"How not to run a poker room" by Mountaineer Casino *WARNING THIS THREAD IS LONG*

I live about 40 minutes from this place and I went there for a heads up tournament this weekend.  I havent been there for a while but not much had changed.  First, I go there Friday night for a satellite into the event.  2 people get seats and 3rd place gets 200 bucks.  This event goes off without a hitch and i win a big pot early but get little to play with after that.  With 4 people left i was in 4th place and managed to never get called on an all in and slip into 2nd place.  I was pretty happy with myself because i managed to keep taking small pots off the big stack and avoiding a situation that would be putting all my chips at risk.  I end up getting the seat and i ask the floorman (this guy seemed to know what he was doing) if they are going to cutoff the tournament tomorrow at 16 or 32 or 64 something that would be even.  he told me yes there wasnt going to be any byes and i said alright.  so i get there saturday morning and this is where the fun starts.

 

tournament is supposed to start at noon and i hear a different story from the floor people who say whoever wants to play will be allowed to play.  anyways they have 20 people and the head floorperson is trying to go 20 10 then 5 and at 5 people award the byes.  obvoiusly they were going ot have to have a pigtail round but i didnt wanna be the one to say that and finally ONE OF THE OTHER PLAYERS IN THE TOURNAMENT SUGGESTED THIS AND THE FLOORMAN LOOKED AT HIM LIKE HE WAS CRAZY.  eventually they decided to do this (around 1 o clock) and then they let another person come in so they now had 21 people in the tourney instead of 20.  so they had to add another pigtail game obviously but this seemed to confuse them even more because "now they had an odd number of people".  after about 15 minutes they figured this out and we finally had a tournament.  they drew the byes (i got the last one!) and the tourney started.  they announce the prize pool of 10,500 and the prizes are "5500 for 1st, 2700 for 2nd, 3rd and 4th 900".  this is wrong obviously they forgot about the 500 bucks from the 21st person.  i tell the floor he says no its right then i explain this to him and he changes the prize pool.  the funny thing is the players were as dumb as the floor.  one player actually traded his bye so he could be in the playin round because he didnt want to wait? i ended up avoiding the pigtail game but it was almost 330 when the playins finally ended.  then im in the longest first round match have the lead for 90% of it and i have 8q in the big blind he limps in and i check.  the flops 852 with 2 spades out there theres 3200 in the pot i bet 3000 and guy goes all in for about 14k.  i call him he has 8j he says well i guess youre gonna win and i said ive seen stranger then turns the 5 i say wow really bad card (all kind of split possibles now) and of course the rivers the worst card of all the jack.  he has the lead about 32k to 18k now and with blinds at 8 16 he kept raising and i was getting nothing and eventually was forced to go with j5 suited against his 1010 and i was defeated.  i was disappointed by the loss because i felt like i had a great chance to win the tournament as i was used to playing heads up and i felt like most of the guys in the tourney probably were not accustomed to it.  worse then the loss was the disgrace running of the poker room there.  it opened in october and people constantly bitched how bad it was run but i was willing to give them a free pass because it was a new room.  now its june and apparenly nothing has changed except the amount of people there.  when the room opened, on the weekend there was usually about 5 or 6 2/5nl games 2 or 3 5/10s and 1 10/25.  friday night there was 2 2/5 nls and saturday during the day there was just 1 2/5.  i think there are 3 reasons this place is failing (hard to imagine a poker room failing these days):

 

1.  gas -- mountaineer is about 90 minutes from cleveland and about an hour to 75 minutes from pittsburgh.  hard to see a lot of people coming that far to lose money.

 

2.  casino games -- now the casino is up and running since christmas (poker was open in midoctober) people would rather play there and try and get fast money.

 

3.  the big reason the management -- who would want to play in a room that they could run better then the people who run it?  if mountaineer was in vegas instead of west virginia it would have been shut down already its that poorly ran.

 

sorry this is so long but i felt like you guys needed to hear the whole story so you could see where i am coming from.

 

i havent been to wheeling yet but i know the room is small.  im guessing that it is better ran then mountaineer, im sure it couldnt be worse.  i would like to go up to wheeling sometime, but mountaineer is closer and the room is much bigger, bigger tournaments.  i honestly dont even wanna go to these places for cash games im only goin to them if theres a big tournament from now on.  mountaineer has 37 tables i think and not even half of them in use on friday night, very sad.

well im goin down there again tonight they are having a limit tournament which should be perfect since im sure these people never play limit poker i cant wait to see how they run this though