Cash game rake likely around $75k per day average. Fri-Sun about $100k average, Mon-Thu $60k average. Figure about 20 max raked hands per hour on average. Weekdays average a max of about 30 tables. Weekends average about 50.

I can tell you from dealing limit and no limit, that is definitely not the case especially at lower limits. LHE sees every river and never gets taken down preflop. Also rarely hits max rake. Even with tanking, 1/2 NLH 5 Max rake does better (hands dealt and max raked hands) than 3/6 or 4/8 LHE.

Having been in upper management of a publicly traded company I can speak firsthand about spreadsheet decisions being made over common sense. We had suits making decisions in our (new) market based on their historical numbers of established markets using metrics such as "Spend per head" which only matters if additional volume affects your core customer spend or there is a facility or equipment depreciation cost involved. It used to make my head spin and ultimately led to my decision to leave the company. Unless the extra 200 tournament players are negatively affecting a whales spend it doesn't make any sense. How would a tournament affect a whale though? They likely park valet, play in high limit areas and receive preferred seating in restaurants.

I get the qualitative arguments, but, quantitatively, it keeps running through my head: ($6 max rake * 30 hands/hr) / 9 people = $20/person/hr.
$140 buy-in at 20% fee = $28/person/however long they're in the tourney.
etc.
And then expense cost of avg. drinks/person/hr.

We also need to consider again that this place is not just a casino. It's a 671 room hotel w/ guests bringing anywhere from 0 to 2 cars. It's also an event venue and convention center with something going on almost every Friday or Saturday in March: Dropkick Murphys, Bacon & Bourbon show and then Smokey Robinson.

The answer is they should get more parking. If there was infinite parking, $/person/hr wouldn't matter because each person (who isn't a parking bandit) is handing them money (e.g., Foxwoods and Mohegan happily welcome all comers big and small). If parking is in fact a bottleneck though, $/person/hr could get prioritized.

I strongly suspect that parking is major factor in their decision to end weekend tournaments. It's a problem of their own making, and not the right way to solve it IMO. But like every other casino it seems most of their decisions don't make much sense.

Yeah this is a great question. From their policies, it seems as though it's a pretty negligible amount. The policies are pretty clearly going to alienate the poker base to at least some degree, and that should be pretty obvious. Management must just not care, it must be so low that opening up some spaces for random blackjack players is worth the loss of rake. The low limit tourneys especially are pretty low rake for potentially a long amount of time taking up spaces. A $40 raked tourney with 200 runners "only" generates 8k of rake, which would probably be pretty easy to make up with other players. That ignores if those 200 runners play cash or gamble in other ways while at the casino.

It just seems odd to me to go the effort to build a beautiful huge poker room, and then constantly make policies that make it clear poker is very low down on the priorities list. I guess since slot revenues are significantly lower than expected they'll try anything to get them up. I'm no casino expert, but it seems like a somewhat risky play if they alienate some of the poker base, and the scene slows down, and then slots still don't go up. Then they've just needlessly cut off a revenue source. Obviously Encore would be very pleased if poker revenue goes down but slots go way up.

Yes, it seems they should promote the hell out of PLO and all the limit/mix games because NL will always be popular. Just do everything possible to get all the games here and everyone playing then worry about rake increases and other things when you have a full room. It is very hard to justify asking for anything from upper upper management when you can't even fill the room. If you wanted more space for tournaments or better food/drink service and you don't have many players why would they provide what you need.

The fact that there are not many/any 20-40 limit/mix games on a regular basis as well as consistently 3+ tables of PLO is a tragedy of epic disappointment proportions. I never thought the 20-40 stud game would break but it has been empty for quite a few hours of the week these days. There is no way a metropolitan area like Boston should be vacant of PLO/stud/LHE/mix/etc... there are so many people here and these are not high stakes. People are just playing elsewhere.

Could there also be an issue with whatever promises were made to the powers-that-be regarding traffic? If they had infinite parking but this caused a ton of additional vehicle traffic in the surrounding area

I don't know how the underlying contracts work, so just brainstorming. I remember reading a lot of articles preaching DO NOT DRIVE TO ENCORE

Yup, I agree they are testing the parking hypothesis, and it might still not pan out. In that case, they have other problems. For example, millenials don't participate in traditional gambling, according to reports, and a lot of the tech money is held by millenials (don't know if that subset gambles). However, it seems millenials might participate in poker (arguably a skill-based game) and sports betting (arguably about analytics, DraftKings, etc.), in which case, those could be draws to lure millenials into the property (though they've already done the poker part and I guess it hasn't helped?). I do know there are still people choosing to commute to Mohegan and Foxwoods, so there's still hope for Encore if they can figure out how to get those people to switch.

