In 1987, I moved to Las Vegas and have lived here ever since. Also in that interval, much of my time has been spent playing poker in various Las Vegas poker rooms, and over this time period a number of them have collapsed or at the very least, lost a significant amount of their business.
The reasons for this are varied. On the one hand, it can just come about that changing conditions, which have nothing to do with the poker room itself, can affect business. One example of this is the current bad economy meaning there is less disposable income available to poker, or gigantic super casinos, such as those built on the Las Vegas Strip, taking poker business away from the downtown casinos. And when this is the case, there’s not much that poker room management can do about it.
But a more common reason has to do with the decisions which poker room management makes that impact the games they are spreading and their relationship with the player/customers. When these decisions are made well, not only are the regular players who start games and keep games going enthusiastic about playing in a particular room, but tourist type players will also want to play there because they know ahead of time that this is where the action is.
But when these decisions are made poorly, not only will a cardroom lose business, but an adversarial relationship can develop between regular players and cardroom staff that can accelerate the loss of business in the future even when there are no other legitimate problems, and bad decisions can be made with good intentions. This brings us to the battle of limit games between the Bellagio and the Venetian.
Before continuing with this commentary, I do want to point out that what will be written here is just my opinion, and it does not have to be correct. For a number of reasons, but mostly because the limit games where my time is spent are spread at the Bellagio, my playing time at the Venetian is now zero. In fact, going by memory, I have not played there in at least two years so my comments will not apply to their day-to-day operation. But despite this, why they have failed to get limit games of any significance is obvious to me.
In my opinion, one mistake that poker room management often makes is that they consult way too much with their players. Now this statement may sound crazy to many of you. Shouldn’t poker room management be talking to their customers and listening to their suggestions and try to make improvements whenever they can? Of course they should. But poker room management also needs to understand how to run a poker room, and when players make poor suggestions, they should know not to do it.
For instance, if players were to suggest that the reception area for customers just coming to the room be moved to a difficult to reach location, no poker room would do this. And if they did do it, the room would quickly lose its player base.
So this brings us to the $15-$30 limit hold ’em game with blinds of $5 and $10 that the Venetian attempted to spread. Why in the world would they do this?
Well, to answer that question, a big thread began on our website, and a representative of the Venetian Poker Room even participated. The discussion of the mini-blinds begins in post #430 of that thread. According to him, a couple of customers suggested this structure, and it was now their game. But on our forums, we had a large number of people tell them that this structure was no good and it would ruin not only their $15-$30 game, but their $8-$16 as well. I even got into the act by participating in the thread and gave reasons why this game would fail.
But in fairness to the Venetian, who were they suppose to listen to? And how were they to know which structure was better? The answer is simple, management was already supposed to know, and if they didn’t, they should be able to quickly find out.
So how do you quickly find out? That answer is also easy, for limit hold ’em look to see what game structures other rooms were spreading, and this includes games on the Internet. If they found a bunch of $15-$30 games with blinds of $5 and $10, then without having a deep mathematical understanding of the underlying statistics of the game, they would know that spreading this structure would at a minimum be okay. So what would they have discovered?
First, they would have seen that there are virtually no $15-$30 limit hold ’em games with this structure. And second, they would have discovered that relative to $10-$20 and $20-$40 hold ’em, which both use a chip structure that is a 1 to 2 ratio in chips for their blinds, there are very few $15-$30 and $30-$60 games. Furthermore, they would have concluded that the Bellagio was probably making the right decision to switch their limit hold ’em games to $10-$20, $20-$40, and $40-$80. Thus, The Venetian should have concluded that if they wanted to attract limit games, the structures and limits should have been identical to The Bellagio. Then, they could have attempted to beat the competition with better promotions, better cardroom atmosphere, better dealers, better cardroom service, and so on.
So what’s the result of all of this? I can’t say for sure, but my suspicion is that there are a number of unhappy limit players when it comes to the Venetian poker room. This was clear from the response on our website, and it can lead to the adversarial relationship that can develop between player/customers and poker room management. Of course, I don’t know if this is the case, but if The Venetian is now going down the same path in their limit Omaha games, then I wouldn’t be surprised if that is the outcome.
