Nope. It's $0.50 per hour.

Thanks. Do you know if poker hours are credited at a rate of 1 to 1 or are they discounted as well (for tier status)?

Just a reminder to make sure you count your chips before you hit the window - was cashing out one of my infrequent wins and the young lady offered me $1,389 for $1,789 worth of chips. She was counting a stack of greens as $100.

Also 4 people in the cage on a Saturday night and 1 window open. But that isn't news.

Is there any particular reason why MD Live poker room has such a pathetic host/hostess presence? I simply don't get why they usually have 1 or 2 people for an entire floor when a majority of their pay is thru tips anyways. It's one of the worst aspects of playing at live compared to casinos elsewhere.

Really wish all poker room managers would take a trip to Commerce to see how to properly run a food/drink service. They probably have 5x the waitstaff per customer compared to live.

I assume by host/hostess you mean the servers? In casinos "host" usually has a different meaning entirely.

Yeah the servers at MDL are close to awful and the service is horribly spotty. They seem to have an awful time keeping people in the job which can't help. I remember when I played regularly at Charles Town that the servers would be the same faces for months while at MDL it's hardly worth learning a server's name since she'll most likely be gone in a week or two.

I know that service is outside the control of the poker room manager which can't help. Mike does a great job at running the room in general and I'd have to think he'd be able to improve service too.

The quality of the service and the generally really poor quality of food available is going to be a pretty big factor in favor if MGM once that opens I'd think. A lot of time I'll go play after work and would like to be able to get some decent food and generally I'd expect to see a server by the table at least every 30 minutes and neither of those happen right now at MDL.

Commerce has ridiculous great food/beverage service. Good food selection at excellent prices.

Yep...I meant the food/drink service. Wrong terminology.

It seems like HR needs a kick in the ass if keeping good servers is a problem. I realize we live in a high income area but the servers should be making pretty damn good $ pulling in a dollar a drink. Certainly good enough that you can keep reliable stuff on the payroll.

In my experience, the poker rooms with the most attentive staff employ not only younger women but men and a decent amount of older staff as well. MD Live has a couple great waitresses but too high a % are flaky youngins.

+1 on the food selection-would be really nice to get a few healthier options.

Back in the day word on the street was that good Borgata servers could bring home $100K a year and REALLY good (looking) ones who hustled could approach $150. I'm not sure if there's something structural keeping servers from really working hard but I can't imagine that we can't find some motivated individuals in the area who would be happy to make six figures with no skills/training.

comparisons to Borgata, or even CT, are stupid and pointless due to the cost of alcohol. Maybe MDL can charge eight dollars instead of NINE for a Corona and supplement the server's wage with that dollar, if we are talking about pointless ideas that'll never happen.

I laugh at this every time, this just continues to be absurd. $216 cost for a case that wholesales to them for...what? Crazy. Seems like there's enough margin to jack up the hourly wage of the servers if they wanted to considering how much Corona they go through.

It also stuns me how many hundreds of dollars comes off the table in a long session with people using their stacks to pay for food/beers. I paid attention one weekend and remember thinking how irritated someone would be if a guy was ratholing a black chip every couple hours.

I really enjoyed my time at ML and think Mike has done an excellent job. I think most of the things we think are "issues" were mostly out of his control.

I don't understand this argument.

Is it really stupid to compare MD Live to these other casinos? Can we not compare them to anyone?

I honestly don't think I've ever been a casino with worse drink service than Md Live. I've been to huge casinos in NJ, NV, CA and small ones in FL, CO, OK, SD and elsewhere. Plenty of casinos charge absolutely nothing for that Corona while still providing superior service. What makes Maryland so unique that the casinos can't afford the extra $4 an hour for a server? Hell, look at CA-they're paying their servers at least $10 an hour before tips and they still employ exponentially more people.

I also question the idea that they are actually saving money by not employing more servers. If someone was solely in charge of maximizing food/drink revenue in the poker room, there is 0 chance they would choose to keep thirsty customers waiting for 30+ mins because there's one server for 300 people.

