In the past, it's been because elgin was dark on Monday and Tuesday so unless you wanted to deal with rcg, rivers was the only game available. But now with elgin going 7 days a week, maybe it will take a little strain off the rivers lists.

Every little bit helps.

This is also true for anything using Bravo. Noobs and occasional recs dont are Ben know what Brwvo is b

Hollywood has been going on Monday and Tuesday for a few weeks now and I believe Elgin just started as well. This should alleviate some traffic hopefully.

MD

What's the response been from management? I'll ask next time I'm out there. Thanks

Tier credits can be a big discussion, I think it's a mistake for casinos to not put at least something 'out there' to entice a poker player to explore the whole facility.

My home casino slashed 'poker' tier credits 3 times after they opened the room .. but even with that a 'poker only' Player could achieve the 2nd highest casino level by playing an average of 47.5 hours per week. This level allowed them to collect the door prizes each week without playing any slots or pit games, while lower levels needed to give action before earning their coupon, which is now $300 in action 'day of' to get the door prize. GL

Agreed here, poker players should be able to achieve status at some level from playing poker only. What's your home casino if you don't mind sharing? I know at Canterbury and Talking stick one could get status from playing significant poker hours. That was in 2020 and 2021 respectively when I was traveling and everything here was shut down. I'm guessing it's still the same at both those places but maybe someone else who's played there more recently can confirm.

MD

The new long sleeve shirts worn by poker employees are very nice looking!

The blue t shirts worn by employees occasionally. Please - Rivers - put those shirts inside trash bags and put them directly in a garbage truck.

Please allow employees to wear something they look good in. Julia Roberts wouldn’t look good in the blue Rivers Tshirt.

There is one thing that Rivers does right.

That card swiping check in machine is solid. I urge you to use it. It also limits the time you have to interact with the front desk floor clerks.

Wow was I sure wrong about this.

Last couple nights elgin with only (2) 1-3 games going and (0) 2-5 games.

Gvc dying a slow death.

I've been back I think twice since I first played at Rivers (due to insane lists and just not having the time to wait), and it really is a depressing room now. Not just how few tables it has, but everything from the average staff member to the people that still go there, and the food/drink options too.

Maybe once the WSOP room opens things will change a little, I'm sure it will be good around the WSOPCs they have there.

I'm here now, 11:30a. Usually there are three 2/5s going but it seems like today maybe a bunch of dealers called off; list is almost 30 deep on 2/5 with only one table open still.

Man if you'd have told me six months ago that there'd be days GVC ran no 2/5 games I'd have thought you were nuts. Unreal.

Played five hours of 1/3 on Saturday. Arrived about 330pm. The sign up process went smoothly and had a seat within 15 minutes. No wait at the cage to buy chips.

Only once did the dealer need to buy chips from a player. Chip runners seemed to be available with minimal delay. Every table in the room was going by 430pm.

I was wondering how big the game would play with the deeper buyin and straddle rules, but at least on this day at this table it felt less crazy than a typical 1/3 at GVC. Not a lot of straddles and never for more than $10. Solid action but nothing out of the ordinary. I’m sure sometimes that’s not the case especially later at night. All in all it seemed like a really good spot for your average 1/3 player.

I'd just do the math this way to get an idea.
30 hands an hour (okay, maybe less)
Tipped $1 on $25 of those hands
$25 and hour plus their hourly wage?

Shouldnt that be in the ballpark?

Some dealers have done it for 20+ years, so it cant be that bad, right?

I could be wildly off, but I gotta figure that's pretty close to their max hourly
Maybe drop it a few bucks for various reasons

Being a high school math teacher, this does not suprise me.
Dealing is far more intense than a typical player thinks.
If you only view dealing thru your own player part, you're missing literally 90% of the duties of a dealer in any given hand.

It's rapid, non-stop, social, and involves a lot of insta-math and people dont like long pauses at the tables.
Dealers know players want the game moving
And if you mess up some people get very pissed since there is money involved.
Typical people cant function under any one of these conditions: quick-thinking, no stop in action, under pressure, people's money, and well . . . numbers
Oh, and we're peppering them with questions the entire time while their mind is trying to keep up with every move made around the hand.
Put them all together and about 90% of the population would flat out melt in the box their first hour.

