One of the things that makes poker at Maryland Live so successful is that it's located in one of the wealthiest areas in the country (i.e. lots of disposable income), which means they can run higher dollar tournaments with a bigger fee and still run the room nearly at capacity.
Personally, I'd love a bunch of $50+5 dailies, but that's just not realistic in the current environment. I don't think Maryland Live would be doing itself any favors by lowering buy-ins or lengthening structures. When the shoe opens in Baltimore and even more so MGM in National Harbor, they're going to lose a substantial amount of poker business. There's nothing they can do about that, and I don't think making low buy-in, slow structure tourney players happy now is really going to make a significant difference in their long-term profitability. If there continues to be demand for those types of tournaments as traffic in the room decreases, I'm sure Mike will adjust accordingly.
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Originally Posted by rmf_319
the baltimore room is going to be smaller(25 to 30 tables) and the national harbor casino is going to be geared primarily to tourists. i think what you'll see is a lot of 1/2 and 2/5 NL and lower buy-in tourneys at those rooms with MD live! keeping all of the other games and higher stakes and occasionally having higher buy-in tournaments.
Assuming MGM puts in even a half-way decent poker room, I'm willing to bet dollars to donuts that a good portion of the high stakes games move to National Harbor. It's an area for rich tourists and professional conference attendees, and The folks playing the big NL and PLO games are going to want to get a piece of that money. Even if only 1 in 200 tourists who visit the poker room actually play the higher stake games, it would be worth it for those guys to move the game there. Not to mention that playing there would likely get you comped rooms in Vegas.
With the WSOP connection, I'm guessing the shoe gets some decent tournament series, and I wouldn't be surprised if they pick up some of the lower buy-in tournies. I'm not sure they get as much of the DC and NoVA traffic and money, so I'm betting there ends up being fewer big games and tournaments there. I live in DC pretty close to 295, and it takes me a solid 35 minutes to get to ML if there's no traffic... which is usually only when I go during a weekday or come home in the middle of the night. It would take a lot for me drive further and fight through a second city's traffic to play when I have a closer option with lots of action.