I'll tell you the things I want in a cardroom...

1. Location. NOT buried way in the back. Not near the sportsbook. Close to the pit and some of the larger banks of slot machines. Signs clearly pointing the way from all major entrances. A significantly long rail to allow many games to be easily viewed by foot traffic. A truly crappy cardroom with a great location can easily be a big success, while a truly nice one with a terrible location can easily be a total failure. Basically, I want a room that the casino execs are NOT trying to hide.

2. Professionalism and friendliness of staff. Dealers should be players first, and should be trained well when hired. Even a brand new dealer who's well trained can be quite good if they care about what they are doing. Floors should be experienced dealers and paid well enough to make it worthwhile for them to be on the floor. Rooms where the dealers make far more than the floor without fail have mostly crappy floors. Friendly staff is important too, the most experienced dealer in the world who's a jerk and makes everyone feel uncomfortable isn't worth diddly. A newbie dealer who's well trained, has a good attitude, pays attention and makes players feel welcome is fabulous. They'll get faster and better with experience, but few experienced dealers become nicer over time.

3. A reasonable cost to the players. Excessively high rake just plain kills the player's money so fast that a player base can't be kept. $5 rake with a $1 jackpot and $1 tip per pot takes $700 off the table for every 100 hands. That's just too damn much, period. The players will bust so fast every day that they'll get discouraged quickly and not come back. Every room should make a profit, but the amount of profit that can be made from poker is somewhat limited. However, the house provides a service and they do deserve to make money for it. There is a balance that can be achieved between making a reasonable profit and sustaining the long term health of the games. If you must nail me down to a number, 10% to $3 with a $1 jackpot (promotion) drop is pretty fair to both the players and the house. Commerce was charging $1per hand, $2 more on the flop ($3 total drop on the flop) for the house, plus the jackpot, and I didn't think that was at all unreasonable.

4. Promotions that spread out the $1 jackpot drop to many players. In fact, I hate bad beat jackpots. Freerolls suck royal butt too. I don't mind high hand bonuses and other such promotions if they spread out the money to many players on a regular basis. The best usage of the buck I've ever seen was excalibur with their "wheel o' shame." It's great to get something back when you get your bullets cracked, or get a bonus when you get a monster hand. They spread that jackpot drop around to many players, which is just fine with me. "megabeats" and other such nonsense are utter crap and I wouldn't even line my birdcage with the rules for those idiotic promotions.

5. A casino that does not segregate poker comps or poker players from the rest of the casino. This is harmful to poker players because the amount of play they contribute to the rest of the casino is ignored by upper management. Many poker players spend lots of money in other places in the casino. They should be treated just as well as all the other gamblers. If casino management would just look at the whole picture, poker would probably be treated better by the casino world as a whole.

6. Comfort in the room. Tables and chairs should not be cheesy crap. Stud tables aren't good for hold'em. Walking space and chairs/sofas for waiting players or their significant others should be available. I don't even mind having some slots in the poker room if they are QUIET. There should be space between the tables so people don't feel crowded.

7. Good and reasonably priced food available without having to leave the room. Even if you can't eat at the table, if you have to go far from the poker room to eat, the games break up around lunch time and dinner time. Drink service should follow, tho I think it's a pretty small point because most rooms have at least acceptable drink service. Don't expect johnny walker friggin' blue at the poker table, be reasonable and you'll see the drink service in a more reasonable light.

al

If the room you play in is keeping the so-called "jackpot fund" without ever redistributing it to the players in the form of, um, jackpots, you should probably contact your local gaming authorities.

Sarcasm aside, you can't assess the EV of a jackpot without considering that your probability of winning some form of a jackpot (including a table/player share) is positive.

In Tunica they raid the jackpot for all sorts of money-added tournaments, so I figure the ring-game-only player is getting back 90 cents for each $1 of drop. It sucks that I'm subsidizing the "$1500 added" tournament if I don't play it, and it sucks that my 90c of equity is going into a really really high-variance jackpot. But it's not vanishing or going to the house; it's coming back as EV of hitting a jackpot.

If the house is keeping backup, supplemental, and multiple reserves for "reseeding" the jackpot, I really don't see how that buck going down the slot is doing anything for the players but going down the toilet. There's no way you can win the reserves, so you can't possibly be getting back 100% of your buck in EV. While the $ may in fact eventually make its way back to the players, in the meantime the casino is holding a large chunk of player cash in their accounts.

Extremely mismanaged jackpot funds can result in very little of the money making its way back to players in the form of jackpots, and most of the money remaining in the bank accounts of the casino. I've seen so called jackpots where only 13 cents on the dollar was going to seed the current jackpot, and all the rest was going to seed the multiple reserves.

Jackpots are really bad for the game. So much money goes into them, and what happens to it? Well, the casino makes lots of interest from it. When it finally hits, two lucky idiots usually take a large chunk of money and deposit it in their bank accounts, never to see a poker table again.

This is why I like promotions such as the wheel at excalibur, because they spread that money around to lots of people a little bit at a time. Just about all of it makes it way back to the table, or at least doesn't go away from the table forever.

al