If you find such a place let me know. Still living out of hotel rooms.

In all seriousness, I'm still working on it. Hopefully I can find some affordable housing options for players.

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what's up, no updates in a while?

Sorry about that. Its been a tumultuous couple of weeks. As of yesterday, I no longer work for the Riverking. I'll try to post as much details as I can soon enough, but for now I'm spending a long overdue day with the wife and kid.

I should mention though that the Sihanoukville room will continue on under different ownership and under a different name. I will be a part of this group and will be moving back there permanently.

In the meantime we'll be going out tonight to tear up the town proper before I leave. If anyone wants to join hit me up.

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What happened man?!

I've been splitting my time between Phnom Penh and Sihanoukville, traveling back and forth every few days, and it was really taking a toll. Frankly speaking I wasn't able to do an adequate job for either room. The owner of the room was loosing interest in the Sihanoukville project, wanted out and was pressuring me to return to Phnom Penh full time. The room by the beach has been struggling and things are generally slow everywhere as we are now entering low season. Not only that but it turned out that our opening was part of a larger wave as three more rooms opened up within a week of our opening and at one point there were fifteen rooms in town. But I still saw great potential in the project and wanted to see it through.

There was a bit of a dispute between our owner and the Chinese partners over the cost of the initial build out of the poker room so I went down to Sihanoukville in order to negotiate with them. But talks remained at a standstill and very little progress was being made. At this point our owner simply wanted out and was willing to do so at a great loss. At this point an interested party approached me about the possibility of buying our side out and taking over the project. We then negotiated a figure that would allow our side to recoup most of what they had spent, but then both he and the Chinese informed me that the deal would be contingent upon me staying to run the room.

I quickly went back up to Phnom Penh and informed the owner of the parameters of the deal, namely that they wanted me to stay in Sihanoukville. Really wanting to be done with the project and get some money out of it, he accepted the deal and I tendered my resignation. I'm back in Sihanoukville now and have informed the staff of the change in ownership and let everyone know that we would be closed for a few days while we purchase new chips and redo the felt on the tables as the name will no longer be Riverking.

Its not like me to lie so I will say that there is a bigger context for all this. But it's not like me to air out dirty laundry as well so I'm not going to spell out every detail of why I left. I will say though that the owner and I have not been seeing things the same and a rift had developed over philosophies in how the room should be run, whether he acknowledged them or not. And at the end of the day I didn't want to lose an opportunity to run what was a fully licensed and legal poker room. The Phnom Penh room is being left in good hands as Renton555 takes over as General Manager, being elevated from his previous position as floor manager. And as for me, I return to the town I once lived in and get to start all over in building out a poker room pretty much from scratch. I am a bit nervous to say the least but remain hopeful and optimistic that the project will be a successful one. My girlfriend will stay in Phnom Penh until the birth of our daughter then I'll move her down sometime after. I'll post any details as we near reopening the room.

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Well seeing that all the photos that you were on were taken from riverking instagram I assume it wasn't exactly friendly split between parties and there is more to it.
Looks like a lot of bad blood suddenly between you and the Riverking owner.

First task is to rebrand. We're obviously changing the name and so far are just going with Bao Mai Poker Room. Not all that sexy I realize but every poker room in town is just named after their casino so it seemed a bit odd that we were called something else. It'll take about ten days to re-felt the tables so if anyone has any suggestions they would be appreciated.

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Mike's Poker Room on Bao Mai Casino 😄

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What are some good luck sayings Chinese gamblers say?
Maybe a play off of something like that.

Safety Tip, cover your 6 0'clock when doing business with Chinese businessmen.

Business norms and common business practice often dont apply.

For now we've decided to go with The Poker Room at Bao Mai Resort & Casino. I don't have to change any logos this way and with so much going on I'm choosing to take the simplest route. In terms of how the ownership of the new room will be structured, we're doing something a bit out of the box. Our Chinese partners own 30% and the new owner bought out Riverking's 70% share. With that he has empowered me to give out as many 5% shares as possible to other players at a heavily discounted rate of $2,000 or $200 per month over the next 12 months. We're basically going to run the room as a cooperative and involve as many players as possible, with the only requirement being that shareholders play as their contribution to the group. Two slots have already been taken up and I'm continuing to talk to other players, including those in Phnom Penh, to see if they would like to join the group. We're opening back up tomorrow so if nothing else this should be fun.

Smart approach, you basically get prop players for an equity share. I wonder why there are suddenly so many new poker rooms opening when all previous generations died from too few players.

the 'chinese investors' 30% is only 12k? like it really took more then 1 person to put up that amount? i would have assumed a poker room cost way more then 50k seeing as a subway samwich shop runs about 100k

Anyone know if you can get a deal on a room in NagaWorld hotel if you're planning to just play poker and sleep there?

I believe they sell it at heavy discount and the requirement is you basically become a prop player for free (well you get some potential profit from the room).

It makes sense because there is just insane amount of casinos and poker rooms in Snooky from what I heard. So this is a real bloodbath. Very difficult for new ventures to open business there when there is already like 20 other casino+poker rooms there.

As far as I know they have no poker room rate. But you should talk to Chris, the room manager, to be sure.

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Basically this.

There are about 12 poker rooms right now in Sihanoukville with a 13th coming soon according to rumours. In the weeks since we've been open, three poker rooms have opened and three others have closed. It makes very little sense as practically none of them are running under a model that can be sustained. But that's another discussion for another time. The previous poster is correct that the competition is fierce. We're just trying to be creative and out of the box a bit in order to carve out our own piece of the market.

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Thanks, read back through the tread a bit and booked a room at RiverKing for the night

what stakes can you find regularly in Sihanoukville poker rooms? how fair are the games? many colluders etc?

How they hell are there 12-15 poker rooms there lol? Theres not even that many here in Vegas.

Well technically there is about 20 poker rooms but looking at my bravo app only 14 even have games going and a lot of them never have more than 1 to 2 tables max but usually no games at all.

vegas is not as big a city as people think...

Vegas has 14 rooms that actually run poker games. In Sihanouk at least half of the rooms (and that's a very conservative estimate) are prolly just money laundering shops for Chinese or other mafia. If you compare the no. of poker games that actually run I'd be very surprised if Sihanoukville was at more than 10% of Vegas.

It's kind of annoying here, most of the rooms that have poker just have one table going and then a lot of the time it just runs for a few hours at night. And depending on who's in town a casino might have a good game going for a few days and then a few days later its dead and you have to find somewhere else.

You should get together with a guesthouse close by and see if they will give special rates to poker players, it would be a be incentive to the casino and to players. A room in a guesthouse where other poker players stay so they can talk strategy with other players. If they play so many hours in your room they get a special discount that the casino should contribute to. It would be a win/win for the players and the poker room plus the guest house would fill empty rooms.

Is it guest house or guesthouse, it is like pussy lips, I like to spread them.

what's the situation in sihanoukville with regards to mainland chinese tourists?

i generally go out of my way to avoid them, but from what i'm hearing the town almost caters exclusively to them now.