Friday, November 16, 2012

Busy

Busy best describes the past three days for me. Wednesday found me hiking in Death Valley. Thursday and today found me building shelving units for The Wife's studio (which probably will take up a couple days every week for the next five or six) and refinishing the desk in my office. Work remains to be done on the desk but it looks amazing.

The hectic schedule prevented me from writing up a few things I've wanted to share. The time to catch up arrived tonight as I sit waiting for glue to dry in a variety of places. Let's start with some poker-y stuff, shall we?

***

Caesars The Evil Empire decided to change a lot of things effective December 1. Apparently, none of the poker rooms under the empire's control in Vegas will be allowed to run any promotions except one - more on that one forthcoming. This means no high hand jackpots, no more weekly free-rolls, nothing. The one exception to all of that is Bill's, which gets to continue as it wants since it will be closing is short order when the casino gets updated.

The one promotion that every poker room gets to participate in is a city-wide Bad Beat Jackpot, starting at a hefty $200k. Caesars Vegas is going the way of Caesars AC, it would seem.

Personally, I think it's a bad idea for some rooms, good idea for others. I think some of the rooms will lose a bit of business in the beginning but if the jackpot grows to a large enough number, they'll get it back even if only temporarily.

Another thing The Empire is rumored to be considering is telling all the rooms in Vegas, except for the room at Caesars itself, that they cannot run daily tournaments. Now there's a bad idea...

***

Just like my weekend, busy best describes our poker room as of late, at least as compared to the previous month. The weekly free-rolls and other promos we started in November so far prove to be fairly popular. November slowly erases the dismal memories of October from the memories of the staff. We could serve as a decent case study for what happens when non-poker people involve themselves in the day-to-day operations of the poker room.

Someone up the chain somewhere forced us to offer zero promotions during October, failing to take into account that the locals market, especially, is promotion driven. Business all but disappeared. Now that we've done it their way, and watched business vanish, they've decided to let us run a couple promotions again. Unsurprisingly, business has started to come back.

***

The allergist called a week ago to let me know the crap she needed to start me moving toward a life less affected by evil trees had arrived. Monday, I drove over and let her inject into my body a bunch of crap that my body doesn't like. Unsurprisingly, I have felt like complete shit ever since.

The best part, I suppose, is that I get to look forward to this misery for 47 more months. To be truthful, I should say that she expects me to see vast improvements by the time the evil trees start trying to kill me again in the spring.

I'm stashing this in the "Cure Worse Than Disease" file.

***

I'm hoping to figure out a way to hike The Wave next week. Prospects don't look good since permits are sold out. Still, the last time I hiked The Wave, I made the decision to do so on a Monday and was hiking the next day. Of course, that entailed a 7-hour round trip drive on Monday just on the chance I might score permits (which I obviously did), followed by a 10-hour round trip drive on Tuesday to actually do the hike. I'm not at all sure I'll be repeating that performance next week.

***

Time to finish off the last night of my weekend with a couple adult beverages and some B.B. King on repeat. ;)

7 comments:

Zooks64 said...

My son did the allergy shots for over 5 years. Totally worth it! He has almost no symptoms now.

Zooks64 said...

My son did allergy shots for over five years. Totally worth - he's mostly symptom free now.

~Coach said...

Ah, so other people do use 'repeat'... :)

Memphis MOJO said...

Even if daily tournaments are a loss-leader (not sure that's true), they bring players in.

--S said...

Daily tournaments aren't exactly a loss leader but the revenue a room gains from a daily tournament is negligible. Very few, if any, rooms will run a tournament where they take a loss just to get people in the room. Some houses have overlay to make up a guarantee, but even then that doesn't necessarily mean the house lost money.

That said, daily tournaments are still seen as a way to simply get people in the room to play cash, or a second source of income at best. A typical $55 tournament having 30 players where the house takes $10 makes $300 for roughly 3 hours of table time. By the same token, if you can get those 30 players to sit cash instead, that's 3 tables running at full rake bringing in a whole lot more than $100 per hour for the house.

Anonymous said...

Have any theory as to what is motivating the CET poker changes? Seems like a massive change in strategy.

--S said...

No theories, sorry. It's perplexing, to me at least, because a few of their rooms have been doing quite well on the popularity of the promotions they've been running. I would expect those rooms to see a drop in play once the promotions are gone. If nothing else, it should be an interesting experiment to observe...