Well after travelling to Las Vegas 3 weekends in the last 5 weeks for the WSOP, i have a lot of gripes about Harrahs, the owner/host of the event.

Let’s start with the venue, the Rio Hotel. I stayed at the Rio 9 years ago, when it was news and it was a nice hotel. I have friends who’ve stayed their more recently and were happy. Well, i stayed in 3 different smoking rooms during my 3 stays. The rooms were ok, but all had numerous large burn holes in the carpet. This 3rd stay, began with my room A/C set to 65, but the temperature reading 76, with it rising to 80 within the first hour. Now, is it really that hard for the housekeeping staff to notice the room was too hot? Well they fixed the A/C sufficiently that evening, but every day, the temperature rose to about 74, despite the thermostat being set at 68. Not a horrible problem, but an annoyance. I called room service on Sunday and was told they were running late and my order would take 45 minutes, it took nearly 1 hour 20 minutes. Finally I called housekeeping on monday about 10am and asked for maid service after 2:30pm (while i would be at WSOP tournament), when i returned to my room at 1:30, the maid was there and had not been told of my request. Conclusion, the little things tend to slip buy.

The Casino Table Game Minimums

The disappointment keeps on coming, when you walk down the casino. It’s evening and the lowest minimum on the blackjack or craps tables are $25, with only 1 $25 table for each game, yet there are empty/closed tables in the casino. It’s obvious that because Rio is off the strip, management has decided to use their “monopoly” like power to bleed the gamblers, but most are just not playing to avoid the high minimum. As for myself, i hope in a cab and spend $10 to get to the center strip where the Bellagio has more $10 blackjack tables, then Rio has open blackjack tables.

The Big Things

Real WSOP problems - a lack of dealers and those that are there, very unhappy. Dealers at the WSOP take a lot of abuse when they make a mistake. This is unfortunate, but not totally unexpected. What is unexpected, is that they don’t find the pay worth the grief. The dealers walked out for 2 hours during the HORSE tournament and i’m told many dealers leave immediately upon receiving their paychecks. The pay for dealers suck, most dealers/croupiers make 50%+ of the earning from tips, poker players don’t tip during the tournament (there are no real chips) so at the WSOP, it’s the responsibility of the “house”-Harrah’s to ensure the staff is properly paid. We assume that Harrah’s generates in excess of $40 million in revenues, not including room rates, gambling in the casino and restaurant sales. I base this on last year’s $100+ million in prize money with harrah’s taking about 8% of the pot, Party Poker paying over $10 million to sponsor the 2006, ESPN buying TV rights, plus other sponsors, hospitality suites etc. Now take 200 tables needing 500 dealers (a lot more than usually needed) for 40 days, requires 400,000 dealer hours, which at $10 per hour (possibly more than they get paid) would cost Harrah’s $4 million, a small percentage of their overall revenues.

So Harrah’s bought the World Series of Poker, a virtual license to print money. They are working at wringing every dime of profit out the event, but maybe they should approach there strategy from the player point of view. If people feel that the tournament isn’t being run well (dealers and floor people) or the casino has artificially high minimums, they may find some descreased interest in future events.