Thanks. It's another 10 minutes or so (depending), but only 22 minutes. Not too bad, but closer is better because of time restraints, so we'll see

Do the others not have 1-2-5 PLO? (I see Shuffle 512 does -- just noticed the website.)

Are you looking at them on Poker Atlas? If not, you might just spot check them on there and see what they really get going every night. All of these places have a lot of games on their list of games they spread, but then nothing goes except a 1/2 nlhe at most of them. At least that's the way it is around DFW.

I am using Poker Atlas. Was on my PC, but now looking on my phone (I'm used to Bravo) and The Lodge is much better so far I hope the closer rooms get a few good games going while I'm there.

Was also curious about play, room vibe, etc., but they are probably pretty similar. (I'm a woman and will probably be on my own, but I'm used to being the only woman at many rooms, and I've played in a lot of underground rooms on my own, so I'm not worried about it.)

Thanks, everyone.

I would say The Lodge comfortably clears all the other rooms by a long shot on those aspects, and would recommend the slightly longer commute to it.

I'm coming to Austin for a week of work at the Convention Center (Coindesk event). Any recommendations for nearby rooms I can walk or Uber to? I play limit and pot-limit Omaha, NLH up to 2/3-5.

Thanks.

I decided to play at Shuffle 512. It was the closest to the convention center and had an ROE (they call it Round and Round) game going Sunday and Monday afternoons (1/2 w/ a $5 bring in for NLHE and PLO). Not great players and really good action. About a $10 - $12 Lyft fare from the Hampton Inn near the convention center. BYOB and there is a pizza place next door that sells beer to go . $10/day membership and $12/hour to play. Very good dealers. I'd definitely go back.

Get Poker Atlas!

Javanewt, you sound like you’d be a blast to play with

It is certainly the largest room in the area. All the other rooms just are too small in ATX. The Lodge could use a few improvements, but overall there is action there every day. Always good dealers there. Certainly a few characters that play there regularly.

LOL. The first time I played poker, my then-boyfriend (now husband) handed me $200 to play 2/4 limit. He said he heard loud fun and laughter at another table and went to see what was going on, and it was me and my table (Lost the $200 in about 45 minutes, but hooked ever since!)

One of the things I love about poker is the camaraderie. I don't actually have any female friends, which sounds sad to some, but not to me. I've been a Tomboy since I was born and still am My husband is my best friend and poker games are my "nights out." I have as much fun as possible!

The lodge is on a steep decline. Doug and company has got ridden of Brushes and will soon up the rake to $12 to pay for their restaurant. The lodge has officially turned into a 1/2 rake trap

Lodge is at all time highs for player volume last 12 months.

Cash games at Lodge are some of the cheapest cash games in the country. Tournament rates are cheaper than most places and at bare minimum competitive.

If we did go to $12, we would very likely add in a $1 comp back to the players as well.

Lots on the table here as we integrate systems with Lodge San Antonio (Rounders).

Damn if that’s a steep decline then sign me up! I travel for work and play Encore Boston’s $10 max rake PER HAND and in Florida their $6 rake plus $2 promo drop EVERY HAND. $12/hr may be the best rake in the country and if not then very close. You guys are spoiled.

I don't think the Lodge is in steep decline and think even if going to $12/hour, it is a good deal overall like you've said. I think where it can feel like a bad deal to regulars is that it used to be $10/hour so rake is increasing plus Lodge is cutting back on things like brushes and waitresses, dealer quality has gone down (in my opinion, mainly because so many dealers and a lot traveling that hard to have the quality they once did but still better than anywhere else I've played), and for cash players, I think the quality of action is not nearly as good as it once was (big tournaments bringing in less crazy action players and so many cash tables now that can be hard to get to the good table. Nothing that is really Lodge doing just fact of them getting bigger which obviously is good overall). As price of something increases, it is natural to feel like it is declining if not getting more value for the increased price.

In my opinion, the restaurant (if done right) could be a huge value add if good food, drinks, and I'm hoping a spot where I can take a break to watch the end of an exciting game. I'd gladly pay additional money per hour for that value (even if I'd prefer just charge less than give comps). If Rounders/Lodge becomes single membership for same price, that is another additional value that makes potential additional rake worth it. I think Lodge is in a bit of transition period but still best place to play overall and has exciting things coming soon.

Anyone know what happened with Poker House? It seems to be closed. I always hoped could create some competition in the area but never seemed they could really get people from the Lodge.

Poker House was always going to have a hard time competing with the Lodge Mahal...

Guess the Scotty Nguyen Poker Challenge is off. Love the vagueposting on FB about how they were closed due to "un-ethical business decisions".

