Good post.
One point i would add is that average to below players love the idea of hand hands because they think they are going to hit them frequently and just don't understand the odds.Once the realization of how difficult it is to hit one sets in,it loses its luster.

PX, I like a lot of your ideas here, particularly as to the creature comforts at the tables. But some of those take up room and I have a hard time seeing the HR spring for them, table food service in particular is problematic given that if you are in seats 4-8 at most of their tables you already have to suffer through the guy behind you banging into you every five minutes, not to mention the dealers coming to the table behind you shoving you.

PBKC has an interesting way to do HH promotions. They assign a value to certain hands and pay that as they are hit. Its posted on a board and as they are hit they are taken off the board. For example, quad 2's through quad 7's might be $100; quad 8's through quad 10'smight be $250; straight flush to the 6 is $1k; to the Q it might be up to $4k. Royals (one in each suit) would be I believe $8k.

And then on the really low volume times it might be doubled. Reset it at a certain staggered point, like every week or so. I was at PBKC last year one day where an old reg at a 1/2 limit game won like $30k for a royal.

The beauty of that promotion is that it doesn't require monitoring time or having brushes available to run around every 30 minutes to track down the winner info. If someone hits an eligible hand they just look up to the board to see if its still on the list.

My thoughts on the bad beat:

Cap main at 60k,change breakdown to 40% loser/20% winner/40% table share.

Mini Bad Beat: Up to 20k,change breakdown to 40/20/40,reduce qualification to aces full of jacks beaten. I believe this would increase the likelyhood of being hit by 100% for the mini.Feel free to comment on my math.

I hated the freeroll tournaments, and would not like to see them come back. A bunch of people who dont normally play at the THR showed up, played the tourney, and then left. Few stayed and played the cash games. So once again a promo paid for completely by cash game players primarily benefitted tourney players.

Plus, the forming of the line process was horrible. People were lining up hours prior to the start time. So there were times where I was already there, playing in a cash game, and then had to choose between leaving the cash game and standing in a line for hours or keep playing. That was just stupid.

So IMO, dump the freerolls and for that matter all tourney related comps. While some people play both, many people just play cash games. So why should their "reward" be a chance to play in a tourney they have little chance of caahing in anyway since they dont play tourneys. If you want to have tourney related rewards, than add a fee to all the daily tourneys and let the tourney players win tourney related comps. But all the freerolls did was give all the Derby tourney players who didnt care about standing in line for hours a free tourney paid for by the THR cash players. Screw that.

"PBKC has an interesting way to do HH promotions." and, they do a lot of other stuff correctly.

hopefully tom bates helps with this...

at the borgata 100% of the bad beat jackpot drop goes to the bad beat jackpot payout (even though it's legal for casinos to use it for other promotional funding... and all other rooms use the jackpot drop for other purposes).

tourney guarantees that aren't met and other promotional events (like extra comps for extra hours played) are paid by the room/casino.

integrity is probably the biggest reason borgata gets more games then the rest of ac combined (imo).

I understand your objections, and also don't recommend the previous method of a freeroll tournament (15K guarantee, first 200 in line get a seat). The freerolls in my recommendations are much different: $750 prize pool, 50 get a seat by random draw, only need to get in line by 10 minutes before start for a chance at a seat. It's not going to be drawing tons of players who don't want to play anything else (only ~$200 first place prize) and it won't require lining up for hours if you want to play. And it's a quick tourney - most of those players will either sit at cash game right away (don't get a seat) or before long.

It's just a way to get more players in the door at low traffic times. Between the $20 re-entries going back to the promo fund and the extra cash game traffic, they may even pay for themselves.

The high hand every 15 mins derby runs once a month or so gets tons of players in the room. Granted most play straight $2 or $1/1 but it does get the players in.

I think if we could combine all the things we like about each room in the bay we would have a great poker room.

Don't see HR adding tables to eat anytime soon. Glad Derby only lets 2/5 and above do it.

Situation last night.

Playing in a 2/5 game last night and i was seated between both players involved in the hand so i had a clear view. Basically the players get it allin on the flop and the dealer awards the pot to the wrong player thinking they hit a flush when they only had one pair. It was a rainbow flop though it was two black cards on the flop and a third black hit on the river. The other player in the hand had a straight on the river. They both tabled their hands in clear view and the dealer mucked the straight. The player who lost instantly left as they had to go to the bathroom and had been saying that before the hand happen.

