On the Live at the Bike thread where Harry pulls a shady move (run it once or twice) people in the thread comment how the Bike is shady and they accuse Commerce of being shady. I've played at over 20 rooms in the country and can't think of one that's not shady. Can anyone point one out?

Mohegan Sun doesn't really sound so shady amirite?

Name 20 rooms you’ve played in OP.

This. Very few rooms I’ve played at have been shade afaik (and I use to play at the rock!)

I guess it depends on your definition of "shady." If you define it as a place where the staff made a decision once that was wrong according to their own rules or stole money, then I'd agree. If you define "shady" where the management of the room regularly violates their own rules, allows money to be stolen and play favorites among the players, it is very few.

Most rooms I have played in (East Coast, Midwest and LV) aren't shady by the second definition. There are some out there, though.

I think the percentage of shady poker players is significantly higher than the percentage of shady dealers/floors/management.

Also depends on how you define 'shady'. If you think every room that favors regs in some way is shady, then the number of 'shady' poker rooms might be pretty high, but that would also mean the majority of other businesses is shady.

I think the 'old' Bellagio poker room is a good example, before players cards and electronic waitlists changed a lot of things. Is it shady if $20 gets you to pass the wait list? Is it shady if good tippers aren't required to play 6 hours/day to get the poker room rate?

The smaller the room, the more this is likely with policies for keeping the regs happy. If this is what you mean by "shady". This helps keep the room open.

I'm guessing "shady" for the OP (and probably a lot of people participating in an online live chat while watching a poker game) means, "A decision was made once that I didn't agree with."

Same with Talking Stick in Phoenix.

Talking Stick's a nice place to play w/ a very low tolerance for the So-Cal BS that happens in those rooms.

FWIW, incompetency doesn't equal shadiness. If floors constantly end up with non-standard rulings, it's very possible they just don't know better.

With the type of weird crap these rooms have to deal with on a regular basis you probably don't have to look too hard to find a bad decision made by a room that wasn't entirely fair or in line with their policies. In rough numbers I'd say probably 25-40% of rooms I've played have generally good staff, are well run, and try to get most rulings right. The rest are poorly managed but are generally on the up and up, they just have poorly trained staff that don't know how to run a room. I can't say I've ever seen a case where I felt a room was actually trying to cheat someone or violate their own policies in favor of a certain player. I'm sure there' s a few out there, but they seem pretty rare.