I haven't seen any updates since WSOP announced:
LAS VEGAS (Apr. 20, 2020) – The 51st running of the World Series of Poker (WSOP), set to begin Tuesday, May 26 from the Rio All-Suite Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas is officially being postponed as a result of the public health emergency involving COVID-19. It is now targeted for fall of 2020, with exact dates and events to be determined.

“We are committed to running the World Series of Poker this year but need additional time to proceed on our traditional scale while prioritizing guest and staff well-being,” said Ty Stewart, Executive Director of the World Series of Poker.
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Based on current COVID status, I doubt Fall 2020 is realistic as they originally hoped. I wish they would announce status soon though, either revised dates or cancellation, so players would know for travel and other planning purposes. I was really looking forward to playing tournaments at Rio this summer and plan to go when it does return.

Ummm the WSOP is all online this year dude.

When they announced the online series they said it’s in addition to the live series at the Rio that was rescheduled for the Fall.

But that was several months ago when people were still relatively optimistic. As of right now it’s very hard to imagine them having a live WSOP of significant size this year.

MGM Resorts lays off 18,000 employees that were furloughed

MGM is finally taking advantage of Covid to clean house and only bring back the best staff when they reopen. Guest service should be up a few notches at all their properties once they go full bore again...

Status of Closed Las Vegas Poker Rooms

https://vegasadvantage.com/status-of...s-poker-rooms/

I believe yours is a pretty simplistic, even ignorant take on 18,000 layoffs.

I am surprised a bit, but isn't it possible the remaining staff that is not permanently laid-off will leave MGM with an older longer tenured demographic among their workforce.

You don't think that laying off 18000 of 70000 might negatively affect the operation's level of service offered to customers ? I understand some whole categories are laid off, like "entertainment", since there are no shows to run. You think that no entertainment offerings is an improvement also ?

You think that cutting the guest service staff by 25% will enhance the guests experience "up a notch"?

Can someone put a cardboard cutout of Chainsaw in front of the casino.

That's not how layoffs work, at least not at huge corporations. And especially not at huge corporations where unions are involved.

There are studies that show how much voluntary turnover increases after layoffs and how much job performance of "survivors" suffers.

If anything, guest service should be down a few notches if you compare apples to apples. If there's going to be an overall uptick in quality of guest service, that would most likely be due to increased resources spent on customers and not because of higher skilled employees.

Nevada Governor Steve Sisolak

The permanent lay offs enable the company to start fresh once they gear back up. They now are not obligated to bring all of the previous staff back - many with poor performance or other issues... Many staff will have been looking for work regardless and they will of course lose good employees who had to find work elsewhere.

My statement was more geared toward the ability of the company to now not be stuck bringing in back any dead weight, as they are not on furlough, but now
terminated and must reapply with the company not obligated to rehire...

I hate to break it to you but the dead weight that you speak of is still there. Its the full timers who have been there since day 1. The union employees who threaten to file a complaint anytime they get reprimanded for not doing their job and have no worry about being fired. The only people who go above and beyond their work duties to provide excellent customer service are the newbies that havent been in the industy long enough to be worn out by the experience of working in a casino and having to deal with people on a daily basis. I can tell you that HR would rather let the before mentioned go before some newer hires. The newer hires are trainable.

so WSOP 2021, assuming it runs back to normal. still will be unsafe if the vaccine is barely a month or two old right?

That sounds pretty good in theory but isn’t even remotely close to the real world of corporate mass layoffs. Otherwise every large corporation would do that once a year, pandemic or not.

Even if unions weren’t involved at all, job performance of the average person let go probably wouldn’t be below job performance of average person still on the job. With unions involved, the layoff process is significantly tilted towards keeping people because of seniority and other non performance related reasons.

There is a good amount of articles on the topic, for example:
https://hbr.org/2018/05/layoffs-that...k-your-company

With conferences / business travel canceled through next summer at a lot of companies, there’s no alternative for MGM. But I highly doubt they’ll come back with a better skilled workforce.

Nobody knows what the world is going to look like next summer.

But in your theoretical case of a vaccine being unavailable before Spring, I have a hard time imagining them scheduling a “normal” WSOP for late May. Not that they couldn’t do it, but the financial risk would just be way too high.

A lot of people think that events through Fall/Winter are canceled because organizers aren’t allowed to hold them. In most cases that’s not true. They could have them but there’s just no business case with social distancing, all other regulations and most importantly: without people wanting to attend.

I recently talked to the race director of a Fall marathon that got canceled. He told me the city would have allowed for them to have it but sign-ups were at less than 20% of last years numbers. Holding a one loop marathon in an urban area costs $100-300k just for police.

The WSOP won’t risk holding an event where barely anyone would attend. So if there’s no vaccine before Spring or another way where things go back to at least somewhat normal before then, my best guess would be another postponement to late Summer or Fall.

IF the vaccine were super effective AND everyone attending had received it, I would think it would be quite safe. But those are a couple pretty big ifs. Otherwise, there would be degrees of safety, depending on how effective and widespread the vaccine is. No black and white answer here; too many variables.

I think there will be no live games until 2022 if you want the activity to be back to normal.

So probably another WSOP online series in 2021.

i agree with all said but even if it came out and was effective in February, I think it woudl still prolly affect wsop numebrs or dates no?


eitehr way im ****ed because I got travel miles back that i hold for two years but they go away february of 2022 : / wouda loved to use it on wsop 2022

That's a pretty pessimistic outlook. But it could be correct.

