Also, i did not see this specifically adressed in the outline, but i would add "unfriendly environment for females" as a major topic.

We have all heard horror stories, but lax/weak protection when female players have been harassed / encounter other inappropiate behavior seems common across the industry. And that doesn't even get into the treatment of female dealers and other staff.

Not sure how much this exists on the US side of the pond, but I really hate playing incentives that require money to be taken from the pot.

I'm talking rake races, bonuses, bad beats jackpots etc. The rake in live games is high enough to begin with without an extra percent or so leaving the game. These are massively to the detriment of casual/recreational players who can't log in a large number of hours and incentivise lots of hours of nitty play, which in turn, end up killing the games.

Going back to Gobbo's point above - I often ask cardroom managers why they engage in this practice and none have ever offered me any meaningful market research that has guided their decision or even robust logic. For the most part, it just seems that these initiatives are put into place when a room in struggling and they need to do something.

Mason you better not get them to take away the jackpot, the jackpot fish are the only people I can win money off of

A few thoughts from a former (failed) small stakes NL full timer and current dealer/occasional floor.

You seem to have a few sections about not wanting dealers to be social. If I've misunderstood the section titles I apologize. I am a quiet and down to business dealer and have had players thank me for this, especially in big or complex games. It's not what recreational players want, though, especially in the smaller games. They want social interaction. So I would say rather than simply telling dealers to shut up and deal I would say they should read the table and adjust accordingly. At the 150-300 mix they should probably shut up and deal unless a player engages first. A Friday night small NL where they're drinking and joking, they want you to join in. They'll stay longer and are more likely to come back if they have a good time.

I don't like it when I see dealers bringing their own racks to the table. It makes it too tempting for them to steal. Not sure what your take is.

One reason promotions are timed the way they are is staffing. Adding a big promo to an already packed Saturday night means more players than they have tables/dealers for and not enough games when those dealers are working their 2nd-5th day that week. Players can't get seats and leave upset.

The easiest way to minimize fills is to install larger racks on the tables. I was just at Phily Live and they are constantly having to get fills because they have a minuscule amount of small chips for rake/tips. They are building new tables, why not give them bigger racks?

Agree Bravo is terrible. The new touch screen version is somehow worse than the old ones. Poker Atlas has competing software but I've only seen it installed at Boston Harbor.

I'm assuming you live in mid or high stakes games (forgive me if I'm wrong) but keep in mind that the vast majority of poker rooms live and die by the smallest games they spread. There are a lot of regs who spend 40+ hours a week in those games and not many are overall winners. They're retired, have businesses that are on auto pilot, or in some other way have money that they bring in. The big games are certainly valuable to any room, but many rooms simply do not have big games and those who do can't make decisions that would help a big game slightly but kill the small ones and promotions that favor regs don't necessarily mean that money is never going back on the table.

One thing probably not on your radar is floor pay. In my room (if it ever re-opens) the decent dealers are making substantially more than the full time floors. Several dealers who would be great at it are making more than the room manager without all the headaches. There's no reason for them to even consider moving up. There are great floors and managers out there who got into it because they prefer that type of work but the rest are burned out dealers who failed up. A better incentive structure would lead to better run rooms over the long run.

Relationships between management the dealers and players need to change. The dealers are toxic and extort every single customer that comes in. No tip after a hand? Bad service for you

I’ve had dealers say they were going to fold my hands cause I don’t tip, have had dealers throw my cards and my chips at me , have had dealers refuse to push me a pot and most hilarious of all, have had a million dealers tell me they have bills to pay- and I don’t???


Dealers make more than anyone besides the casino. And I bet that’s a fact



Besides that management needs to grow a pair and fire bad dealers while catering to their customers (players)

The Reno Peppermill has instituted a $6 time rake for all their games since the re-opening following the virus shutdown. This has been very well received by all, dealers and players.
Not sure if anyone from that room, in a management capacity, is on 2+2. It would be great to hear from the about rationale, results, reception.

Things like Bobby's room are an embarassment to a well run poker room.

The games themselves generate nominal amounts more rake than a constantly running 1-2 NL table, while taking up more space, generating more CTR reporting, generates complaints about list favoritism, and having an expectation of higher service. This is fine if there's the attraction of "I can see Doyle playing" that draws people in.

