great point.


This is going to be a pretty easy decision for Casino Execs and depending on their flooring in the poker room, not too difficult
to implement. I dont know much about how most slot banks are designed. Not sure how hard it would be to remove half from a bank and move to other floor space. Prob varies by slot mfg's cabinet model. Can anyone share more about this?

Take the least profitable game and most difficult area to Covid-19 protect and flip to most profitable game and easiest area to protect.

Especially true since available slots will be at least cut in half maybe by a third depending on how the social distance.

That’s a very important point. I would add that it’s probably also way easier to convince a degen who came for poker to play slots instead than it would be to convince a slot player to play poker instead.

Slots also only require a players card instead of chips and in a basic setting there’s zero interaction between customers and the very limited number of employees. You don’t even need a cage and cocktail service won’t be available either.

Like many other things, Covid-19 is simply going to accelerate trends that are already going on. Once casinos see that having a poker room isn't necessary to draw in lots of non-poker players, you'll see many of the smaller/weaker rooms close and far fewer players in general. If you want to spew money, there's lots of more exciting ways to do it than play poker.

Games like poker won't be profitable enough with social distancing and demand will be way down among recs like myself ... no way I'm wearing a mask and sitting for 12 hours ... may one or two? But action will be way down. The only people playing long sessions, at least at the start, will be people who need the money. The risk is simply too high.

Poker won't be back until the winter flu season is over and more people have had covid than not, or there's treatment/vaccine. Hopefully we'll have a 2021 WSOP, but it won't be more than 30-40 events.

It's a conspiracy, listen to them explain how they are trying to trick us with their lies.

Opiod deaths are counted the same way. If there's drugs in the system, it's drug related even if the death wasn't related to drugs it still shows up that way in the data.

Death rates are very well known and the expected causes are easy to determine. The total death numbers will give us the answers when it's all collected and only then will we know the actual number of deaths caused by covid.

I do agree the government has been too quick to cancel normal treatments en masse. I am especially concerned for people who have deadly conditions and have had their treatment suspended. This is about as ****ing stupid as it gets.

Yes been widely reported that due to the CARES act, hospitals have had great financial incentives to list COD as corona. ( If patient had corona, at all, but many other co-morbidities) they were just listing COD as corona. Death rates are likely inflated to a degree. Most recently, PA just redacted close to 200 of the death toll for this reason...

I think there will be some innovative ideas on how to get live poker going safely. This is interesting.

https://www.vegasslotsonline.com/new...resort-casino/

I like how the author of the article doesn't know what a poker table is. That's cool.

I liked this part of the article :
What happens if the dealer who plays your hand for you is a fish? . So that's 10 dealers per table or does the same dealer play all the hands? That would really up the importance of position since the dealer will have seen everyone elses cards before he gets toyours.

Besides nothing says welcoming environment like feeling like you're playing poker with the cashier at the cage.

The glass barrier is the interesting part.

I think it will take an innovative idea to get poker going anytime soon. That's dependent on casinos caring enough to be innovative. My biggest fear is that they just go the easy route and put slot machines in the poker room.

I don't get the dealer playing your hand thing.

I don’t understand this distancing thing, if nobody at table has virus it doesn’t matter and if someone in room has it most likely they are screwed. If they can get those tests available for everyone and which are very accurate that might help but still won’t be enough as you can’t keep getting tested every other day, so it does look tough for now.

Those digital poker tables seem to be the only way this can happen. Passing round chips and cards seems like a really good way to get a virus given most of us can't avoid face touching. It feels like you would be almost guaranteed to get it if someone else at the table had it.

Its very hard to imagine live poker coming back until we have herd immunity. There will probably be underground games. But I think we are stuck with online poker for quite a while

I believe that the 'dealer playing your hand' thing would be that the Dealer is the only one handling chips .. as in you don't get to touch your own chips!! You would just have a 'partitioned' pile in front of you that the Dealer would move around as needed.

I'm not sure how a Dealer would let you see your cards. It makes no sense in 'not' passing chips around, but still passing cards around. GL

Michigan is loosening it's restrictions, but casinos are down until at least May 28th ... just before Memorial Day weekend, imagine that! GL

Memorial Day is the 25th.

Either I am missing the point, or you guys are. That video is very clearly a table game, not a poker table. The article writer seems to not understand the difference.

In a table game (at least, in some of them), the player's cards are face up, so the player doesn't need to touch them anyway, and the dealer can do all the touching.

I don't see how this would work in poker. Maybe the players don't touch their own chips and all bets are verbal. But it would be very difficult to not let them touch their cards, to see (while protecting) their hole cards.

Even if casinos are willing to be innovative, you also need players to accept those changes.

The question is if a middle ground exists where the game is both save for everyone involved and still fun and convenient enough for recreational players to be interested in playing.

Electronic tables is a great example. Card rooms quickly realized if they offered both regular and electronic tables, nobody was interested in the latter. So they had to go back to just regular tables or make all tables in the room electronic. Unfortunately for them, they found out the hard way that it’s not regular tables > electronic tables > no poker but regular tables > no poker > electronic tables.

The longer I think about it the more I worry that if it’s going to take a very long time for games to get back to normal, a lot of recreational players might have replaced poker with another hobby they picked up during that time.

I don't think people's love for poker will go away. We are still in the thick of the storm so our perception of this situation is not good at the moment. I have faith that the game will come back. It will be slow. There will be casualties. Some rooms will stay closed forever and some will make a come back. I have faith that somebody will figure out a way to play poker safely. Livelihoods are at stake. I fear the cost to play will go up at least in the short term. It would be a lot of super short play and I suspect new rules would need to be put in place for walkers.

I wonder if casinos are lobbying to get into the online gambling business. Create legit sites to allow states/tribes to recoup a lot of money they lost from this disaster.

Hopefully there is good news on the horizon regarding the trajectory of this virus or vaccines being available sooner.

Yeah it's a big case of if you don't know what you're writing about, please don't.

Not saying it is right, prudent, smart or even universal and I am certain won’t be enough for some percent of players. But I am certain within three months and maybe three weeks, some room somewhere will open for live poker. They might limit it to nine or eight max but otherwise the6 will go with gloves, masks, sanitizer and warnings with liability waiver language but that is it. Further these rooms will have adequate patronage to remain open

A thought I had last night about rooms that take a promo drop (at least here in Nevada)...even if a casino wanted to never open their poker room again, they will have to open in some form for at least a day to return all the promo funds to the players.

This is a good point that I hadn’t thought of, but they are governed by the gaming commission, so could gaming make exceptions and allow the funds to be dispersed some other way?

There are governing rules for that sort of thing depending on jurisdiction but if Covid-19 does shudder rooms permanently there is *zero* chance of them opening poker "just for a day" so they can give away player promo money. Zero. They'll come up with a way to give away the money that satisfies gaming and they'll get the handwaving okay to do it. Slot promotions, BJ promotions, etc etc etc.

Any poker room opening early would likely have these criteria:

1. Has to be a stand alone room. Otherwise, the space will be allocated to slots first.
2. A governor who is a republican that is standing shoulder to shoulder with the President.
3. A willingness to go as fast as possible to re-open things.

My vote would be for Florida rooms. In particular, bestbet Jacksonville.