Was a complete cluster fk. Bravo said for nobody to be there until 11am. Room was packed at 10:30am. They had everyone go upstairs to the mezzanine. From here they asked for diamond &7 star players to go off to the side. Once those were filled, they had 7 diamond members left. They then did a random draw for the list with the remaining 200 or so people to get on the wait list.

Other than prioritizing diamond and 7 Stars (which I don’t mind since I’m Diamond but also understand that the casino has a policy to prioritize those people) that seems like a fair way to do it. Instead of encouraging people to literally camp out in the poker room (which looks horrible inside of a casino floor), they told everyone to come 1hr early and then just did a random draw for the wait list order. Seems like a smart way to do this.

How many tables did they have going? How many WSOP packages were given away? Just random seat draws for the WSOP packages?

did they hand out lammers or just a receipt? lammers would probably be more valuable.

9 tables 9 handed. Limit 1 seat draw win per player. 11 10k seats given away and last drawing was at 6:30 for 4k.

Straight or better gets u raffle ticket and every 30 min was drawing for a 10k non transferrable credit. Then raffle tickets get reset.

130k roughly given way in 6 hours thru 81 players equates to about $250/hr in promo value. 1 table of 2/5 and the rest was 1/2 or 3/6 limit.

RIP PHoPokerRoom. I'm uncharacteristically melancholy over its closing. We traveled the casino floor, back and forth from the front entrance to the middle near the bar, to over by Earl's and finally to its eventual demise. I rarely played cash games there, but was always jealous of how much fun seemed to be present at those games.

My usual Vegas routine was to get up and hoof it to PHo for Earl's breakfast sandwich, coffee and the PHo 10am donkament. Great way to kill a couple of hours, priming the pump, so to speak, for gambling or further poker adventures later in the day.

I loved the vibe of the poker room. Since I was usually there in the mornings, they would play classic rock, transitioning to more recent pop/hip-hop in the afternoons. Was nice hearing some of that good old RnR, like classic Van Halen, ZZ Top, Boston, LZ, Sabbath, etc, some even 'deep' cuts that you didn't hear on the radio everyday, while grinding low-stakes tournament poker.

<sigh>

Correction: eight 9 handed tables and one 10 handed table….and the automatic shuffle machine was broken at the 10 handed table so it was hand shuffle all day at that table(table #9)

Just think of how many regs put equity into the promo pool and never got the chance to realize...

I don't want to sound like a nit but why do we allow these casinos to hoard our cash, with which they can make money via interest/capital gains? Promo take seem to only be increasing, and more rooms are doing them to begin with. My normal room even does the +2 take during off-hours, when they are not offering any high hand/bad beat bonuses.

I've ranted about this in the New England thread, but I feel strongly that regulars should put their feet down when it comes to egregious promo rake and poorly designed promo structures (anything more than +1)

Agreed but clearly regs don’t care enough about casinos holding onto a huge promotions reserve enough to boycott a room. Even if enough regs boycott a particular room, some regs will see that it’s all tourists playing and will break the picket lines by playing as they see an opportunity to make money. Then others will see this and will follow suit till the advantage (if there was one) is not longer present. It’s market equilibrium.

Also, if you look at a bunch of the +$2 promo drop rooms in Vegas (not sure about other markets), it’s packed with regs who actually want the promos because they wrongly feel that it is positive EV for them or at least not enough negative EV to overcome whatever positives they like about the room like location, juiciness of games, or just friendly dealers.

You gotta realize that a lot of regs are not regs to make money from poker. They are regs to pass time and maybe break even or make a few bucks. You’ll find a different type of reg at the Aria, Bellagio, and Wynn in Vegas than you’ll find at Bally’s, Flamingo, or even Venetian these days.

Damm, if I'd known about this I might have taken a drive up. Probably be the only way I'd play the Main because I'm sure as hell not paying ten grand.

probably wouldnt have been +ev if you have to book a room given the lack of transparency

Did every diamond get a seat?

Understanding prioritizing diamond and seven star, but they should have made it clear upfront that was what they were doing. Douche move to get people to show up at 11am on a sunday to get in line for seats that have already been reserved for a special player class.

The post said there were 7 diamonds left after all seats filled.

Since there were more diamonds than available seats, how did they decide who to sit amongst the diamonds?

Why does the day/time matter? Would it have been less douchey otherwise?

Maybe not less douchey, but Sunday morning is probably one of the more inconvenient times in that people are less likely to be up and near PH than they otherwise would be. So same docuhiness level but with maximized inconvenience.

Doing a once thru listen to The Trooper this morning indicated that there were 20 non-card-holding Players that got original seats .. and he wasn't one of them.

He either didn't know or failed to mention of any Diamonds that didn't get seats and thus had to go into the waitlist lottery. He did say that they divided 7-star and Diamonds into separate groups, so perhaps they only allotted a fixed number of seats to the Diamonds and the rest to the rest.

I know that you typically don't have a 'home' casino when it comes to rewards programs, but it does seem 'even more' unfair that 'any' Cesar's high card holder could come down and jump into a game that they may have never played before.

All of us can argue the numbers, but IMO I think that they should've allocated at least 50% of the seats to 'everyone', if not slightly more. GL

I like how Harrah's Joliet distributed their bad beat jackpot after they closed:
Every player who played after the last bad beat got a number of entries based on minutes of play after the last beat. They then drew entries by computer and awarded (I think) $2,000 to each winner until they exhausted the jackpot. I don't know if a player could win more than once. The Rewards Account number was then posted in a list on their website. (I don't recall if a player had to sign up for the draw or if it was totally automatic based on their records.)

I was there and it ended up being 7 people that were diamond that got put on the list and 20 non diamond. Those 7 diamonds were first on the list then the remaining 20, more then half that list never got in a game because all the seats were given away by that time.
Only people leaving the games were the winners every half hour so basically 10 or so people total got in from the list.

This makes way too much sense I can't believe Caesars did it

Guess I should've mentioned I'm Diamond and I probably could've gotten a room comped. I'd still have to buy gas, etc, but I think it would've been +ev.

People that don't know poker would probably leave when they found out they had to hit a high hand to be eligible for a drawing.

It's very hard to believe that a prototypical pit whale would be able to sit there and play 'hours' of poker as well, but it appears to have happened. GL

Caesers sold Rio is 2019. Caesars is still running the casino and leasing it from the new owners, and that is expected to continue through 2023.

RIP. Definitely had one of the best poker vibes in Vegas, if you're into that sort of thing.

The Goliath series had huge value as it's lower buy-ins attracted a lot of recs.

I thought they had to sell a Strip property after the merger because regulators didn't like their domination of center Strip.