Obviously it would have been a good thing for Encore simply to provide enough parking so that it was never a problem. But I have no idea of the economics or politics of this.
I seriously doubt that they expected to need to set aside as much of the parking space as they have for Uber, police, VIP's, etc. I also think that they may have seriously underestimated the surge in parking demand once they made it free. Rather than attracting hordes of new players, I think that this may have incented lots of existing players to simply switch from public trans or offsite parking and park onsite.
Bringing in additional several hundred poker tournament players on weekends now simply displaces an equal or greater number of more profitable slots and table games players. (My impression is that a lot more of the latter come as groups; most of the poker players come alone.)
I've heard rumors that Encore intends to acquire the lot across the street. If so, I hope they make it free, and charge for (and comp) the garage.

Although they're not supposed to, I wonder if employees started parking in the main lot. That seems a larger threat to me than the parking banditos.

January was their best month of slots so far. It could very well be they are willing to piss off poker players in hopes that their upward slot trend continues.

Hey everyone.

Looking for some help understanding the whole compdollars, points, poker points, Poker comp dollars cluster. I have read through everything and tried googling this but am still lost as hell. Thank you in advance.

I play poker and sometimes dump some money into slots, never played a table game. Here's what my online Wynn profile says.

Point balance - 3319
(What do I do with these? Is this what I use for $1 valet parking? How many points = $1 ?)

Compdollars - $97.63

(Are these my Poker compdollars? These can't natively be used for $1 valet parking but can be converted if requested? I'm confused because I keep reading the Poker compdollars are not visible online but mine seem to be?)



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The 3319 point balance is equal to $33.19 in free play once converted.

$97.63 Compdollars - points that can be spent on food, parking etc.

Poker comp dollars do not show up online, you need to ask the desk. It's a guessing game otherwise.

Those stats are from your slot play. 3319 points means you ran $16,595 through the machines. And $97.63 comp dollars from that play means you were playing on 94.12% payback machines, on average.

Instructions for converting your 3, 319 slot points:
https://www.encorebostonharbor.com/p...free-slot-play
Slot points have a 12 month expiration.
Free play dollars from converted points have a 30 day expiration.

Compdollars can be used as currency for almost anything in the casino, including valet parking for 1 compdollar. They can also be used to buy admission into the buffet at half price (15 compdollar lunch, 20 compdollar dinner). They have a 6 month expiration.

Poker points or poker dollars can only be viewed and converted at the poker desk and can only be used at certain (all?) food places. Never heard of anyone using them at the Drugstore or other shops or for hotel/spa. Cannot be used for parking. Not sure if/when these expire (but everything else offered by the casino has an expiration, so ...).


Don't wind up like this person:
https://urcomped.com/post/details/12...r-beware-this/

Limit is dead. It's been dead for quite a while. And on the occasional day when it does run it's filled with nothing but limit nerds. I'm not sure where you think people are going "elsewhere" to play limit poker. I'd also point out that one day we were trying to get a 3rd 2-2 PLO game going and you sat down and then realized it wasn't PLO 8 and you got up and left. Which honestly confuses me. That PLO 8 game is terrible while the 2-2 is generally much better. If people aren't willing to play anything but their best game, all the games will be bad.

All that said, if you're truly interested in promoting limit or big bet split pot games you guys should think about a limit-NL/PL mix game. I'd love a half PLO half Big-O game or a HORSE type game with NLH and PLO. And you'd have to have a rule that you can sit out the big bet games, that's so annoying. One time playing 8-16 mix 2 people were sitting out multiple games.

Thank you.
It is both fascinating and a bit scary how much information you were just able to extrapolate.


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About 2 weeks ago I posted how you can figure that out.

How do you figure out what the payback percentage was?

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Anyone well informed on this corona stuff? Is there a reason to stay away from the Encore/casinos in general right now with the large amounts of people and germy chips etc?

I saw some people in masks last weekend.

Coronavirus or not anytime I visit I carry a travel bottle of hand sanitizer on me and use it every hour or so. That and washing my hands well for 30-45 seconds when using the bathroom, not just the 5 second splash most do makes me feel better.




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