Instead, they get locked in a private room and anyone even attempting to look through the glass is immediately shoo'd away. Straight up makes rec players feel like second class citizens.

Abolish any ‘promotion’ that is paid for by the players through extra rake. As an occasional visitor to the Vic in London it hurt so bad that they took extra from my pots just to feed the prizepool in the monthly free roll for the regs. This should apply to high hand and bad beat jackpots too.

If you want to encourage fresh entries to the player pool then make sure that your dealers take care of them and don’t jump on every little error in play, or etiquette, that their inexperience causes. Stop the a-hole regs from screaming ‘string bet’. Have your CRM keep an eye on the tables and have a word with the regs who can’t lose a hand without criticising the newbie. Let’s ban the expression “How can you call me with that ****?”.

Have the exact same rules for all players, no matter how regular/local/wealthy.

drink service, especially during some events/MTTs:
there's consensus across the board of different nutrition/health theories that one needs to drink a lot and regularly. It shouldn't happen that players are sitting for 1-2 hours with nothing drink. It's simply unhealthy. Make sure every player always has some water or something.

If you are looking to attract more recreational players through promotions in order to make the games better and increase the profitability of the room, then adding a 'fun' element to the promo seems to me to be the way to go. Spinning a wheel, adding a random element to the prize won or even just awarding different prizes depending on the time that a promo is won are options.

Anything that poker rooms can do to create a sense of fun or energy will help to attract the recs that may be put off if seeing a sombre, boring environment and head to the craps table instead.

Topic for the book:

"Hiring new floor manager / TD"

Experience required?
Can they be trained without poker experience?

In my local casino, the floor + upper managers had no poker playing experience

try tipping a little you'll have a better experience

that's not why those games run.
they run bc some of the whales who dump in those games also dump big in the pit.

We've been hearing the "on a whole women just aren't that interested in poker" arguments for decades, but I think its just an excuse, not the reality, or at least not the -potential- reality.

If it is true that women on the whole are not interested in poker, this is because of the way poker has been marketed, and the environments in which women see poker being played, not because of anything inherent in the game itself.

The reason I make this claim is because we see women making up the majority of the customer base for all sorts of games that are very similar to poker, with the exception of the facts that they are not played in a male-dominated environment (e.g. casual skill-based electronic games like Candy Crush or other skill-based card or tile games like bridge or mah-jongg).

The two biggest reasons I see for why women are not attracted to poker specifically:

1.) There just aren't a critical mass of woman playing. Women will be much more likely to sit down at a poker table if they are not the only woman there, especially if they already see two or three other women at the table.

This is not a sentiment exclusive to women in any way; it's going to be a natural human reaction to any situation in which you feel alone and surrounded by people different than you. And it's not even a by-product of men treating women badly (although this certainly doesn't help). Men simply being polite to the lone woman at a table won't necessarily make her feel comfortable if she's still always surrounded by men.

One way card rooms could address this is by hiring female prop players to make sure that no games spread are exclusively male. These players could move to other tables once a table has at least two other women playing on it.

2.) The game is marketed to what are perceived as male interests. Advertisements for poker as entertainment focus on big all-ins and big bluffs; basically situations that are mano-a-mano tests of courage with one player trying to beat another through intimidation. In general, this is not what women are going to find appealing about games. We should be emphasizing the puzzle aspects and the social aspects. We should especially be de-emphasizing the benefits of one player literally staring down their opponent.

One way card rooms could address this is to spread more games that a more social and less about conflict and intimidation. This would basically mean a return to limit games and mixed games, and certainly backing away from a dependence on NLHE and PLO cash games.

I have some more radical ideas for how poker could appeal to new players (both men and women) but I doubt they would be welcome on this board, as they likely wouldn't benefit professional players at all.

Timed rake has been around for ever in the UK, in fact I'm fairly sure it used to be illegal to rake pots here. I seem to recall reading some books that indicated that this form of rake certainly did exist in the US, of course the climate in 2021 is a lot different from the games with which the author(s) refer to, but I would think you'd be able to extrapolate

In terms of what sucks, choice of games mainly. May not be the case for many average punters, but NLHE is boring and I'd play any limit game over it, and I just hope that if and when I get back to Vegas (previous visit ~18 months ago) that not only is the Orleans room still running, but there's other rooms that spread NLHE games

Last time I was in Florida there was a couple of rooms that was still running 10 handed. Ridic. 8 handed should be the standard with the option of going 9 during the more dead hours.

