Chips were flying around the 2/2 plo tonight. Hope it runs more regularly.

Any tournaments ever going?

I'm going to get back into the swing of things in the coming weeks. How have wait times been after dinner as of late?

Room is pretty good right now in my 15ish hours over several nights recently.

Lots of regs who all know each other very well. Mostly, they are fun and willing to mix it up. Also a few good "whales" that are regulars.

Good dealers and floors. Generally little or no wait, but they do seem to have some rushes where if you show up at the wrong time, you'll wait a half hour.

Terrible beverage service. Probably worst I've seen in my dozen or so poker rooms. Choice and quality is good, but simply not enough servers and their bar is far away I believe. Don't be surprised to go 2 hours waiting for a drink. This is my biggest gripe with the room. They do have a free self service basic drink station if you like soda or coffee/tea.

Overall the room is great in my opinion. I've played about 10 hours 1/2 and 5 hours of 2/5. Haven't been able to get a PLO game on my nights.

lack of cup holders is insane

saw two separate spills on the felt in one session

They actually have a boatload of them in the cabinet by the bathroom but people are just too lazy to ask!

That's odd you didn't get PLO, it runs quite often, especially on weekends.
It's very very reg heavy at 2/5 no doubt. The 1k max tends to bring that out.
Similarly tho, the 500 max at 1/2 makes those games a bit extra squishy and plumpy, softer than normal.

The MGM has the best dealers and floors in all of NE, IMHO.
Lot of them are former Foxwoods or Mohegan employees. (Minus one dreadfully slow dealer...)

The lack of servers is really annoying for everyone. And some may come off kind of rude or will forget orders to make things worse.

My biggest gripe with the room right now is the coffee there absolutely sucks. I have never had coffee that tasted as bad as what they offer in that crappy self-serving machine. They won't let you bring in your own anymore which really sucks cause there is a dunkin right down the street worth walking to just to avoid that gross black tar they serve!

Is it just me? Am I being a coffee snob? I see others drinking it. I've never found any other coffee to be undrinkable either. But that stuff is truly God-awful. I hate it. I've resorted to literally smuggling in my dunkin from time to time. (The floors won't care or mind, just the security guard at the casino entrance that now sits there and ID's everyone. Advantage players beware they do scan ID's sometimes, not sure if that's actually being recorded or not, or if they just check mine extra carefully cause I look 15, idk)

Also, wait times can get way out of control at rush hour, I recommend always calling ahead and getting put on the list!

I mostly drink Dunkin' but had no problem with the coffee from the self-serve machine. It didn't taste burnt or anything. I only use a splash of skim milk fwiw

Yes the self serve coffee is awful. I drink it black, but I like everything usually, even cheap gas station coffee.
Oddly, the coffee served by the waitresses is decent, but comes with the same slow service problems.

I did manage to play PLO the other night finally. Pretty good games.

5-5 Big O was super juicy this Monday with a mandatory straddle and lots of action. I don't come often because they didn't used to get PLO, if this was the norm and not just due to the holiday then I might have to make more of an effort.

It looks like the 2-2 PLO is now running almost nightly, even two tables at least one of those times.
I think I just happened to miss it my first couple trips, but the dealers and players were telling me it always goes.

Hi guys,

This week I tried out the $1$/$2 for the NFL promo hours. The tables are good and the math looks good on the promo, so I'll try to commit to the Sunday day games, then Monday and Thursday nights, for the duration of the season.

I've been keeping track of it over in House of Blogs. Stop over and say hi if you want.

Is the NFL promo continuing through December?

Looks like it's going until 12/29. I don't know what they're doing in January. It would be nice if they kept it going.

What is the rake structure?

I used the search function and couldn't find any info. Thanks in advance.

I'm not 100% sure but I believe it starts on the flop, 10% up to $6, with $2 in promo drops; $1 for the bad beat and $1 for whatever other promo is going, and the pot needs to be a certain size for the 2nd promo dollar to drop.

Tournaments are back. Tuesdays (2x), Thursdays and Saturdays in January. I'm not sure when they started back up but I totally missed it. I may play one or two of these this month for old time sake lol.

I don't love how they skip 600/1200 and 800/1600 - or do I just play in weird structures normally?