Not to get too political, but we're totally at that "good times create weak people" part of the cycle.
Dealing is demanding job mentally and physically (I cant imagine the carpal tunnel and sore shoulder blades from reaching into the corners . . . hey dickheads in the 2,3 7, and 8 seats, push forward your chips and cards, dont make the dealer lean over and stretch out 8 hours a day, that's gotta be awful on your back) and at this point in the cycle people tend to be very very soft. Thinking the world revolves around them and refusing to push themselves. Another great quote is "democracies end when the people realize they can vote themselves the treasury" or something like that, and it appears we may be on the verge of that.

Bottom line, appreciate your dealers, even the new so-so ones. It's not as easy as it looks. I've played at GVC for 10 years and I still have no f-n idea how they figure out what's going on when someone gets up and it's small small big or small big big, or whatever, I just do what the dealer says. I'm sure it's not that complicated but I still haven't picked it up just from casual observation

Complaints about long lists at Rivers, when there is literally NO WAIT at GVC all of July and it's 20 minutes away blows my mind.
I've gone to Rivers a few times, and yes I had to wait, but I chose that.
If I just HAD to get a seat I knew I could have gone west on the Kennedy instead of east.
I live literally 20 minutes away from each so it's a decision made by bravo when I get to Roselle Rd
you cant complain about a 90 minute wait when you could have driven 20 more minutes for no wait at all
GVC is only a step down visually, the game is the same and despite what people say, 1-3 at Rivers does NOT have "Crazy action!"

Looking at you Horseshoe!!!!

At Caesar's in late June I Was literally like 37th on the 1-3 list and the waits had been so long, when they opened a new table I got on it, and it wasnt full until the entire list was gone. Felt like a one-outer to get a seat in that spot.

It was early afternoon so people just signed up as they first walked thru the casino and then decided to do something else I guess.

It only took another cheating scandal on Friday night for RCG to finally stop letting players shuffle.

What happened this time?

I long ago decided to stop playing there (at my table after a dealer change new dealer said the deck felt light, counted it down and it was 2 cards short, those two cards were found under the table but not immediately), blows my mind that people who have the option to play elsewhere still don't. Guess it plays pretty small and some people want that.

Heading to Rivers today and haven't been there in a couple of weeks. Right now there are 16 tables going with 7 of them being 1-3 and a list of 27. We shall see wait time once I arrive.

MD

Took a little over an hour today to get a seat, and they had to close a 1-3 table during that time.

MD

I'd also like to know what happened this time.
My "last time playing there" story is from about a year before Covid: 2/5 game, double-board bomb pot.
First board: 6♦️-x-x
Second board: 6♦️-x-x

Yeah, two 6♦️ in the deck. I'd been sitting for almost two hours at this point so the table had been using that bogus deck for at least that long. Haven't been back since.

There is a 'Tipping Containment' thread that carries the long-running conversation about wages and tips. You have two of the key components covered .. projected tips and hourly. But the larges variable is the actual hours in the box each week.

I played a lengthy session yesterday in a casino and I'd say that more than half of the downs were around $10-12 .. which projects to a decent hourly rate.

I don't want to drag it out here, but if it was really 'that good' I don't think there would be 'this much' of a labor shortage. GL

This is also posted in the GVC thread

Okay, so I just played 3 10 hours sessions at Rivers over the past five days, felt weird, like I was cheating on GVC, but I wanted to find out for myself what was going on there. I think 30 hours of play is enough where I can make a good comparison to GVC.

Parking at Rivers is great, your car is maybe 50 yards from the tables tops. You walk in and moments later you're in the room.

The food there is amazing, the $16 half chicken rotisserie with 2 sides?
Are you kidding me? Amazing. And that was at their lowest level restaurant.
The shrimp and velvet eggs at the late night fast food Asian place for $15? outstanding.
Only Buckingham's has a few things better than the lowest level food options at Rivers.

