Seems like the Northeast is in a Funk for tournament Poker.
Playground Poker in Montreal, Foxwoods & Mohegan Sun in Connecticut, Borgata in New Jersey are all basically (except small $250-$500 type tourneys) shut down tourney wise.
Turning Stone has a 2023 WSOP Circuit coming in March, but besides that, I don't see any WPT, WSOP Circuit etc.. on the horizon.
Anybody have an inside on any of those properties getting back to those type of tournaments they used to have anytime soon?

Other than a vague, there's still hope, from one of the establishments, crickets.

Turning Stone has their big series next month

Nah no hope. Borgata I think has moved on from their big series. Tab the TD is no longer there and I don't think MGM has the interest in running them again.

Parx keeps claiming they don't have enough dealers and they have pushed back any dates of their Big Stax series until sometime next year at the earliest. Sadly I see this series as gone for good as well. Doubt it's a money maker for Parx when they ran it and after covid the priorities of a lot of these casinos have changed.

Turning Stone at least is having a series here and there and yeah they are having a wsop circuit stop. But it's pretty out of the way.

Foxwoods my home casino keeps making excuses as well as to why they can't run any series for the time being but I think it's bull. I don't think the tribe's focus right now is on poker so I don't expect Foxwoods to have big tournaments for the foreseeable future either.

Definitely sucks what has happened to NE poker tournaments.

A 2 day 1s $460 does not constitute a big series.

Playing poker tournaments at casinos is incredibly foolish. You should play tournament style poker in home/private games. Most poker players are poor and will never make much money playing poker because of all the rake and tournament fees they pay.

didn't Tab take the job back/works for betMGM poker now?

the 3500 betMGM Aria main that happened is the most likely outcome for Borgata soon.. I heard some rumblings this summer.

Woods isn't coming back because Rainmaker is being turned into a waterpark

I read some of Tab's tweets and he gives no indication he knows anything about if or when Borgota will resume their series. He thinks eventually but he's not part of that anymore.

The Parx Big Stax not coming back it seems to me is worse. They had 3 buyins all pretty affordable with a main event type structure. The $330 buyin for example would get thousands of players.

True.

That said, I'd guess the prize pool will well exceed 200k.

Isn't it down in many places? Other than the midwest, where the WSOPC keeps things going strong; and the WSOP itself, it seems like the tourney funk is not just localized to the northeast.

Consider...

• Gone is the Festa Al Lago in October and Bellagio Cup in the summer
• No more Bay 101 Shooting Star on the WPT schedule, and the standalone version is half the buy-in ($5K) it used to be
• The average buy-in on the WPT televised mainstays were/are considerably smaller in recent years than it was during the boom: e.g. the Bay 101, Legends of Poker.
• The LAPC has fewer events of $1K or larger buy-ins than it did in the 2000s and 2010s, although this is offset by the more recent $25K high roller.

Obviously, there are new faces in the poker crowd (e.g. Thunder Valley in Northern California, Seminole Hard Rock near Miami), and some events are doing better now than they did during the boom (Five Diamond main event has had massive prize pools in the past five years). But overall, it just shows the combined effect of Black Friday, the WPT telecasts losing steam, COVID, etc. The northeast casino major tourneys began disappearing long before any of those trends, so it stands to reason that the overall scene is in worse shape than anywhere else.

Too bad, though – the casinos you named were certainly household brands for poker fanboys like me during the boom, and with PokerStars actually available in your corner of the U.S., it seems like there should have been a renaissance.

OP you're correct.
The Borgata poker room is a shell of its former self. They tried to have some 400 dollar tournament presidents day weekend and it was a complete and total **** show. Other than that they have not had any big MTTs since January 2020.

It was already going downhill when MGM bought them pre covid, and it's completely in the toilet now.

You are totally wrong on this. Before covid Borgata had 4 big series a year including a decent summer series. Parx ran 4 Big Stax series a year or it might have been 3. But the crowds were huge for that. Foxwoods ran some decent series as well and while the crowds weren't what they once were, they still got a decent turnout to a lot of their tournaments. Plus Encore Boston Harbor ran a nice guarantee tournament right before covid and word was they were going to have a series soon after. Obv covid threw that plan away.

So yeah after covid poker in the Northeast now sucks and probably will never go back to what it was, especially if Borgota and Parx do away with their tournament series(which sadly it is looking that way).

But even in 2019 the Northeast was fine and pretty darn good for tournament poker.

