So glad I saw this thread before this past weekend ... We had almost the opposite occur!! A Floor was going to convert the Must Move to a higher stake without asking any of the Main Table Players, who were on the list for that game, what they wanted to do!!

We got the train slowed down and ended up converting both tables to the higher stake, which basically didn't change much except the max buy-in ... and of course a few Players got run out the door pretty quickly when the big boys added on. GL

If you're going to allow what happened in the OP, I see no reason to let a must move game convert to a higher stake as well, even if the main game doesn't change.

If I didn't know better, I'd just shrug and assume you hadn't played very much.

The Oaks 15 died because of exactly this.

I mean this is literally true, they don't want to play shorthanded ... with that lineup.

Nobody wants to give up their seat because the game might not go, and the game might not go because nobody wants to give up their seat. Then a fish sits down and everyone turns into Usain Bolt to grab the three seats to his left.

Well, I was never a regular at the Oaks, just played occasionally when in town, and the game I wanted to post was always already running.

But I have been a regular at several other places and never noticed it. I guess it's possible that I missed it sometimes since I was never using that in my decision to start a game.

When I was a regular at the Borgata I would occasionally hear other regulars complain that the game wasn't too good on a particular day, but they still played.

I would occasionally leave to take a meal break when I got to the main game if it wasn't nearly as good as the must move, but pretty much no other regs even did that. They weren't there to make money so didn't care much about game composition.

Just realized that in the rooms where I was a reg, you could not easily see the game I played from the other types of games or smaller games where people would generally be playing while waiting for my game to start. That could have prevented the nitty behavior.
Like at the Borgata the no limit games and 4/8 games were in a different room with a different floor person from the 10/20 games.

1) I'm still spinning on what the right thing to do with the OP spot should be. My general feeling is that a Floor should do 'whatever' it takes to keep a full table running. An existing game should be able to change stakes if it wants with no regard to who's on the waiting list. Do we decline that 'right' just because there's already a list for that stake which may allow Players to jump the list?

That's the fine line, but seated Players should take priority over waiting Players when a Floor is making decisions.

2) I had no issues with the MM changing if the Main voted it down. It was the idea that the Floor wouldn't include the MG in the discussion. I was the first to move off the MM and really didn't want to leave that table, so I also had personal motivation to either get back to that table or insure that I was eventually going to have those Players at 'my' table.

There was also the impending 'doom' that 2-4 Players from the Main were going to move to the 'new' table as soon as they converted ... which would've put a wrench in the Main for sure with no one on the waiting list anymore. I may not have mentioned that the MM was down to 5 handed when they were having this discussion. GL

Maybe. All the time, I see the people who openly stand up, look over at the table, and then accept or decline the seat.

I've had people openly tell me they're not playing 3-handed with me and another person, even though all 3 of us were sitting at the table twiddling our thumbs, and I've had people openly tell me that they will play any game any stakes any time as long as I am in it.

To be clear, I think it's predatory and terrible and I wish you were right in that nobody ever did it.

Well, maybe except for the last part about people challenging me. That was pretty fun, I think he was already mad at me, I semi-bluff 3-bet the turn and binked the river, and then yelled "YOLO!" as I fastrolled. TBH in retrospect the 3-bet was a mistake, he wasn't folding ****.

Oh, well I've run into lots of people who wouldn't play 3 handed. Even quite a few people who thought 7 handed was too short to play. But it wasn't because of the particular players.

To be clear, I agree those people exist as well.

Rob, your posts don't mesh with what I've seen over and over on a near-daily basis. Your experience here is coming from a very unique perspective and I don't know if it's that you play in an isolated poker community, or if maybe you just don't notice these things happening around you because you're not part of the staff that has to juggle this nonsense every single day. Maybe these things literally never happen in your presence. It's possible, and I'm not here to argue with the validity of your claims. I don't know, but you have to at least realize at this point that your experiences are not as common as you think and that setting procedure based on ideal situations is bad for business.

OK, I'll trust you that in your room people don't want start games to play with good players. But then, you really think it is fair to make to rules to shut out those players? Doesn't seem right to me, but I guess maybe it is best for the poker room management. Really I guess it's for the best just to ban pros from your room. At least that would be honest.

Nobody wants to ban pros they are most likely not starting because of the players over the number of players. I think you're forgetting how big poker players egos are and are lying.

They'd rather say I don't want to play 5 handed, most of the time what they really mean i dont want to play 5 handed with these 4 players.

If they could magically wave a wand they turned into 4 whales, MOST of them would sit.