Quote:
Originally Posted by Hendricks
Really looking forward to you experiencing this for yourself and your subsequent comments. I absolutely believe the numbers RAHzero has suggested given my own experiences at the Wynn. There is a very significant increase in play and across the board, regardless of age and poker experience / success players were loving it. I think you’ll be very pleasantly surprised by how positive a rule change this is. It’s going to become the norm very quickly as those tournaments that don’t implement it will quickly see entry numbers drop.
I play at the Wynn less than some other venues, but my recollection is that their dealers a pretty competent... perhaps even more so than what I am used to on a regular basis on the East Coast. I have no reason to believe that eliminating ante-collection from Wynn tournaments will somehow create a much better time-savings benefit than elsewhere.
Its really comes down to this... if you're going to advocate for a new system which essentially eliminates the collection of antes, and if you're going to claim that this will save significant time, then by definition, the collection of antes must take significant time. This was not really my impression when this issue was first broached. But I was willing to actually look into it deeper in order to take perception off the table as a contributing factor. And what I found was that collecting antes does not take a significant amount of time. Now, I will readily admit that my experimentation in this area is not the end-all be-all on this matter. And I'm certain there is some amount of variance to be expected. But I was actually surprised at how consistent the results were. Nevertheless, I will probably repeat my experiment at some point just to be sure.
In any case, at this point, I do not believe collecting antes takes very long, and I have actual data to back it up. Maybe it "feels" like it takes a long time. But that is a completely different topic, and certainly not any sort of justification to change things when there are real warts with the new system.
I will be very curious what comes out of the Wynn's own experimentation in this area and I will be interested in their methodology. I think mine was pretty solid... directly measuring how long it took to collect antes. I don't think they're going to do exactly that. I guess we'll see, but I'm not sure what kind of look it will be for a casino to admit their ante-collection process takes a surprisingly long amount of time. I mean, that's sort of admitting they have a dealer quality issue, and if that's the case when it comes to collecting antes, imagine what it means for the many other more challenging and important tasks a dealer must execute in order to do their job.
As for what will happen with this in the future, like I mentioned in another post, I have no idea. Maybe you're right. Maybe there will be a large enough (or perhaps vocal enough) group of players who prefer the new system for whatever real or fake reason and casinos will acquiesce to their demands. That is certainly in the realm of possibility. But I doubt very much something like this will drive numbers any time soon. That will still be dominated by things like guarantees, structure, buy-in, etc.
And lastly, after playing in one of these tournaments... I may agree with the proponents. I may say I "like" it. I may say the game dynamic changes it brings about are good, or at least a nice change. I may say some of its more esoteric benefits are more consequential than I thought. I may even say that all of these benefits are enough to overcome the things that aren't great about it. I'm actually pretty open minded at this point. But I really doubt I will ever come out and say, you know what, this is significantly faster. Because physically, it can't be. And I don't believe in making changes based on perception alone.