Any idea how many runners the saturday tournaments have been getting?

ETA - found them in Hendon Mob - looks like other than Xmas eve (34) the sat events have been getting 60-80 runners.

did the drive from nyc to maine a few times in recent months and usually stop by and put in a few hours

seems like there's a bunch of the same people there every time

also done a lot of good work dispelling any notion I may have any talent at poker losing a few buyins last few visits to villains who vpip 90% and call any raise preflop

love the button straddle, especially since without it everyone calls me a nit for only playing about 30% of my hands

This room has a very weird "reg" dynamic. Every time I play, I'm at a table where probably 6 or 7 players know each other very well by name. Obviously all of them are very regular. Overall, the tables are probably more reg infested than almost anyplace I've played before. The weird thing though is that they are mostly fun, laggy regs that are good and fun to play with. The games are still very good with all the regs.
I played at Foxwoods a few days ago and couldn't get 9ver how miserable the game was. It's seriously almost like they did an audition for fun regs, all the good ones were allowed to play at MGM while all of the miserable, nitty, and headphone wearers were only allowed to play at Foxwoods.

this so much

really like the crowds, fun group, last time i played a dealer was talking about 9/11 conspiracies and stuff and instead of it getting weird it instead became a fun kinda disagreement where everyone liked each other more so afterwards despite that people very different opinions on it all

and I definitely put a pause on "oh he knows the dealers/other players he's a reg should watch out for this guy" as the regs here seem more like guys who just want to have fun rather than learn to play well

there's one reg who takes forever, like every action he needs to pause for a min of 30 seconds

he kinda looks like the guy from halt and catch fire and he makes a big deal of tipping all the female dealers (but not in a creepy way just will tip females randomly but not with the men so you may know him

he's pretty insufferable to play with because he'll call a raise pre then call a 3 bet and then on an AQ7 flop out comes a standard cbet, other guy folds so it's a simple decision now heads up and he'll tank for 5 minutes for a $25 bet into a $40 pot, last time i called clock on him a bunch and got on his case and he acted confused like he wasn't using much time and everyone else lets it go cause they want him at the table since the reason why he's tanking is because he has T7o and he's deep in thought trying to figure out if he's good or not - not whether he should raise here and turn it into a bluff or something crafty but rather whether or not villain actually has an A or a Q or has something like K3 which what he plays and therefore he should call cause he's ahead.

last time he was really good for the first hour or so, to the point where I genuinely debated complimenting him for speeding up his play but was unsure if I'd come off as a dick saying that, but then he slowly transitioned into the tank mode later in the night so I think maybe he just gets tired and slows down

another guy took major offense when I gestured with my hand for him to move his hands so I could see his stack when we were playing a big pot, thought that was a bit weird, dude is actively covering his chips and mad dogging me and just made a big bet so I preferred to hand gesture which he understood and complied with but then after the hand thought about it a bit and got really angry about it about a minute later - didn't feel like it was a mental tactic or anything since I'm quite a bit bigger than him so he must have genuinely felt offended by what's a pretty standard move I've used and seen others use for years without any issue, it didn't really bother me just more puzzling than anything else and when you're sitting at a 1/2 game where you fold 2/3 your hands pre and it goes 5 to a flop then you have a lot of time to sit and contemplate

otherwise, I really enjoy playing there, it's a fun crowd and like you said, despite being reg infested, there's been very few players I've played with for over an hour and figured they knew what they were doing - definitely a few good players but it's still tricky making adjustments from asia - biggest adjustment I gotta make is to discount board textures when deciding whether or not to bluff, quite a few times I've gotten looked up on really wet boards cause a lot of these guys treat top pair like it's the nuts as well as having definitely ripped it in plenty of times with the nuts and gotten looked up by mid pair etc etc

FYI about 80 runners today; 11:15 start and the vast majority of players seemed to show up on time. 20 min blinds go quick! Final table by 3 and done by 6:30.

Two regs, who I am aware are/were regulars in the big games at MGM, were accused of colluding at Boston Encore (Eric and Nikita):

https://twitter.com/Dublistic/status...snTxGz5SAfJzng

Anything come out of this? Have they been back and played since?