The lists move really fast, not sure why so many people sign up and don't show, but you can be 20th on the 1-3 list and you wont be waiting an hour, now I know recently there has been no wait at all at GVC, but on "normal" pre-the collapse of GVC, if you were 20th on the list, you werent getting seated anytime in the next 2 hours especially on a Fri or Sat.

They dont do fills or sell chips from the rack, which means more time to play.
I never realized what a hassle that was. I just accepted it as the norm
Still not sure WTF is going on with when the chip runner wants you to give him $100 so he can bring you $100 in whites to then sell to the dealer.
But overall, why do it any other way?, no table fills makes everything easier for everyone.

No meal button, so no empty seats for an hour at a time. I do NOT like how they make you cash out and buy back in the same amount. Why make me get in that line twice when you could just take my ID and place it on my racks and then put it on the table in the cage for me to pick up when I get back? Why is getting in the line a big deal, well that leads me to this major problem Rivers has . . .

The cages are unbelievably slow. I mean absurd amounts of counting and recounting chips.
I added $200 and the person brought two stacks of $100, they count out the first stack, not by splitting it into $25, then $25, then putting those two into one pile of $50 and then noticing that it matches the other half of that original $100. Nope she counts it all out to four piles of $25 and then puts it all back together, now she has two perfectly equal height stacks, one of which she counted out . . . think that's where she stopped? Nope, she then does the exact same thing with the other stack of reds.

You're thinking, "this is not a big deal" but when the line is frequently 10-15 people deep, with one person working in the cage, it matters. They count and recount the chips so thoroughly its all you can do to keep your mouth shut and not be like, "seriously? How many chip stacks from that rack are you going to pull out to count before giving them to me? In vegas, if you buy $500, they yank a rack from behind them, slide one chip across it and then shove it at you almost shoo-ing you away. At Rivers you'd think every chip had to be individually touched for it be allowed to leave the cage. Honestly, have they ever pulled a stack of red out of a rack and had it NOT be $100 exactly? One guy at my table got felted and the line for chips was massive, so he went downstairs to a blackjack table, bought his chips there and just brought it up stairs. He was back so fast were all confused.

Often there are three people behind the cage and only one of them is helping players. I have no idea what the other two are doing, but how hard is it to rip out chips and get that line down to 3 or less?

Table changes. You're on your own. You will get passed over numerous times and when you finally decide to stop being polite and go up and say, "uh, so am I still on the seat change list?" instead of saying how you really feel, "hey dickhead, you've sent at least 10 people off the 1-3 list to tables since I asked for a table change half an hour ago, WTF?" So, when you go up there to gently remind them of your request they go, "oh, ya, you can move to table X right now" So, when you want a change, watch for someone to rack up, then go straight to the front desk and tell them you want to move there in the newly empty seat. One time I asked for a table change and they wrote it down on a post-it note. Really inspired confidence. GVC also was iffy on table changes depending on who was working that list, Edna never missed my changes, but others were very "inconsistent."

Each day I played it seemed like more and more GVC players were showing up at Rivers. From just a few faces I remember to at least 2 at every table, multiply that by 20 tables and that's 40 players not on the GVC lists.

What bothers me most about GVC is that they enforced a phone ban for apparently no reason at all. Everyone hated it, and it didnt have to be that way at all. Rivers opens up and BAM! "We're gonna see about getting that rule changed" and two months later it's gone. Either they were lying to us for a decade about it being an IGB rule or . . . I dont know what else it could be. It shows such disrespect to the player pool. If I were a dealer there thinking of all the hassles and comments and crap they had to take enforcing it. I'd really like to know who is responsible for that situation. One time I asked one of the long term floors and she said they had no idea the rule wasnt actually a rule. I would like to believe that's true. It just shows that the players and dealers were not a priority.


After my 3 sessions there, I'm not sure what brings me back to GVC except some degree of loyalty? I do have an obscene amount of credit on my Caesar's card after my trip to Vegas, got to look into if that money has some sort of expiration. But the no table fills, amazing food, many many more tables to choose from . . . If someone like me who has loved that room and spent waaaay too much time there over the years is willing to move on, GVC's time as the biggest room in the Chicagoland area if not the entire midwest will have been extremely short. Times change, amirite? Wutygunado?