That 1K high hand is taxed too right?Even more money leaving the Encore poker community.


Glad I moved on.

30 hands per hour is accurate when hand shuffling, a little more than 30 with a shufflemaster... any dealer pitching 20 hands/hour is soon to be unemployed... Math is indeed a crazy thing, unfortunately as simple as it is to understand most people don't pay attention to it when it comes to rake affecting the winnability of a game. Although if you look over the room on any given day most of the players look like they never made it beyond Jr High math so I guess that might explain it.


There's no way $0.10 per hand is enough to finance $1,000 high hands... There's also no way that $0.90 is going into the bad beat pool because the house takes an "administrative fee" out of every dollar and by "administrative fee" I mean they are raking the promotional drop for house profit.

Encore had their first tournament since Covid.

Started at 10:00 am, 240 dollar buy in, 222 entrants, 24 places paid, 1st place was a little less than 11k.

oh damn they're actually doing it? I heard they were gonna be 6 tables max. This is a step in the right direction I guess

Re-buys I assume? I can't imagine they committed 22-25 tables to a tournament.

Did they build a tournament area?

So annoying that they have tournaments only during week days. Would love to play one on week-end. Who are the 222 players who can come and play on a Tuesday morning...

Tell the floor you want to see one on Sunday, that day is relatively dead. Could definitely use a tourney then to bring in people. If enough people ask they may put it in

212 entrants in the $360 today. Every table full. Not sure if that's right though? 3 people busted at my table and it's only one of 20 tourney tables. Over half the people who busted being at my table doesn't seem right

Why would they run this tournament on a Friday? Lists are jammed. Whoever is running this room has no clue what they're doing.

It started at 10am. The room is 80% empty at that time. Nothing wrong with it. It's down to 2 tables by like 5:30 and ends at 8-8:30ish

If the idea is to drive traffic on slow days, they're doing it wrong.

I thought they would use the room by the women's restroom that has never been used for anything but storage all these years for some extra tables but if the goal is to have less than 24 tables available at any time for the tournament then it will never be super big as people don't want to show up and have to be in a line of alternates waiting for people to bust out, etc...

This is a step in some direction and hopefully it will become more than 2x a week.

It is apparent that whoever is running the casino has absolutely no clue. That trickles down to each department including their choice to run the poker room and operate it on a day-to-day basis. I've never run any gaming establishment or poker room and I could turn that room around and make it work for the casino and the players.

As for the promotions. There are certain places where promotions are necessary, Encore is not one of them.

About how the management has no clue how to run the place... I have never run any type of poker business either but I have run many companies/businesses/departments similar in size of employees and stuff like this and I don't even need to know anything about poker but just being a player I hear all the chatter from a lot of people who have been around poker for decades. A few tips and things to improve every different aspect of Encore poker makes perfect sense from these poker veterans and all they needed was an email/text number for people to drop suggestions and they could fix everything in a month. They can even just read the comments here. It is incredible how easy it is to please the customer base but until the room is boycotted nothing will ever change. They can't even keep the poker cage staffed. Always some kind of lunch hour or long line. A good example was Saturday night around 11pm there were 60 people on the 2-2 PLO list and 90 people on the 1-3 list but there were 2 tables of 2-2 PLO and 14 tables of 1-3. They don't want to have any other games like Stud or whatever and I would say giving up 2-3 tables for other games and having 2-3 less tables of 1-3 would be fine. I'm not even really sure how much those slot machines by the poker room are making. I've never seen the first floor slots all busy and full of people and the ones by poker are scarcely populated. On the weekends 100% a poker table makes more $ than a slot machine in that area when there are 250 people waiting across 1-3, 2-5, 2-2, etc...

I have recently been informed that you can just get change from the full service cage as they can color the 100x promo chips down to at least green 25x promo chips. I don't know if they ever spread real blackjack for $25 but even at $50, it would be a little less variance than having to bet 100x increments....

It's pretty amazing that this dump can't even fill up the room on a Sunday

Is there a place to check the results from the Tue and Fri tournaments?

they used to report them to hendon mob I guess not anymore?

Yes, I couldn't find them on Hendon Mob myself but that could be just because I am incompetent ha but maybe they're slacking on the reporting as they're supposed to post them somewhere and usually Hendon is very good at taking that data in but who knows what this rinky dink operation is doing these days.

For the first time (August 8, 2023), the BIWEEKLY tournament @ Encore raised its measly guarantee from 5k to 10k, and it easily broke that. ~$10k up top on a rainy Tuesday morning full of retirees. Not bad.

And no, Encore Boston Harbor has NOT bothered to post tournament results since 2020 on Hendon Mob:

Looks like the top five (August 8, 2023) did an ICM chop:

Is there a plan to have bigger tournaments at some point? Poker Atlas is showing a $570 tournament on Sunday, October 1st but with an 11pm start time? Guessing that's just some kind of bug, but curious if it's indicative of plans for something.

I mean are they actually supposed to report results to hendon mob by law? I know mohegan sun doesn't report daily results either

Tournament results are now being posted on Hendon Mob. Just search for "Encore Boston" and it will show a recurring tournaments schedule with all results since July 10th or so.

Also note the $600 event scheduled on Poker Atlas for Sunday OCT 1st @ 10:15am. Great to see! I would imagine it will be at capacity, so get there on time.

I played and final tabled yesterday's $360 event. Very well run. A few inexperienced tournament dealers during bubble, but multiple floors present were all over it, so good outcome. Overall dealing was fine. As was beverage service during tourney.

Heading out west to the other Encore tomorrow for a trade show. Hope rains aren't too bad with Hillary near Vegas!

What is the capacity for tournaments, do you know?