It happen so quickly and the dealer realized that a flush didnt hit, but loser was gone by then all within 10 secs. He pushes the pot to the one player and I feel some way about it. I head to the supervisor stand and briefly talk with a super about it when the player who lost comes up. They see me and say I won that pot didnt I? I say yeah you won that pot.

Two supers head back to the table and one ended up ruling that since the loser had left, there was nothing they could do about it. The loser of the hand is a regular here, but was salty about the whole thing. Correct ruling?

Up until recently you could go up the ramp to the parking garage and just keep going down the other ramp and park in the small lot behind the poker room, just west of the Smoke Shop. Literally 100 feet from the back entrance to the poker room (through the smoking area). A lot of the parking spaces were marked as employee handicapped but some of them weren't. I tried last weekend but it looks like they caught on to that and most, if not all, are marked now.

Front outside lot never occurred to me. I'll have to give that a shot. Doing laps of the parking garages is infuriating.

NO that's not the correct ruling! wtf?!.... though why would you leave if you thought you won... you gotta stack your chips. you can't just leave a pile of chips in the general vicinity in front of you lol

Both hands were tabled...and the player left the table after dealer mucked his hand. IN equity, after the mistake is realized, the winner should have been identified, and the pot should have been removed for him, since he was leaving anyways. He's a local, right, not a mystery man.
Gawd, what are people thinking sometimes?

doesn't a tabled hand play? one of the many reasons tend not to play over there.

you ask 3 floors the same question and get 5 different answers.

Thanks for clarifying that. Sounds OK to me, though I still prefer not to give money away to tourney players. Misread the way the seats would be decided and thought it would be the same goat screw we had here.

since the mistake was realized before the next hand was dealt, they should have pushed the chips to the seat where the guy left, and then treat them like they do chips of guys who are away too long. Try and find him, but if they cant, turn them over to security.

It would be different if they had dealt the next hand and then realized the mistake. There has to be a finality to a hand. But in this case they caught it in time.

I think the supervisor probably vaugely remembered something about some rule about abandoning a hand during play, and misapplied it here. The guy tabled his hand, and he was present at the conclusion of the hand. Now, of course the player is ultimately responsible for protecting his hand, and made a mistake by not verifing the flush himself. But in this case, there was a way to rectify that mistake, and the supervisor chose to ignore it.

This room could so support a tournament like this Wednesday tourney every day. Maybe mix it up and make it PLO on Sundays and black chip bounty on Fridays.

Sun 1pm - $235 PLO
Mon-Thu 11 am - $235 nl holdem
Fri 12 pm - $350 black chip bounty

Your new tourney schedule, Hard Rock.

Regarding the bad beat, there is information available on the website. On the poker page click on progressives. I am not allowed to post a link here, but the website has all the info.

Scott- so does that mean that when the BBJ is hit (under the new system) that it resets to the "seed" amount listed on that chart?

Thank You Scott.

Some Questions if you could please answer:

Is there no longer a mini bad beat? Does the qualifying hand change for the bad beat? Is the bad beat resetting to 50k or 5k after the next hit?I only ask this since the back up is over 70k now.What is the promotion plan for December?

Thanks

THe fine print in that handout states that the qualification doesn't change--still quad 10s have to get beat. Good question about the current back up jackpot; seems to me like they should go ahead and put that into the next jackpot; don't think there is going to be a mini bad beat, or it probably would have been listed on that handout.

Where will the extra bad beat money go? A bunch of backups then into the general pool?

It goes into the "Poker Promotional Marketing Fund"

A better question is what is that, since it is listed differently than the high hand promos fund, which off the top of my head I don't remember.

Thanks for the info Scott. I had trouble finding it immediately as it is actually the "progressive rules" link under the monthly tournaments link (which kind of makes no sense since they are not totally related). Anyway, it's not clear from that link if there is a still a mini-bad beat. It looks like it is eliminated.

Also, where are you posting the distribution/use of the "Poker Marketing Promotion fund" thingy? I understand you may bring back the high hands again next month. Will you be posting this information on the web site in advance? I was playing yesterday and asked three dealers and none of them had a clue what was going on with the promotions.

Once again I think an email list would be great. I heard you are from the Borgata - which as you know emails it's players updates. I get them all the time.

Anyway thanks for you time.

Ugh, high hands are the worst.

What's the alternative?