Would TR need approval from the "powers to be" to increase the number of poker tables? Seems to me that they are on the right track and can only get better.

Yes it requires approvel. It's Rhode Island though so nothing a few palms being greased can't get done if they really wanted.

First they need to staff the cage to handle the busy times. Yesterday at about 6 PM, the wait at the cage was 15 minutes.

Can you call in to reserve a seat?

Yes

People are posting on Facebook that they're skipping the line by waiting until they make a final call for someone who has left, and claiming to be that person. What a complete farce. I wish it were better, because it's the closest place to where I live, but not by so much that I would prefer to go there.

Young guy in a hoodie and shades on Saturday said he was going to do just that.

It was rough. I got there at 3:30, put my name on the 1/2 NL and 5/10 stud list. Got called for the stud game about 40 minutes later. Two hours at that table and I hear my name called for 1/2. I kept playing stud.

That's nothing new. Happened at Foxwoods all the time

today Its not the dealers, The players are so slow. Changed table 3 times. About to go on monkey tilt in the pits

Are you the Magic Man that has been playing the 2-5 plo on occasion at Foxwoods? If so we know each other.

Anyways, I think an assessment of the room is missing in your post. I'm not sure how qualified the floor is in making correct poker rulings. I don't know the poker background of any of the floor. Someone told me a story of calling clock and the floor didn't know what that meant.

More than once people have told me a floor make a ruling again traditional rules of poker and was told that's how we do things here. That a problem in the sense of not getting the same ruling on the same problem one day to next (which is a problem at Foxwood's, who also have some floor that I'm scared of asking for a rule, but a least you can go to a higher authority for clarification), and with 2-5 or 5-10 no limit running, there can be some very large hands where a ruling is needed and a floor that may not know the exact rules of poker and can make thousand dollar decisions based on whims or if someone is a regular or any reason at all, with "that's how we do it here" as a final answer.

I personally I like the room too. The dealers will get better as time goes by, and once they are proficient in dealing 2 cards, they can add "the game of the future" to the game selection

I personally I like the room too. The dealers will get better as time goes by, and once they are proficient in dealing 2 cards, they can add "the game of the future" to the game selection[/QUOTE]
I played there Monday afternoon with same rotation of 4 (very slow)dealers at 1/2 NL. Requested a table change, went to the new table with my rack of chips and sat down. The dealer, "Are you leaving us sir". Me, "Not yet, I just got here."
Dealers are slow slower and slowest.

Since they have a rotation instead of a snake like Foxwoods, you can search the tables that have a good 4 dealer rotation and elect to table change.

They really need dealers to keep their own and that will weed out bad dealers and change the attitude of others. I was there a couple of Fridays ago and my dealer was practically doing play by play of the double overtime Celtics Warriors game instead of watching what was going on at the table.

Oh, that reminds me of something I don't like in the poker area. The monitors are not tv's but rather streaming from online. That means all the monitors must be on the same game. The streaming feeds are jumpy so they are hard to watch and they are not synced up. Some are faster than others. When we had on the Celtics Warriors game, the bar next to the poker room was much faster than what we were watching, so that we heard groans or cheers from the bar before we saw what was happening, but we knew by then what had happened.

anyone feel that games are tougher as a result of wait times? no way pit game fools or weak players in general are waiting 2 hours for a seat with a blackjack seat or roulette table steps away

This was one of the factors I noted earlier ITT when I said that 16 tables was a suboptimal middle ground number. It's enough to attract people to the room, but not enough to meet demand at peak times. And of course it's those peak times when you get more folks who are either inherently fishy or liquored up.

The only question is will they (or RI) wise up to get more tables before they lose the opportunity to capitalize on initial momentum.

I've never been to TR (yet), but people had similar concerns when Charles Town first opened. It was the only venue for legal live poker within a 90 minute drive from DC, demand was absolutely overwhelming, it wasn't even open 24/7 at first, lines were much longer than 2 hours, and they had a $6/hh time charge at 1/2 (yes, really).

But the donkery came anyway, it stayed, and it reloaded for the max when it lost. It was totally normal to see a 1/2 NL table with 8k on it. 10k wasn't unheard of and I even saw one with 12k on it one time. So the games were just fine.

I think the games are very soft. In fact I think the opposite is true. The fish that don't want to drive to Foxwoods to lose their money will wait it out. It's the experienced regs that have no patience for the long waits.

I'd rather wait an hour (although if you there at the wrong time it can be longer) than drive an hour to FW. It's the drive home that bugs me. Rather be 20 minutes away than an hour

Last night I got there around 5pm and my name on the 2/5 wasn't even on the board it was on the "overflow" pad. It literally only took about a half hour for it to be called.

Most on the lists are on multiple games. So they don't want the seat when called. Also they do in fact leave. So it goes pretty quickly.

Another note about fish and the game due to being packed. As of now. I see more people sitting in a game they aren't comfortable with just so they are playing. The 5/10 game was full of players i have never seen before or know to be 1/2 players

When was the last time you've seen 8k in front of someone at Mohegan or Foxwoods even at a 2/5 game? The quality of play in New England isn't comparable to what I've heard of the play at CharlesTown or ML when they first opened. I'm pretty sure you won't have to worry about 8k stacks at 1/2 at Twin River anytime soon.