Borgata actually had 5 series although the November one was shorter than the other 4 unless thanksgiving fell really late

The Jan and Sept were WPT stops

Its a shame and I keep debating if I should try to get involved coordinating something or at least trying to get a push for one. Me + some other vloggers could show a northeast casino how badly we all want tournaments

There is such a vacuum in the NE right now that the opportunity is significant. All it would take would be a little bit of live feature table coverage and some low budget roving cameras to pick up some big hands. And in the NE, there are dozens of fully qualified narrators who could provide play by play/color and who would work for next to nothing. Maybe that's too much, but the main point is that there's an opportunity to take a leadership role and be the destination for tournaments. Someone needs to step up.

seems to me, they dont have the dealers for it now and they wont hire them back. so its over

I would imagine this is the case where dealers are unionized (not making an anti-union post here) like Foxwoods. They probably can't bring in roving dealers there owing to union contracts. Not sure what the situation is elsewhere when it comes to using out of town dealers. Turning Stone had a successful WSOP-C with out of town dealers so it can be done.

mgm can't even hire cashiers or maids because they want to pay ****.
their dealers mostly suck and there is zero accountability for poker room employees.
when they first reopened after covid the state would only allow them 30 tables so they hired their part time dealers back first who are mostly terrible because they wouldn't have to give them health benefits. only when they were allowed more tables did they hire full time dealers.
MGM also fired the poker host and eliminated the position when they took over and that's before covid.

MGM is a dirtbag company. **** mgm.

The 2 biggest borgata series of the year were WPT who used their own dealers and the WPT is yet to return to Borgata.

It seems like it needs to start with the Large WPT, WSOPC type events (with mostly there own dealers) to get things rolling. The demand is there as it was in Vegas for the recent WSOP. I just seems like the properties don't have the staffing to run their own events.
The Borgata, Foxwoods, Maryland Live, Parx & Playground all have had very successful tournaments of these types in the past and there's no reason they can't have success again.
With Foxwoods tailing off a bit in regards to being rewarded a WSOPC or WPT, I think that Encore Boston would be a great stop for any of these type of events as they would get a huge turnout there.
It may be the WPT & WSOPC executives will have to approach the powers that be at these properties and sell their game.
If they have them, we will come!

I think I was looking specifically at the World Poker Tour schedule from year to year. You might be right. EDIT: It should be noted that I also was referring to the largest events (i.e. single tourneys) while you're talking about large series.

But as an example, Foxwoods held a $10K main event World Poker Finals until 2011. It came off the WPT slate and dropped to a $3,500 event in 2012. In 2013, that Foxwoods main event went to a $2,700 buy-in.

The mid-September Borgata Poker Open main event went from a $10K buy-in to a $3,500 entry event in the late 2000s. Of course, the prize pool stayed reasonably high, dropping from around $5 million to $3-4 million range, so it's not like it suffered a massive plummet.

After 2008, the C$10K event in Fallsview came off the WPT televised schedule. It came back to the broadcasts six years later, but this time as a $5K event with a prize pool roughly a third the size as it was pre-Black Friday.

So yeah... maybe "disappeared" is an unfair overstatement, and "diminished" would have been more accurate. Wow, who would have thought using extreme choices of words rather than tempered ones might elicit response?

Interesting to hear. I’m a little surprised because I expected more of a post-Covid boom. I understand the labor concerns. It appears that Vegas tourneys have been getting great numbers?

Maybe series just become more destination based? Most of the old east coast tournaments locations aren’t really “destinations”, except for maybe the jersey shore, even though AC is historically trash or Montreal in the summer. A big summer series at the Borgata makes sense because it jives with the Jersey Shore. A legit series in a place like Palm Springs would be great. It’s a vacation town, lots of short term rentals.

Hopefully! And as many in the thread have said, that's sadly going to be one of the larger tournaments in the northeast in the near future.

Looks like Maryland Live is having a $1,100.00 tourney (250K Guarantee) , 2 day ones Aug 19 & 20th.

+1 to I don't understand this at all. NYC is one of the biggest and richest cities on earth, and the hub of finance, and you can't find a single 10k+ buyin (or even 5k+) without going 1000 miles or leaving the country. Not to mention that Boston, Philly and DC are all right here too. It makes no sense.

LA can sustain at least one big series per year (LAPC) and a couple of medium sized ones. They're running 25ks and 50ks no problem in Ft. Lauderdale. And the entire Northeast somehow can't find the demand for a 5k? It's wild.

Like, if Borgata hosted a $25k once a quarter and partnered with Blade to fly people down there and made it nice, they wouldn't get 20 runners?

Before Covid, Borgata was running 3.5ks with 1200 people. Can they not also run a 10k with 300 people?

Just don't understand it at all

This year's LAPC main event drew 119.