Indeed, since the opening of the hotel it's been really crowded.

I'll say.......Mini trip report and observations, Dec. 5, 2015

Visited the Bike Hotel and Casino for the first time since the hotel opened. Wife and I are in LA 6-10x yearly from NorCal, we frequent the bike when visiting. Beautiful new Porte cochere for entrance on the redone hotel side. Valet parking now a $5.00 post-paid fee, appears there is no more " keeping it close for more" extra tip available. Maybe, but don't think so.

Great new entrance leads right to main stairway of poker room, with Bakery, Brewpub and hotel lobby on the right.
The room appeared to "sell out" at around 10pm, for perhaps an hour. WSOP in town.

Deli had an $8.00 buffet, popular with the tournament crowd. No coffee, you have to go to the new bakery.

New bakery has some issues, employees/dealers cutting in front of public, others ...getting a meal, at a discount, oh well. Bakery has stuff in the display case that they Are completely out of....cookies on display, but no, we have no cookies.

Bike Brewery has great food, we had little gem wedge salad, 1/2 broiled chicken, bike burger, all cooked, prepared and served perfectly. All issues with this restaurant are from the fact they've been open five days only- pacing, seating, the overly loud band in the lounge next door, and just the newness of personnel. All these are observations, and not critiques at this time, one hopes this restaurant fixes these simple growing pains.

Once again, the only wish for the bike is some sort of improved player tracking, hopefully Bravo. No info posted on what they intend to do. Some sort of table near the Plaza with a sign on it about earning 0.01 in comps per hand played, ....am thinking one needs a lot more in of on this, this sign is bizarre.

Nice new mini wallets for player cards, an improvement over the old, folding card carriers which never lasted long.

Bike's food service, dealers, valet and floor are way too incompetent and are unacceptable if they expect to ever put any kind of hurt on Commerce. I played there three nights in this past week and wasn't impressed. The games aren't better than Commerce, either. For as huge and as much of a zoo Commerce is, they do a good job running it. Bike has trouble running a plaza area with 15-20 games running. It's pathetic.

Sorry they wouldn't comp you your dinner, but really- the idea that the Bike is worse at customer service than Commerce is just laughable.

Lol. Playing 3 hours for free food is not a problem. Their food servers are damn near impossible to track down and the food takes forever. They're also rude. I heard a guy ask a server for a coffee and they said they were too busy. You'd get fired in a restaurant for that.

The floor also has no idea what is going on half the time. The tables don't fill quickly and table changes are a complete disaster.

Valet also almost gave my friend's car to someone else! They don't even check the tickets.

I've played both places and it's laughable you think Commerce is worse customer service. They do a damn good job of running that many tables. Believe me, I am rooting for the Bike to take some business away from them but it's not happening. This upswing in games is a mirage and only happening because of the tournies.

LOL

Does anybody know if there is a regular 10/25 or 25/50 NLHE only game during the week (NOT Fri or Saturdays)? Looking to fly out and play in one somewhere before the end of 2015 & want to make sure 100% they will have a game and typically what time it is spread

Went last night. You were right about the food service being awful. They are not staffed for the level of business they're doing right now, and it shows. Plus they fired all the porters, which just puts more stress on the servers. Bad decision. Historically though, I still think Commerce food service has been far weaker, and while the service is bad at the Bike right now, the quality of the food seems better (and it has always been better than Commerce).

Valet took forever too, and it's BS that they're now charging $5. They havent figured out yet where to put cars while they're in the portico. Growing pains. It does seem though that they replaced the scummy ones that used to run valet.

No complaints about the floor or dealers. The remodel is pretty funny though- all they did was graft on a new hotel and front onto the same dumpy casino they've always had. So it's like walking into the front door of a B or B+ grade Vegas property, before ending up at the same old Bike. I'm hoping a redesign of the casino is phase 2.

The Bicycle is my favorite casino and hope the hiccups currently happening will be temporary.

I think I have seen you there man

Boooyah guys!! Took first place in the Quantum reload on 12/23 for $1565. Did anybody else play in it??

Congrats no deal?

Thanks! No deal, played it out. I had such a chip lead that with 5 people left, I would have got 1st place prize anyways with equity chop. 5th place guy didn't want to take his equity and ended up coming in third so worked out for him.

Anyone know what you get with the rewards card at the bike? Is it just free food for three swipes? Seems like hustler has the best rewards in la.

If you're playing in the yellow chip games, 25 hours earns you $50 cash back plus $2.50 for each hour after that.

This is per month I assume?

Yeah that's monthly.

The Bike is now on PokerAtlas...any thoughts?

Nice to be able to see how many live games are going before driving there.

I think this is a major accomplishment. Congrats to The Bike, but especially to PokerAtlas for coming up with this thing.

Heard the blind structure for NLHE games at the Bike will now require a bb to be posted on the button. Any ideas on what the deal is with that?

That's only for the 5-5 (300-1000) game, all the other games are still standard. And it is actually 5 on the button, 5 on SB and 5 on BB, so you will be posting 3 times in a round. They wanted to reduce the number of chops preflop.

That's just going to increase the number of chops preflop, but they'll be 3-way chops now. Unless they plan to enforce rules against that, which I doubt they will.

Maybe they should try to figure out how to run a room and they wouldn't have as many chops.

I visited over the weekend and enjoyed this place a lot. The remodel looks great, plaza is very nice to play on, good amount of mid limit games, good tvs, good food, much quieter, more pleasant than playing at commerce (and that includes the players who seemed much friendlier). Good valet service as well. Will definitely be back.