Originally Posted by TampaKn1sh
There's room in the Greater Austin area for other poker clubs to be successful, without siphoning a ton of players from The Lodge. The problem is that many of these rooms come in underfunded to do what you'd need to do to find success, they have leadership with little poker room management experience and they don't know how to structure cash games and tournaments to be sustainable or take into account what the competition is doing so you aren't setting yourself up for failure. They also try to hard to beat The Lodge at their own game, that just isn't going to happen. You need to offer something different, and target a different audience.
When I worked at Poker House Austin they put together a 200K Guaranteed Grand Opening Tournament for mid-March. They ran 10 day 1 flights at all their poker clubs across the State to make it happen. But there were a number of issues:
1. Their Ft Worth location is right next to a WalMart. It's a beautiful room, but the tournament crowd they attract are very freeroll / low buy-in heavy. It's not players who are paying $360 to enter a tournament with multiple flights and bags. So they're going to struggle with that property.
2. If you make Day 2 of the tournament, you're in the money and guaranteed a few hundred dollars of profit (and that's if you only entered one time). But to play Day 2 you HAVE to travel to Austin. Well, all of their other poker rooms are 4+ hours away (Ft Worth, Dallas, Midland, Odessa and San Angelo). So you're asking people to spend any profit plus some to travel 4+ hours, pay for fuel, tolls, hotel and food, on the off chance they'll go deep in the tourney for a bigger score.
3. At the same time they scheduled the 200K event, The Lodge already had a 500K on the schedule with a smaller entry fee.
4. They created a conflicting schedule that would force players in Austin to choose either their 200K or the 500K at The Lodge.
Needless to say, the event was doomed to fail from the start. Now, no one consulted with me, I could've seen all of this from the jump. Fortunately they listened to play complaints and cancelled their Day 3 finale and decided to end the tourney on Day 2, allowing players in Austin to play both their event plus The Lodges.
However, halfway through our 10 Day one flights we were 152K short of the 200K guaranteed. So I said "ok guys, we have a lemon, but good ole' Anthony knows how to make lemonade. This is an opportunity for us. Poker players love value and free money, and they love integrity. We're fighting the ghost of 52 Social and its negative reputation. Plus a lot of rooms these days offer a guarantee and when they see they're going to take a bath on it, they don't honor the guarantee or cancel the event outright.
If we honor this guarantee, we'll build up our image in the industry and we'll develop trust with the poker community. At the same time, there's going to be a TON of people in town for The Lodges event. But they'll see our event has a smaller, softer field of players with an overlay. Tournament players are always hunting for that value, we should promote the absolute hell out of this overlay!"
I don't know if they were embarrassed or what their issue was, but I had to argue with them for four days straight before finally, the evening before flight #6 they told me "ok Anthony, tomorrow you can start promoting the overlay"
Now mind you, they gave me ZERO BUDGET to do any facebook ads, etc. So I was out on Reddit, here on 2+2, on facebook poker groups, etc. spreading the word. When all was said and done we went from 152K short to under 28K short. When you factor in the fees they collected, they didn't lose a dime, they actually made a small profit.
I'm a very detail-oriented, get ahead of it type of person. They were last-minute, don't think through the details, shoot-from-the-hip, chaos personified. A month prior to our Grand Opening I asked "hey, do we have a trophy for the winner of our 200K guaranteed?". Their response "not yet, don't worry about it, not yet". I continued to bring up the concern multiple times over the course of that month and kept getting the brush aside.
Then four days before we crown a winner "Hey Anthony.......got anyone who can get us a trophy?". I made it happen, I got it done, and one of the owners had the nerve to complain "this trophy is pretty small, we should get a bigger one next time"
The room itself is aesthetically beautiful. But for the livestream they just tossed a table and chairs in there and it looked like trash. 3 weeks before our grand opening I inquired about sprucing up the livestream room to make it match the beautiful aesthetic of the rest of our property, so that the players in there had a positive experience and viewers on our channel would have a good impression of our property.
They had brought down one of their knuckleheaded GM's from the Ft Worth location and he said "yeah, put together a list, but let's keep it inexpensive, I don't want to spend more than..................fifty to one-hundred dollars"
???????
I can't even get you a piece of wall art for $50-100. You guys spent 6 figures on cameras, wiring, RFID, computers, etc. to put together this livestream and you want me to decorate the entire room on a one-hundred dollar budget?
The biggest issue was that they were trying to put the cart before the horse. As soon as we opened the owners were hyper-focused on:
1. How do we cut costs?
2. How do we generate revenue?
I tried explaining that we're a brand new business and most businesses don't turn a profit in the first year. We need to focus on building critical mass. We need to get people in the door and butts in the seats. If that means we have to run games at break even or a slight loss for a month, 2 months, 3 months, that's what you do. Get people to make your room part of their daily routine, their weekly routine, whatever it is.
I had (and still have) tons of plans for local marketing and outreach, something I feel many of the rooms fail to do. But I was never empowered or provided a budget to implement any of those ideas. Instead they were hyper-focused on stealing market share from The Lodge. I wanted to target players that were being missed. There's a TON of people in the Austin area that don't even know poker exists out here.
The most common responses I get are:
1. There's poker in Austin?
2. Isn't it illegal?
3. I'd love to play, but I've never played in a real cardroom before, only in home games. I'd be intimidated, I don't want to make a mistake and get yelled at.
I wanted to structure cash games and tournaments to protect the recreational players, to keep that pool of players something renewable and sustainable. The grinders are going to come if you have good games anyway, but I don't want to necessarily create games that benefit their bottom line to the detriment of the local poker economy and your business model as a room operator.
Many of the grinders lose sight of the fact that their job as a professional is to be an ENTERTAINER. You're supposed to make people have a great time while they lose money to you so you can pay your bills.
So many grinders these days make games overly serious, not fun or social. They sit there with scowls on their faces, wearing headphones, hoodies and sunglasses on. They don't socialize, the only time they speak up is to berate the dealer for a mistake or insult a player for getting lucky. The misregs are the absolute nut low.
And unfortunately when you have cash games and tournaments structured in a way that puts most of the money in their pockets and allows them to slaughter the recreationals, rather than sustainably farm them, you get tables with more misregs and less fun, recreational players as time goes on. The games become less fun and less profitable because of this. It's a balancing act that many rooms struggle with, because they listen to the squeaky wheels. And those are the vocal minority of players who have a vested interest in structuring your games in a way that benefits their pockets, to the detriment of the poker ecosystem and your business model. They want to scoop up as much money as quickly as possible, rather than considering the long-term implications.
