Neeme, Owen and Polk buy stakes in "The Lodge" poker room, Austin TX (Lodge containment thread)

Regs will always adapt to a structure that benefits fish because there is no reg without fish. Pokerstars is an example of trying to cater to regs and losing the fish. GG is an example of a structure where regs have adapted and fish still play

Twisting yourself up to paint extraction as a benefit is definitely sophistry. You are just taking money out of the card rooms pocket

One pillar of the community reg doesn't make up for hundreds of misregs

Idk, I need a few more '........'s to know for sure.

This is definitely a big issue I've noticed in the market. Oftentimes the majority of "feedback" the room operators receive is coming from the vocal minority of misregs who have a vested interest in having cash games and tournaments structured in a way that benefits their pockets. It doesn't benefit your overall poker economy, and it doesn't benefit your rooms business model. The silent majority of recreationals don't speak up for themselves and don't really have anyone advocating for them.

Many of the "professionals" have lost sight of the fact that their job at the tables is to be an entertainer. I want you having a grand ol' time while you lose money to me, so I can feed my cats. I was at one of the local Austin rooms a few weeks ago, it was just a 1/2 game. It was all misregs except for this one sweet recreational lady. She was stuck, she finally wins a big pot to climb out of the hole, she's not even up, just back to even. She's happy, social, conversing.

Well, the misregs could not STAND to see her happy. Every opportunity they had to call any rules infraction on her, they were taking it. I'm sitting there thinking "what the **** is wrong with you? This is the one person you WANT at your table, and you're making her experience miserable and trying to run her off"

A lot of the grinders are short-sighted, they're trying to gobble up as much of the fishes money as quickly as possible. They don't think long-term about sustainably farming the player pool. So you wind up having your fish chewed up and spat out, and then too many sharks at the table due to overfishing.

It creates games that are overly serious, not fun or social. These turn off recreationals. So you may have ten 1/2 games going, but good luck finding any that are actually worth playing in.

The reason we don't get the 2/5, etc. limits running is because the misregs want to be able to make the smaller games play larger, put the recreationals out of their comfort zones and just run them over.

Too many of the rooms focus their marketing efforts on catering to the grinders. And while I agree you need the grinders to start games, keep them running, etc. You need fun, recreational players even more, but so few rooms are bothering to market to them.

I think protecting your lower level, entry-stakes games is paramount. Newcomers need games they can learn in, without them being completely wrecked and turned off from coming back. The grinders are going to win in the long run anyway, they don't need unlimited restraddles, match the stack, etc. to tip it even further in their favor.

The same goes for unlimited rebuys for 4 hours, multi-day, multi-flight, multi-bag, top-heavy payout tournaments. All of these things are just additional edges to the better players, making it that much harder for the recreational players to have any shot.

Shear the sheep, don't slaughter them. They need to win sometimes too, so they continue playing bad and you can pay your mortgage because of it!

If you're structuring your cash games and tournaments in a way that funnels the majority of the money into the pockets of the pro's, guess what? That money is leaving your poker economy. They're using it for life expenses and large purchases.

Instead, ensure it's spread out a little flatter and more evenly. Now the recreationals have a few dollars in their pockets, it's more likely to recirculate in your poker economy and keep it chugging along.

Thanks for coming to my Ted Talk!

Agree with this, but undercover boss is for CEOs who want more attention on themselves and pretend they are great by spending 20k on a few random employees.

Isn't this what Owen and Neeme are for?

Isn't this the exact same set up in this situation lol?

This is spot on. I've never played in Texas but so many regs/pros are just entitled and toxic. They do nothing to cultivate a fun environment to play in. They think their job is to play better than bad players and that's it.

That's just batting practice. If you can't play better than people just playing for fun who like to gamble and see a ton of flops then you really suck at poker. They're all take a no give. If you want give up some short term ev for the good of the game then at best you are a complete clown who doesn't remotely understand what your job actually is.

Rooms that let mis regs dictate policy just create a race to the bottom. What matters is what the bad players want not the good players.

Also lol@ the poster complaining about 11 dollar an hour time charge. You'd have to be such a filthy nit for that not to be a good deal.