During 2016, up until this Aug 31, Maryland Live was reporting reoccurring daily tournament results to the Global Poker Network/Hendon Mob.

Could you explain the reason you stopped doing this?

Thx,
Shjux2

++1

What street was that???
These numbers seem high/ inflated ; about 40% too high
Even tho.....given that still a nice wage.... point taken

Eh? I bet in the glory days of C-Town a server could make 70-100k, pretty sure an attractive female at that time could make 100k if they hustled

But everyone loves Christian. On another note, PDF of the Tournament Calendar is located next to him.

Thanks

Mike

I would like to add my thanks as well! MDL staff were perfect, and we could not have had a better tournament experience. (BTW..much better then Horseshoe where we conducted the Tournament Last Year)

Nearly half the filed of 99 players had never been to MDL before. And all Feedback that I have received has been that it was an excellent experience and looking forward to the next one.

Agree with everything you said but your last point is the more important one. I have no idea what servers get paid or if they get benefits or anything like that. But I feel pretty certain that if you had a few more servers working, you would be getting that many more $9 beers on the floor. More beers, more profit, happier customers and accountants? Sounds terrible to me.

The last time I was there the girl downstairs told us she was the only one working the entire floor. I thought she was kidding but the dealer made it clear she was the only one. Lulz.

Again, I dont know if Mike has any control over the number of servers working the room.

Thats odd. I would figure servers would jump at the chance to work in the poker room. Concentrated # of players, less walking.
But if md live is short on servers in general, then that would explain it

The handful of good servers would love to just work the poker room. But they aren't allowed to. They have to work the majority of their shifts on the main casino floor, and they don't make very much money out there. As a result, turnover is very high. So we constantly get new and inexperienced service in the poker room.
Mike has little to no control over this.

Called a server and told her that another server took my order for a cup of coffee but never brought it.
She said: "Oh, that is normal. I do it all the time" !!!???

Heard this story from my gf who was playing cash during the hourly $2016 high hand special - apparently 2 friends sat next to each other at a cash table, able to communicate their hands by either showing or some other method. At the river, one of them used sleight of hand to swap a card from his hand for a card of his friend and used that to claim the high hand - a qualifying boat. When it held up, he got paid the bonus and the two walked off. It was only after they left that one of the players mentioned he saw the move and wondered if others saw it too. Other players concurred and then the floor was called to look into this. Some murmuring that the other player who saw and suspected this move should have said something but he wasn't completely sure what happened because the card swap happened so fast.

Who also got cheated was the honest player who was next in line for the high hand. By the time the floor got involved, the card swappers were out of the room and that was that.
But they should have recorded the winner of the bonus - if so, they can identify that person (if he gave a real ID/players card) and go after him - ban him or other sanctions.

Back in MD for my annual holiday family visit, and a couple of notes.

Though the room is generally well run, how 4 years in have they still not figured out how to staff the cage in such a way that it doesn't take 10+ minutes to get chips before playing or cash out when leaving. If they can't figure this out, they should allow players to buy-in at the table, particularly since they have dedicated chip runners. MD Live is the only poker room I have played in that, when starting a new game, does not sell the players chips at the table, but forces them to buy chips at the cage.

A bigger deal for me, as someone with allergies, particularly a sensitivity to fragrances, is what is up with the casino pumping so much perfume in the air that my clothes still smell of it days later. I know the poker room has no control over this, but the brass at MD Live should really consider turning it down a notch.

Other than that, am pretty okay with how the room operates. Dealers are generally good and there no longer seems to be much of a problem of people wandering around and line jumping, though that may be more a function of less demand than better policing. The days of 50+ person waiting lists seem to be long gone, outside of the times when there are crazy promotions.

I do miss the days of a few years back when 2-2 PLO8 would run regularly.

Yay-$1 chips in the 4/8 game. That plus the high hand promotion really loosened things up. Sadly I had to leave before 1pm.

Progress!

Meh 24 hr ban at most. And how do you enforce a ban when playing poker does not require a players card anyway?

Seriously, cheating of any sort should result in serious consequences and in some instances criminal charges.