Another thing that has always tilted me is how many people ask for table changes/seat changes in the US. Now obviously the majority of people who ask for this are boring nits/regs but it does filter down into something that the weaker plays then pick up on too and slows down the games.

I fully agree that the paying players on hours per month is horrific!!!! I remember like 6 or 7 years ago staying at TI in Vegas for a few nights. It was something like putting in 60 hours a month, getting $600. It was a $1/2 no game that was filled with what seemed like $2/5 regs and zero rec players. I would sit down and hear people discussing Ed Miller books and such. I obviously put in very little time in that room during my stay and instead went over to Venetian and Ballys mostly. About 2 years after that trip, it shut down.

If poker was only a live game I'd probably agree with you that a lot more women would play if they didn't get treated so badly by so many men at the tables. But the percentage of online poker players who are women is also extremely small vs that of candy crush as you used in your example. None of the issues you mention are a problem online. No room is going to start hiring female props to try and get more women to play because that simply won't work and would be a waste of money.if after decades including the advent of online poker you still hardly have any women players then the bolded is clearly true.

Card rooms aren't going to return to spreading limit games because that isn't what their customers want.Even in the old days when everything was limit women barely played. This isn't the issue.

The point about online poker is a fair one. But I do think if you are looking at stats from something like PokerStars, you need to remember that online poker for actual money is a very serious game that has significant barriers to entry even at fairly low stakes. Very casual players and people with little background in poker are not likely to have much fun entering these games.

If you look at free poker apps like Zynga poker on Facebook, the demographics are significantly more even. (It may be that these free apps are only 25% women, but even this would represent a huge improvement over what we see now in both live card rooms and real money internet poker.)

I really don't think the claim about the "old days" is true. I don't know if any kept real demographic statistics, but my impressions from card rooms 30-50 years ago that were spreading mostly stud and lowball is that the customers were about 1/3 women. You can see a real such room in the movie California Split. This has gone waaaaay down over the past few decades as rooms have moved to spreading almost exclusively NLHE and PLO.

Even now, I would say the player base for LO8 games may be around 20% women, while for NLHE, it is 5% women at best.

Look, as a former dealer I'll tell you what the problem with the casinos are:
-Rake too high
-Management often makes terrible rulings
-Management plays favoritism
-Penny wise, dollar foolish

Your whole section about dealers is just... weird. Shutup and deal is a very situational thing. Some tables like it, others don't. The dealer has an incentive to make money, and usually the tables that like talking you will make more money by... talking.

This didn't stop men who had never played poker before from playing at all.

If you're right that 1/3rd of the players were women back then you might be right about the limit games- i'd love some old timers to chime in on whether or not that is true.I'd be surprised if it was though. While I don't have the numbers I can even remember playing on pacific poker before they had nl and i'd be shocked if their customers were anywhere near that number.

Even if zinga poker is 25 percent women then it merely means that women by and large just don't want to play poker for money. You can play online for literally pocket change but they still don't do it.I don't know why you keep insisting this can be changed or saying that people pointing this out for decades have been wrong.At this point it's like saying men will watch The View if the View marketed themselves to them differently.

Ha ok Mason. GL

Time rake is much better for the players than raking from the pot.

1) Faster and easier for the dealers
2) Often players will participate in a "bomb pot" or similar for the time rake, which some dislike but seems to be enjoyed by many action players.
3) Action players are not punished by paying more rake
4) Optimal strategy is to play looser than in raked games
5) People have an incentive to play faster. Other players in the game are more likely to speak up against people tanking.

Downside would be that low limit players / new players would balk at paying, not realizing that they are paying the same amount or more in pot rake.

One issue I haven't seen mentioned in this thread is tanking and stalling. It might still be cost prohibitive to have a shot clock or "chess clock" at each table in a live card room, but I think people tanking for long amounts of time (especially on early streets and/or small pots) is something that no one else really wants.

Hi Everyone:

I'm back in the thread now and I'll be responding to some of the posts. Also, whenever I see a point that looks important, I'm adding it into my notes for the book, so please keep these posts coming.

Best wishes,
Mason

Need to talk about the corruption of staff, tipping to get on top of lists, private games run in public casinos, shady dealers...it all goes on. would be good if you could get first hand accounts from well known players on it etc.