Rumor has it they didn't pay their rent and the landlord changed the locks

Sent from my moto g play - 2023 using Tapatalk

I've heard similar. The former owner of 52 Social, Jun, is the actual tenant of the property and was subletting to Poker House (is what I've heard). Either Poker House wasn't paying their lease to the actual landlord, or to Jun, and Jun came in and changed the locks.

To back up the not paying their bills story, this was posted as a review by someone claiming to have been their security provider:




Then this showed up recently on facebook:



So it looks like the guy who's going to run this location now is the same guy who had his club raided by the cops awhile back here in TX:

https://www.pokernews.com/news/2024/...gain-45600.htm


For full disclosure, I was an employee of Poker House Austin from when they opened in mid December of 2023 through the end of March of this year. I had heard grumblings from some employees about issues with their pay and then they violated Texas Payday law with my pay. That prompted me to research some additional laws (since I figured these guys knew the laws given they were running 6 poker clubs throughout the state)

I discovered some things that concerned me legally and tried to address them internally with an owner and two upper level managers. Long story short, I was terminated from my position because of this.

It's unfortunate because the room itself is beautiful, had a great advantage with a full restaurant and bar, and fantastic parking in the plaza as well. Plus there were great ground-level staff that were true assets in the industry, as far as front desk, dealers and floor supervisors. But unfortunately poor leadership/owners ultimately led it down the wrong path.

Austin Social Club? I guess they are cutting ties with Poker House which I know was trying to be the leader in the state as far as influence if anything ever happens with a state governing board.

I saw the ad for dealers. I laughed and refused to even consider applying.

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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.

I don't see how Poker House was going to be a leader in the state for influence given their own violations. When I was working there I tried to address a number of issues I felt put us at legal risk, ultimately leading to my termination.


1. PRIVATE CLUB/PUBLIC RESTAURANT

In Texas gambling is illegal. But there's a defense under the law that the gambling took place in a private place, not accessible to the public. While Poker House has a private gaming room, it also has a restaurant and bar open to the public. The rear of that restaurant is wide open into your "private" gaming space. So we regularly had members of the public, who were not members of our private social club, including families with young children, walking by the poker tables, by the cage where chips are sold, to use the restrooms shared between both sides.

My concern was that it's already a legal gray area, and now we're stepping over the line and blurring public and private. If we have to defend ourselves in court, how can we claim the public has no access when clearly they do?

2. CALCUTTA AUCTION

On Day 2 of our 200K guaranteed we had 79 players make it. They allowed people to place monetary bids on everyone. If you win a player in the auction and they cash in 1st-3rd you win money. Over 14K was collected in the auction and they told me it was perfectly legal because they weren't taking a cut themselves. However, I looked under TX law. There are parts of the law that state if you do something "for gain", it's illegal.

However, the part of the law that discusses placing wagers on participants and their outcome in an event or contest, it was missing the "for gain" verbiage. So the way I read the law, the mere act of hosting that auction was an illegal act, regardless of whether they took a cut.

3. PLAYER SUPPORTED JACKPOT DROP

Every time a cash game pot hit $10 they were taking $2 out to support promotions (flush frenzy, high hands, bad beat, etc). I have no reason to believe they weren't tracking and paying it all out to the players. However, under TX law you are only entitled to your "personal winnings" when you gamble. So if you're winning a promotion that contains money collected from the winnings of other players pots you were never involved in, is that really your personal winnings? On top of that, some of those promotions don't get hit for awhile, so the room is holding that money. Are they generating interest off that money? I'm not an attorney, but all of this sounds like it could be in violation of the laws.

4. LACK OF EMPLOYEE RIGHTS POSTERS

Federal and TX law require employees rights posters be up in conspicuous locations (a break room, entrance's, etc). I had never seen them up. At the time I was there, one of the owners (who's no longer there) owned a sign company. I sent them links to the pages where they could download all the PDF's and get them printed so we could put them up in all the clubs and ensure we were in compliance.


I was trying to avoid what happened to the Watuaga social club from happening to us (the cops waited until they were on the final day of a big guaranteed tournament to show up, guns drawn and raid the place. The owners and employees were arrested and charged, the patrons got fines/citations and tons of money was confiscated by the cops.

You're running a million dollar business, why risk it by doing stupid things? I also heard rumors they siphoned a big 5/10/25 PLO game from the Lodge and were charging time fees PLUS taking a rake (again, I have zero personal knowledge of this, just something I heard after I was no longer there)

"Unethical business decisions that are outside of our control" is one of the most hilarious sentences I've ever seen put together.

Is the lodge raking pots to fund their bad beat jackpot?

No

Thanks. I was just curious. The place I normally play was thinking about having something like that and I was hating the idea, thinking it would mean a promo drop coming off the table.