It has been confirmed that Caesars Palace has officially raised its rake to 10%/$5 max, plus $1 jackpot on all its games. This now means that all Harrahs owned properties are raking at the $5 max level.

Up until now, Caesars, Harrahs Flagship property and premier poker room, had kept its rake at the Vegas industry standard of 10%/$4 max plus $1 jackpot.

I learned on good authority that the decision to keep the rake at a $4 max was directly correlative to Caesars offering only well drinks in their poker room. The room management apparently decided that in lieu of raising their rake, they would rather limit poker players to non-premium cocktails.

However, now that the rake has risen to the Harrahs standard of 10%/$5 max, the premiums are NOT being brought back to the supposed "Premier" poker room.

This means that one can get better quality cocktails at the lesser properties (Imperial Palace, Harrahs, Ballys) and pay the SAME RAKE then one can get at Caesars Palace, the supposed flagship Harrahs property.

Furthermore, Harrahs poker room, located accross the street from Caesars Palace, offers Red Bull in the can in addition to premium cocktails, complimentary, and has 3 cash games in the morning when Caesars is ususally either dark or running a single cash game (8-11AM).

Of the premier poker rooms in Las Vegas (Venetian, Wynn, MGM Grand, Mirage, Bellagio, and Caesars Palace), Caesars is the only room that does not offer premium cocktails, rakes at 10%/$5 max, and takes a jackpot drop.

Will probably help get rid of some of the nittier grinders.

I think it's time to remove Caesars from your "premier" list. It's a "big" poker room, not a premier poker room.

I agree I have never felt CP was a premier poker room in the first place. With raising the rake to 5 plus a drop they are proving they aren't.

I'm typically not a fan of fyp posts, but a more apt description is:


Will probably help get rid of the majority of their player base.

There's absolutely no reason to play at Caesar's now. Highest rake in town, terrible cocktail service, bad dealers, bad floors, bad brushes, bad parking, the scandal from earlier in the year, f-ed up air conditioning, and plenty of soft low limit games all over town.

The most disgusting cocktail waitresses in town by far. They should pay us to look at them. Seriously how fat ,old and ugly can they possibly get..what is management thinking?

unless you play high stakes the rake determines alot of your chances of being a winner.
if the pots are averaging less than 200 all you are doing is transferring your wealth over to that casino.

If OP is accurate, its more sigmniofcant than just being $5.

Its 10% to $5.


at Venetian while the $1-$2 is 10% to $4, the rake in the other games i geenrally less than 10%


for example if you have a $40 pot on a $2/$5 NL at the Venetian you are looking at a $2 rake as opposed to Caesars $4 rake. And that same pot in a $4-$8 limit game is a $3 rake at the V also les sthan 10%.

Harrah's is laying off people left and right, they cannot pay their structured dept payments and there is buzz on wall street of expected unbundling (even Steve Wynn recently alluded to the fact Harrah's may have to sell off in an interview last week) - Caesars would probably be on the block if Harrah's could afford to keep the rest of their empire just by selling off this aging asset. As a human being I'd rather see them forgo premium cocktails so a guy whose job it is to clean the poker room floor can give a good christmas to his family, tough decisions need to be made during a recesson but I would hope that chosing to keep well drinks only is not a tough decision.

Don't get me wrong, there is a time to bitch and moan about poker room management sticking it to the player but that time is not now. Caesar's just let go their entire concierge staff and even on the casino floor cocktail waitresses are being laid off left and right, expect Harrah's and many other strip companies to start trimming the fat all over. Don't be shocked if premium spirits are removed from Bellagio in 5 months if the economic downturn continues! Is bad timing to roll out the $5 max but as we have talked about in previous threads the entire strip is expected to be mostly $5 max within the next 3 years - although I dont like it its time for vegas to catch up to the per-table profit margins that the rest of the nation has, Vegas has always been at the top of the most cost effective places to play poker but I do project those days are dwindling. For what its worth i suspect that off-strip poker rooms will mostly remain at a $4 drop + jackpot.

PS: I don't play at Caesars because the rake is too high, irony at it's finest.

huh? I thought Venetian was also 10%.

management is thinking that if they get rid of the old timers they will be sued? Caesars was started long before companies like Borgata came along, the Borg was smart because the employment contract for cocktail waitresses states that they are entertainers and can be fired at will in the event that they get to old, gain too much weight, etc. back when they launched Caesars nobody thought of that :-(

IIRC they have a reduced rake for limit games, I believe it's 5% to $4.

I know you're Ray Zee and everything, but come on, it's not super hard to beat even 1/2 with $6 total rake including jackpot for 5 BBs/hr or even substantially more.

