I played the red dragon 2 or 3 years ago and the level of the tournament players on average was just terrible. On the cash games though there was almost no fish at the tables. It could have changed since it's been quite a while.

Hi rickroll,

The Macau Millions Main Event doesn't quite work the way you think here. Each Day 1 flight plays down to 7% of field but it's not based on a set time. The tournament continues to play until 93% of the field has been eliminated. So you cannot be knocked out if you have chips.

Thanks a lot for clearing this up, unfortunately already made other plans since then so won't be participating in this one.

I could be further exposing myself as a noob but given that some of the day 1 legs don't start until 10pm and the exact wording on your site is:

"The unique Main Event allows for same day re-entry, with the top 7% of the field from each Day 1 flight advancing to Day 2."

I'm hoping you can understand why I interpreted it that way.

Thanks for these reports rick. May I ask, how did you find the food situation in Macao (for a westerner)?

English is not a problem there at all in getting around and eating out. I speak fluent Mandarin and even though most people speak it, they almost always responded in English so I eventually just switched to English entirely unless in a place that only gets mainlanders.

They have great Portugese food if you are looking for western. If you are in one of the fancy casinos you can get a very fine western meal of the more familiar variety.

Macau is also well known for pastries, I know a family in Hong Kong that heads over on the ferry a few times a year just to go the the bakery they love then head back right away.

Otherwise, the food is mostly Southern Chinese style or other regional SEA cuisine. I love eating that stuff so I was happy. My favorite places to eat were little hole in the wall places and just picking randomly because they do a good fusion at those places so stuff will be somewhat familiar but also pretty new at the same time, like you'll get a sandwich but the interior will be Asian - kind of like the Vietnamese sandwiches if you are familiar with that. I'm a bit more adventurous than most though. Also a place that my friend says has great wings called Wing Pacific or something. It's a very friendly place with an awesome Filipino staff that unlike the neighboring places is actually intended to be a bar for drinking and eating. It's near MP3 bar, try not to ask for directions because people will assume you're going to pick up hookers so if you go there just search for mp3 bar and the wing bar is a few bars down and just trust google maps

To be honest I usually just grind out 15 hour sessions and grab something simple on the way to and from the poker room - unless with friends and then it's fancier stuff. You can also order food while playing - at least at the wynn and they have some western stuff.

Dim sum is amazing and pretty simple in composition/flavor so you should be able to handle that no problem. Otherwise you can always fall back on Portugese or fancy casino dining.

Eat soup dumplings or "Tang Bao 汤包" not like the drink Tang but a soft a like salad tong and bao like bowzer. I could eat those every day and rarely meet anyone that doesn't like them. Just be careful, they are delicate and full of soup so hold use a spoon and bring your head over the table otherwise you may dribble a little on yourself until you get used to them.

Definitely set aside at least a day of exploring Macau, casinos aside I think it's a really unique place and really enjoy wandering around the winding alleys of the residential areas.

I'm going to macau in april as well. Then I will travel to Jeju, Beijing and Cambodia and play poker there. Do you wanna join us?

It is unarguably that Asian players are conservative. They can just play online

you guys do really good work

macao is a great place to play poker

retty sure the lack of stakes lower than 25/50 have very little to do with Asian gambling status and very much to do with the aforementioned table cap.....

As I understand it, 15/30 used to exist in several of the casinos in the past, no?

Also, even though I've only been once, given that the difference between the two tables I played was so huge, I doubt very much that its possible to characterize the play in such a small sample (i.e first table was ultra loose passive fishy with the closest thing to a reg being two ultra nits playing <10% of hands, second table being 90% obvious regs in their mid 20s).

Quote:
This would also explain why the largest poker pots ever are to be found in macau, not in the US or Europe where there are far more millionaires and far more disposable income to go around. In fact, in vegas there is an upper limit of 100k that any person can lose per pot, whereas this restriction does not apply in macau.
Doesn't Hong Kong have one of the highest concentrations of incredibly wealthy individuals on the planet? Plus it's not like China has a lack of billionaires...

Anyway, this 100k cap, how is that applied? To just table games? I mean I don't know the first thing about high stakes vegas poker, but I'm assuming it's not some kind of law, just thinking back on that infamous Townsend 3 barrel PLO bluff for .. lots and lots of $$

Hm, nice
because usually can lose a lot at these exchanges

Going in the new year looking forward to it