I think he meant 8k-12k in all stacks combined.

This is what I said, yes.

And to answer this, I have never played at Mohegan and rarely play at Foxwoods but I've seen 8k stacks and bigger at 2/5 in mid-Atlantic rooms not in the DC area (AC, Philly, Delaware).

The few times I was there I saw a 4-5k stack at 1/2 on every trip there so I thought he could have meant one stack. 8-10k effective stack at 2/5 in that room was fairly common and iirc it was a 500max buyin. I recall seeing a 2/5 with one 11k stack, a 9k, and a 6k at same table.

wait lists were not bad at all today and games are confirmed still soft

Funny you should ask, just saw this on twitter like 4 hours ago: FW 2/5 10k

wtf!?

on a happy new years note...I 4 way chopped the 230 20k yesterday

Played here on Saturday 1/2/16 - 4.5 hour wait for a 1/2 table. Complete mess everywhere. Got there around 6:00 fully expecting to wait a bit and was willing to do so. Come to find out, they're not taking names for 1/2. The list is closed. This defeats the purpose of a list. Instead, there ends up being a pool of people waiting around the desk for them to begin taking names again, all the while they keep yelling at everyone to move away and give them space. So now I have to wait and can't even go have dinner. Finally after 45 minutes they begin taking names again - after a change in staff at the desk and the woman who came in just started taking names without telling anyone. There were 100+ people in front of me on the list, far more than I've ever seen anywhere. The list moved at a snail's pace both because it was a popular time, but for other reasons I'll outline below.

Their software is so terrible it can't hold more than 30 names, so the majority of the list was on a legal pad, and the people at the desk couldn't figure out how to transfer the names from the pad to the list without having overlaps or confusion on their end. They badly need Bravo, or at least some other form of software that isn't a stripped-down Excel spreadsheet projected onto a screen.

During the wait, I walked over to the rail and was observing the tables and how they ran when a seat opened up. Some of the dealers being new and not having experience would softly call out an open seat once and then forget about it. A table right in front of me had two open seats for almost 15 minutes before they were finally filled because a floor happened to see them. Other times, the dealer called out loudly an open seat and the floor just didn't react. Even further, there were times it would be called out, the floor would radio to the desk, and the desk wouldn't call anyone. They're so busy trying to hunt down the people that left, finding another 10-20 stud player, or figuring out how to work their ridiculous software, that they let things go. At one point, they called a 1-2 player the normal three times, gave a last call, then stopped. Apparently, in the time between that they forgot they'd called the person and didn't take the initials off the list, then 10 minutes later called the same person again and went through the same three-call protocol, wasting even more time for everyone involved. When I finally say, one of the dealers commented "Well, you can come in and put your name on the list, go home take a shower, have a nap, then come back." Well pal, that's not going to work for the large base of customers you have coming from 30+ minutes away up here in Boston. Just a bit of an example of how out of touch some of the people here are.

There are some people there, dealers and floor, who have a clue what they're doing and/or are trying to do run the room effectively. Unfortunately, there's an equal amount of people who don't give a crap and have no idea what the hell they're doing. I even overheard a cashier who was giving me chips say how the poker room is the worst thing that ever happened to the casino. Probably not what you want your poker customers hearing.

Also, during the wait I overheard a floor (one of the really good ones who ran things really well) chatting with the guy right next to me about the whole situation. The player asked if you could call the desk ahead of time and get on the list. The floor said they had all been explicitly instructed by management to not answer the phones there if anyone calls at any time. Again, really bad form and bad customer service.

It's nice that they try to offer multiple different kinds of games here, but in a 16-table room with 100+ person lists for 1/2 and 2/5 all day on weekends, spreading 10/20 stud, 5/10 and 3/6 limit just isn't a good idea. They have eight 1/2 tables, four 2/5, and the other four dispersed among 5/10, 3/6, and stud. Even switching up two of those tables to 1/2 or 2/5 would help alleviate things. 10/20 had virtually no interest, 5/10 had some but many of the players just ended up on that list because 2/5 was too long. The desk personnel were begging people asking for 2/5 to go on 5/10 instead.

There's a lot of potential here to draw people who don't want to make the drive all the way to FW or MS, but they need to make the room bigger, something it appears isn't going to happen soon. That said, some quick fixes that require little or no money and no regulatory changes such as amending the games they spread to reflect demand, joining Bravo or finding more advanced software, answering the phones, and perhaps running a Twitter account with live updates would make things much better.

There was still a 25-person wait list for 1/2 at 2:45 am when I left on Saturday night. I've never seen that anywhere I've played, east coast, west coast, or Las Vegas. I loaded Bravo on my phone just to take a look at what wait times were like elsewhere - open seating at MS, FW, sub-10 waitlists at Bellagio, Aria, Wynn, Venetian, Caesars, etc. where it was only 11:45 at night! Ridiculous.