"Trimming the fat" is something I expect to see too, but I expect it to be more along the lines of stuff like self check-in kiosks in the hotel lobby. Raising the rake in the poker room is not a good way to do it. On another forum a rep. from Harrah's (the casino, not corporate) admitted that raising the rake reduced their player base to the point that they were making the same profit as they were before with a larger player base and lower rake structure. FWIW, Harrah's didn't get a player base back until they started hitting people over the head with promos that are probably not financially viable over the long term.

I know you expect this to happen, but I don't see all the independents going along with it. The Venetian has become the biggest room in town by giving the players what they want, and I don't see them backing away from that philosophy on the rake. Rooms that currently offer reduced rake structures have carved out (sometimes quite large) niches for themselves. And while only a couple of those rooms are on the strip, other rooms might take notice that the rooms where games are growing (Orleans, Venetian, Binion's) all have some sort of reduced rake.

There's more to it than just beating the game.

There will be far more people who can beat a 1/2 game with a $3 drop than with a $5 drop, and for people who can't beat either rake structure poker can go from being cheap entertainment to prohibitively expensive. Eventually, the higher raked game will get tougher to beat, and the players who move up will be stronger under the higher rake structure.

If Harrah's corporate knew this he would join the people sitting home without a job, thats a really dumb thing for him to do. We have a ton of poker room mid and upper level management people that read the 2+2 forums daily, any issue like this they are almost always forbidden from discussing in their employment contracts, statements like that have to come from the corporate PR department. Not smart dude on the other forum, whoever you are!

When upper level management starts seeing every other room in town has higher rake they will increase it too, although Venetian has a lot of traffic now remember that a lot of it is from tournaments which has a lower yield and NL games which also have a lower yield than limit games (unless its a time game of course). I am not privvy to their most recent figures but its safe to assume they are much more profitable now. Venetian operated as a break-even room for 1 or 2 years (I forgot which, its been a while since I was privy to this info), eventually they will have to step up their efforts to turn a larger profit unless Sheldon continues the "kill the competition at any cost" mentality.

If rake was genuinely that big of an issue to everyone, then everyone would be playing at El Cortez, which has the lowest rake in Vegas (10%/$2.50 max with $.50 jackpot dropped at $10).

Having said that, the Orleans is arguably one of the busiest overall rooms in Vegas. I realize that it is a locals room, but it is close enough to the Strip to warrant a significant amount of tourists as well. Their rake is 10%/$3 max plus $1 jackpot, and they are VERY liberal with rake reductions. I have to wonder if the fact that they have a fixed lower rake is a superstrong factor in their overall success rate as a poker room.

Binions is loudly touting the fact that they are $3 max (plus $1 jackpot), and seem to be garnering players as well. Palms is doing the same thing, but never really advertised it, so I don't know if that is still the case.

For me personally, I play at Harrahs every day. The rakeback promotion coupled with the dependability of finding a game (often a good game), Red Bull, and other little things enable me to enjoy my recreational play time there, and sincerely beat the rake.

With regards to Caesars, I spoke with a full time poker dealer there who (anonymously) quipped: "It seems to me that they (management) want the room to close. They are going out of their way to piss off the few regulars we have left."

I KNOW that, but Ray Zee said "if the pots are averaging less than 200 all you are doing is transferring your wealth over to that casino" which is so beyond untrue as to be way out of line.

I'm flabbergasted he said that, I mean it's just crazy to say that. I like Ze and would hate to see him go the way of Caro and become a living dinosaur totally unconnected with the poker food chain of today. I hope he'll revisit this thread and clarify, because I'd really like to think I've misunderstood or mischaracterized him.

In a lot of ways, having fewer customers while retaining the same amount of profit is a good thing for a business.

Their 1/2 NL game is the only game that is a straight 10%. All other games have rake schedules or time charges.

i was in vegas in november and played a couple of venetian deep stack tourneys and 1 caesar's mega stack tourney. apparently the media people screwed up and forgot or neglected to advertise the mega stack series in any significant way. while the V deep stacks were drawing 280+ runners every day, the caesar's mega stack tourney i played drew 98 with a very similar buy in structure.

being in the tournament room for 13+ hours, it got ridiculous that we were all sitting there sweating in a poker room at 2am when we had already complained to the floor several times.

i loved the structure of the tourney and ended up chopping it up with 3 people, but the rules of the room were nuts. it is apparently against the rules for the staff to pause the tournament clock so that the players can discuss a chop agreement! WTF?!?! that makes no sense whatsoever and is totally alienating to the players.

the room is beautiful and well set up, but figure it out caesars.

It means less employees and benefits to be paid to make the same amount of profit, and probably more once those two things are eliminated.

Wow....not used to this. Some of the casinos down here there is a $5 rake + $1 jackpot, an extra blind on the button in lower limits, and no drinks free - not even sodas.