Quite possibly, yes.

You are wrong, this is exactly how it worked at the local tribal casinos.

That’s not really how it is going to work. But if it was like that, there might be enough time to schedule a scaled-down version for early summer. But that’s cutting it pretty close and already accounts for the fact attendance numbers will be way lower anyway, at least among international players.

This fateful thread was started on January 21, 2020....long before the cancellation of the Tokyo Olympics, long before the total lockdown of Las Vegas, long before the cancellation of the WSOP, long before the wsop.com and ggpoker.com online versions of the WSOP, long before the new normal of wearing a mask and social distancing.

On this great day of optimism - May 13, 2021 - the President of the United States Joe Biden has just announced that people that are fully vaccinated no longer have to wear masks both inside and out.

I am bumping this thread because the first 200 posts of this thread clearly captures the high levels of uncertainty and the immense amounts of fear that the whole world was jointly experiencing when this thread was started over 16 months ago........... in massive contrast to the great announcement that President Biden just announced just moments ago.

Here was the GLOBAL statistics of Covid at the time that this thread was started.

I highly recommend reading the first 200 posts. A great freeze frame of what it was like just weeks before the most significant event of our generation.

The WSOP is back! The world is back!

Not so much if you live in India at this time, but your point is taken.

What's amazing about this whole experience, shared by virtually everyone on the planet, is how little we still know about COIVD-19 after all this time. How did it really start? When did it really start? Why are some people seemingly impervious and others really susceptible to horrible symptoms? Why was there such variance in effectiveness of government interventions, even amongst those nations/jurisdictions which did basically the same thing? Which mitigation efforts mattered, and which were just for show? Was it all worth the cost?

Anyhow, I'm sure there will be efforts to answer these, and other, questions at some point. And I bet it will make for some interesting reading. But I'm not sure we will ever learn the real truth of it all. One just hopes our governments have learned a bit about how to better protect us, and we as citizens have learned a bit about how to better protect ourselves. As devastating as COVID-19 has been, things could have been significantly worse if the virus were more deadly.

Maybe you haven't been paying very close attention. The news doesn't do a good job of reporting the information people need to know about coronavirus.

It leaked from the level 4 lab Wuhan institute of virology where they studied coronavirus by doing gain of function studies by genetically engineering the most virulent and potent strains of the virus. In 2018 the lab was cited for safety violations. It is highly unlikely that a virus that is so readily transmitted from human to human originated anywhere other than a lab.

The first detectable case was in November 2019 in Wuhan China. It likely started then or some months earlier.

Covid-19 effects people with type A blood much worse than other blood types. It also effects people with weakened immune systems much worse. Being young with lots of vitamin D and zinc make it so getting covid-19 is not that bad. Also exposure to higher viral load will lead to worse infection. Smoking tobacco also seems to help prevent getting the virus, though being a former smoker makes it much worse. Nicotine is a bronchial restrictor closing passages in the lungs making it harder for the virus to get in.

For all the reasons mentioned above. Nations vary greatly in their levels of fitness as well as their blood types. (USA has a higher rate of type A blood than China for example. Which is why blaming Trump for all of our problems is pretty stupid when it would have affected USA worse no matter what.) Also sunnier climates result in much higher vitamin D absorption for the population.

Wearing masks mattered, though the stupid cloth maks most people wear are largely just for show. They block a small portion of aerosolized particles unlike surgical masks and n95 masks which block much more significant amounts of particles. Early on Fauci was saying we didn't need to wear masks when anyone with a brain (like me) could have told you wearing a mask was a smart precaution. Wearing masks outside while not in large crowds was just for show (duh). Haphazard and incomplete lockdowns were largely ineffective at preventing the spread of the virus and possibly caused more harm than good. Lockdowns should have been more complete or not at all and just have vulnerable populations, like the elderly, be quarantined.

China destroyed documents and jailed and disappeared journalists who were reporting about coronavirus early on. Things could have been significantly better if China had acted better and shared information with the rest of the world. It's possible they preferred to have a worldwide pandemic rather than a local epidemic.

SimpleRick, like I said... interesting reading. Anyhow, I think some of your claims are likely closer to the truth than what has widely been reported. As for others... its hard to say.

This is one of the fundamental problems with the "misinformation age" we live in. There are very few, if any, outlets of information which are truly reliable. They all either have some sort of agenda which doesn't put a high value on honesty, or they are some combination of too lazy, or too incompetent, or too focused on profits to deliver useful reports. And so we are left to try to sift through the jungle of information and try to figure out for ourselves what is real and what is kinda real and what is outright fake. And that includes reading the unsourced comments and claims of random forum thread posters.

FWIW, I have always had a suspicion that blood type played a significant role. You would think, given the amount of anecdotal evidence about this, there would have been a large effort to study this as quickly as possible in order to better fine-tune recommendations. But I haven't seen anything along these lines. And when I asked my doctor, I was told that blood type is never used to make diagnostic determinations about a person's risk. Perhaps the science just isn't there yet. Or perhaps the science is just too slow to deal with a raging pandemic. In any case, its stuff like this I would like to see improved. A reasonably-effective vaccine seems to have been developed in record time. Surely we can improve the speed in which real-time data can be gathered and analyzed so that leaders can make better informed decisions.