My suggestion would be to leave it as is. If you see that this 90 min rule is causing games to break then revisit it.

As a general rule of thumb the bigger the game the less the players will mind playing short handed. Fwiw MDL did not have 3rd man walking rule in time raked games and I don't rmbr this being an issue.(they also allowed 90 minutes). Your room has even more HS action than they ever did so I don't anticipate this will affect things as much as u think it would.

Shorten the time any player is allowed to be away from the table ... so the player you are picking up is the guy who has been walking longest not the guy who has been walking for the shortest time.

Too rife for the ultimate angle. Player A is not good for the game. He leaves to go eat. B and C know he is first to get picked up, so they get up and walk until A get picked up.... live one comes to the game.... B and C are back.

You misunderstand. I'm not saying player A's time is based on how many players are walking.

I'm saying rather than a 3 man walking rule, you just shirten the time any player under any circumstance can be walking. Have a dinner list so that a player who wants to take a long break has a time frame to got o the top of the list, but must leave the game and free up the seat

We already have that. It's a 30 minute rule. Problem is, in the highest stakes games, the odds of getting back in those games quickly is very slim... that's the reason for the rule adjustment.

i don't understand the constant adversarial tone, but ok....

I want the opinions of my shift managers and my operations manager on rule changes. They get lot more face time with players, and have the most accurate information. I am not a "top-down" manager. I encourage all opinions, as I feel you get the most info and the best decisions....

I for one will be happy to ask for pickups on third-man-walking grinders that aren't players I want to face. That'll cause some entertaining conflict until they get the idea that they should be dour-ass grouches all the time, and instead should be making fish like me happy.

The time-rake changes are very welcome. Thanks Johnny!

I can. I appreciate direct. Some supervisors have more experience in this market, and I rely on it in the decision making process. This is always a process and never a finished product.

I doubt he is a pro if he needs to consult notes before making a decision in a hand.

those people are idiots.

I played the tourney today. It was very well run. No real complaints, I enjoyed playing in it. I like that we start with 25k chips (with the additional $10 addon). I ended up in 28th place, I believe there were 70 initial entries and then 20+ alternates joined. I plan to play at least 2 of these a month.

Blinds move up fast and there was a period at around rounds 10-12 where everyone at my table was pretty short stacked compared to the blinds and it turned into an all-in bingo donkfest. Not sure how that happened, seriously most of us were only 10BB deep. But after I busted out at 28, the tourney continued on for at least another 3 hours. People at the final table were very deep stacked which allowed for more maneuverability and creative play (according to one of the chip leads at the table who I spoke to outside).

One thing I wish is that they paid more than 1-9th place. 9th place I think got almost 3x their buy-in..would be cool if they paid a bit more places like down to 15 and 9-15 got their money back. Otherwise great all around tourney, was very well managed and look forward to playing many more.

I played the first tournament on Monday (and made a small cash). Here are some thoughts:

-Registration for the tournament opened at 10 am (an hour before the tournament began). I got there a couple minutes before 10 and there was already a bit of a line. Had to wait approximately 40 minutes in line to register but I was at least able to get an immediate seat without being wait listed.

-The tournament was capped at 90 players (9 full tables). I believe at one point there was a wait list of well over 100 players, though many of the wait listed players ended up choosing not to play so the wait list ended up being 65 or so players (for a total of 90 + 65 = 155 players who ended up playing in the tournament).

If you got into line to register after 10:15 or so not only did you have to wait the 40 minutes or so just to register, you had to wait just to get a seat in the tournament due to the 90 player cap. Players on the wait list had to wait anywhere between 30 minutes and 2.5 hours to get a seat LOL. For example, an hour into the tournament they had only gotten through 5 or 6 people in what was at the time a 100+ person waiting list.

They were still letting people from the wait list enter the tournament at Level 12 with full 25,000 stacks (which was only a little over 10 BB at that point).It was somewhat discouraging to see person after person come in with full stacks even a couple hours into the tournament after players got knocked out.

-The tournament clock screens didn't work for the first 2-2.5 hours of the tournament so there was some difficulty with the blinds and knowing how much time was left in the blinds. (They eventually got this fixed after a couple of hours.) Seems this should've been tested before hand.

