Hi Everyone:
And here's the draft of the "Promotions" chapter:
Promotions
Way back in the late 1980s, after having been living in Las Vegas for a little more than a year, I had a conversation with a particular poker room manager who, while always a pleasant person, didn’t run his poker room the way I thought that it should be run. “Look,” I said to him, “if you want to fill this room with players, take all your promotional money, go find the ten worst players in town, and give it to them with the stipulation that they had to play their poker at your place until the money was gone.” Of course, we both laughed, but there’s something about this silly idea that’s extremely right. The best and most successful poker rooms have good games and it’s these good games that attract the plyers, both experts and recreational players alike.
So, it should be clear from this short story that those cardrooms that offer promotions that these promotions should be designed to benefit the weaker players and not the pros. However, if the weaker players benefit, then it should be obvious that in most cases the pros should benefit as well since much of the money that goes to the weak players in time will end up in the hands of the strong players (less rake and tips). This is the sort of thing that makes poker rooms successful. Let me give three examples, one good, one neutral, and one bad.
First, a common promotion that many poker rooms have is a reward for making certain hands of value, usually four-of-a-kind or better, and sometimes the reward money goes up based on the strength of the hand. And who gets this money?
Well, if you understand how different people play poker, it should be obvious that in most cases the weak players play more hands than the tight strong players, and the more hands you play, the more likely you’re to make one of these strong hands. It’s also my guess, and again this is just a guess, that about two-thirds of this promotional money will go to the weak players. So, in my opinion, this is a good promotion for a cardroom.
Second, I’ve also been in cardrooms where they have seat drawings. I won one recently when my seat was randomly drawn (and the drawing occuring was linked to a casino slot machine jackpot being hit). While this was certainly nice for me, having the money go to me was from a cardroom’s perspective similar to putting putting the money in a wood burning fireplace and burning it.
Of course, live players can also win these drawings, so this is not the worst promotion there is, and I would give it a neutral rating. Not good but not that bad either. However, if it was up to me, random cash drawings would never happen since there are better ways to distribute the promotional money.
Third, many poker rooms have a promotion where in one form or another, they reward players for playing a certain amount of hours. It can be something like $100 for playing 20 hours in a week, and, if you play a full 30 hours, the reward will go up to $200. Another version of this is that players after putting in enough hours (and sometimes the hours will count double), will earn a spot in a free-roll tournament which of course has value, and in terms of expectation is similar to giving a player money.
But there’s a big problem with this type of promotion. The majority of the money is going to the better players and not the live ones. That’s because it’s the better players, and not the recreational players, who are the ones that tend to put in a lot of hours. So, here is a common type of promotion which has the effect of making the games tougher and should be long-term detrimental to the poker room. So, not only would I give this type of promotion a poor rating, but in my opinion, promotions that reward players for putting in a lot of hours should never be offered. My guess is that poker room managers have never thought through the damage that promotions like this do.
Continuing on with this chapter, let’s address another more important idea. And it’s the fact that poker rooms need to consider the clientele that their promotions will attract.
Again, going back to the late 1980s, one of the poker rooms that I played at offered a promotion where the first person who played 500 hours on graveyard shift, regardless of the game he played, would win a substantial amount of money (and I’ve forgotten the exact number). Also, if more than one person tied by hitting the 500 hour mark at the same time, the promotional money would be split. The idea was that this promotion would add one or two more games on graveyard and through the rake easily pay for itself, and it may have done exactly that.
However, this cardroom was located in a very nice casino and this promotion attracted many “low lifes” who were probably desperate for money. And while I don’t know for sure, it was my opinion that even though an additional game or two was occupied by players trying to win the promotion, it also had the affect of chasing more desirable players (and casino customers who wanted to play a little poker) out of the poker room. So, in that sense, it had the opposite affect. That is, instead of creating more games, it cost the cardroom business and most likely contributed to its closing a year or so later, and I’ve never seen a promotion this bad again. (Of course, the manager of this poker room, probably due to his resume that showed a lot of experience, went on to get a better job.)
Another example of attracting the wrong clientel probably occurred in the Desert Inn Casino (which has now been replaced by The Wynn Casino). For those who don’t remember, the Desert Inn, while small by today’s standards was a beautiful casino that had a high class and wealthy customer base. Anyway, one day in the mid 1990s I was in the Desert Inn and their headline entertainer that night was none other than the great Frank Sinatra, and it was one of the last times that he played in Las Vegas. In addition, you could tell by the way people were dressed in the show line that these were the type of customers the Desert Inn management would want.
However, there was also a small poker room in the corner of this casino and that night they were having a $12 buy-in tournament. Needless to say, the people coming into the poker room were not of the same status as those in the show line. In fact, it was my opinion that if the casino management at The Desert Inn understood what the poker room was doing, there would be no more poker room. And sure enough, it was closed a few months later.
Next, I want to address jackpots when a terrific hand gets beat that offer large payoffs for the loser of the poker hand. At first, this might seem like a good promotion since the jackpot winner is more likely to be someone who plays too many hands. That is, the more great hands you make, the more likely you are to get one beat. But there is a problem.
First, notice that for a promotion to be good, the poker room needs for most of that money to go back into the poker games. But does this happen when a large jackpot gets paid out. I think not.
But what will happen is that someone will buy a new car, perhaps make a down payment on a house, or come up with another way to spend a large amount of money, and this can’t be good for the poker room. However, some cardrooms seem to realize this and they try to spread the money out to a number of players. This includes not only the winner of the jackpot hand but perhaps all the players at the table, or even more.
As an example, and this goes all the way back to the mid-1980s, I was once playing in a California poker room which had a promotion that anyone who made a straight-flush wheel (ace-deue-trey-four-five of the same suit) in one of their California Ace-to-Five Lowball games (which was a form of draw poker with only two rounds of betting) would win a big prize. However, as part of the give-away, they also gave money to everyone who was playing in one of these games at that time, and one day when this jackpot was hit, I received $100 for playing in a similar game.
Needless to say, ths type of promotion is better than just the straight jackpot give away since some of the money will go to live players who will just bring it back to the poker economy. But in my opinion it’s still a poor promotion.
I also want to mention one final idea. It’s when is it best to offer these promotions? Many poker rooms will offer them on their slow days in an effort to attract more customers. At first, this seems logical since on certain days there will be a lot of empty seats and tables in the poker room, and its management should be aware of this. But who’s now going to get the promotional money?
The answer is that it’ll mainly be the regular/tougher players who show up on the slow days and so the promotinal money will again be going to the wrong place. And part of the reason for this is that the poorer playing recreational players, who’ll show up on the busy nights, won’t have the money to play on the slower days since they were losers on the nights they did show up. So, this means that the promotions, where lots of money is being given away, should happen on the busy nights so that a larger percentage of the weak recreational players get it, and this is probably the opposite of what most poker room managers think.
By the way, and this is not the subject of this book and will only be briefly mentioned here, but in games, like poker, which are based on probability theory, many things will be counterintuitive to many people, and the idea that promotions should be held on the nights when you don’t seem to need them is certainly a counterintuitive approach that doesn’t seem right.
Anyway, to finish this important chapter, and to recap some of the above, I believe that promotions can be an important part of what makes a poker room successful. But the promotions need to be done right with the emphasis on the money being returned to the players going mostly to the right people. This will help assure that the games stay good and, as was pointed out at the start of this chapter, it’s good games that attract players to a poker room and allow the poker room to thrive.