-Noticed a lot of "temp" dealers and dealers who weren't sure of tournament rules; players at my table were even giving certain dealers who seemed unsure guidance on what to do in certain situations. There was one situation where a female dealer took the ante chips and appeared ready to drop them in the chip toke box before one of the players stopped her. There was another situation at the 6,000/12,000 level where a guy raised preflop to 36,000 and the dealer insisted to me that the minimum re-raise was to 72,000; multiple players had to remind her that 60,000 was the minimum re-raise.

-I didn't really like the fast 15-minute blind structure for the tournament (15 minutes for 1st 6 levels, 20 minutes after that) or the fact that only $100 out of the $130 buy-in goes into the prize pool. Even the $65 Maryland Live! Bankroll Builder tournament is a bit better structured than this IMO.

-When full the poker tables are very cramped because of how close together they are. In many cases for example when a dealer needed to sit down it required a player at the table getting up to make room for the dealer to squeeze between the tables to get to his seat.

-The tournament seemed to run fairly smoothly after the wait list ended and the tournament clock issues were resolved. I played for around 7 hours and busted a little before the final table so made a small cash (I believe it was at some point in Level 20 - 10,000/20,000 blinds - when I busted). There were 155 total players; 15 cashed with the 16th player (bubble) getting $10 from each of the other 15 players that were left. I don't know how long they played after I busted so don't know how long the tournament lasted in total.

I think they stopped doing breaks after Level 16, which seemed odd.

-The manager of the room (Johnny Grooms) seems like a nice guy - solid guy who seemed to do a good job handling everything considering the issues that came up. But I didn't like the initial 15-minute blind structure for a $130 tournament or the 9 table cap so not so sure I'll ever be playing in that tournament again...

Awesome. Thank you, Johnny!

You must have been seated on table 32 or 33. We are in the process of getting lighting in an area that will allow those tables to be spaced a little better. We do have some dealers thatbheave never dealt a tournament, Eric Comer (Poker Ope Manager) was actually the guy handling the tournament. He has directed at least 30 tourneys with 1,000 plus players, so he has seen just about everything you can imagkne. We tested all the technology 3 times prior to the event. An automatic reset on the A/V side (all TVs are server based) caused the issue, and it happened at 4am local time. We recognized the issue prior to reg opening, and the issue took several hours to resolve.

This is the kind of feed back I was hoping for, complete with all the necessary details.

Thanks to Crystal, DarkOut and others.

JG, extending the registration to 2 before and 2 after sounds like a good idea. Also, during that time, if you can dedicate one/two cashiers in the cage for tourny registration only might increase the speed.

Do you have any alternate options for accomodation if the tournaments become very popular? Just saying!

They'll find a nice balance point for tournaments I'm sure. Remember that the Monday tournament was on MLK day a day that locally probably has higher than an average Saturday level of traffic in poker rooms. I'm sure the demand for an average non-holiday Monday 11am tournament will be well below what the room saw on MLK.

What was the tournament like yesterday? That's probably a closer approximation to what to expect.

Registration won't be extended beyond 1 hour after the start of the event. I have philosophical objections to the trend of giving full stacks for late reg. We also have a limit of what we want to accomplish the tournaments. I don't want to crowd out cash games, so if the numbers continue to increase, we will raise the buy-in to adjust...

The TEMP you see on the badge does not mean a temp dealer. All dealers that work there are regular dealers, no temp dealers. The temp is for the gaming badge itself. The permanent gaming badge is awarded after the temp gaming badge. Simply means the gaming investigator almost has all of their info (enough to grant a temp license so dealer can go to work), once they have all info, and it's good, dealer will receive a normal gaming badge.

I didn't play in the tournament yesterday, but I did play cash after work. I started playing around 5:30pm and saw the tournament display on one of the TV's. It said there were 97 entries and around 5:30pm there were 7 players left. The last time I recall seeing the tournament display up was between 6:30-7:00 with either 4 or 5 players left.

Dan "Jungleman" Cates grinding the 10-25 plo the other night. Guy is such a beast!

And you can always trust poker players to tell you what they had after they've thrown their cards into the muck.

JG hope to bump into you today.

As always will be here till 3:30.

Had meetings all day from 10:30-3:30. Just finished. Bad timing again.

So it sounds like the long registration and long wait lines to get in Monday were due to the federal holiday and that there were no such issues on Wednesday. That's good, because I may be in town on a Monday in a few weeks and would love to play in that tourney.