Schooling

Somebody on 2p2 asked about the possible effects of a casino opening near Boston on the games at Mohegan and Foxwoods, and then specifically asked if some of the California people could pontificate on player pool mixing and the like since we are the only place really on Earth where you can actually choose WHICH casino you want to play 20/40 at on a given evening.  So here is kind of how it works here:

First of all there are a couple of outliers that I won't really include in the discussion.  Oceans down in Oceanside has 20/40 and 8/16 (so I hear) and a 40 game on Friday nights.  But it's 100 miles from the other LA County Casinos and really shouldn't be counted.  There are the Indian Casinos like Morongo and Pechanga, but again I have no clue what happens there.  There is Crystal Casino in LA which I have never set foot inside, and there is Hollywood Park which apparently has a 40/80 Omaha 8 or better game on the daily but no LHE above like 4/8 on a regular basis.  And there is Normandie which is down the street from the Hustler and apparently stole their 25/50 game for a little while at one point.  I don't think I'm missing anything but I could be....so that leaves us with:

Commerce
Hustler
The Bike
The Gardens (formerly Hawaiian Gardens)

I doubt there are many people who have a higher min hours played among these four casinos than I do (I'm pretty sure I've played 1000+ at all four).  Now that I think about it I don't really know what I'm going to say here.  The player pools mix in various ways, based on a bunch of factors like what stakes are offered where, what times of day the games go, physical location, and who is barred/running good/bad or broke or whatever.  Generally speaking, however, I believe that more games is better for every casino.  Around here we have rampant price (read: rake) fixing, to the point that all the casinos implemented a rake increase on the same day a few months ago (they take a SEVENTH dollar if you see a river), with the exception of Hustler.  Apparently they didn't get the memo but increased the rake the next day.  The jackpots are mostly a joke (Hustler and The Bike don't rob you blind, The Gardens and Commerce do) and only Hustler does anything in the way of rakeback ($5/hour).  I guess my point is that more games and more options for players in general will force some of the idiots running these places (and they really are just stone cold idiots) to maybe not do something intelligent, but at a minimum DO SOMETHING, and as we all know (unless we live in Kansas and in that case GBUEO) mutations are the basis of natural selection.  At a fundamental level we need casinos just trying shit to try and make things better.

But on player pools....I think every case is different.  Hustler was very strong like a year ago, but now I hear they can't get even a third game down most nights (25/50) and that their game which used to break once a month now breaks in the middle of most nights (this could be because they bar players liberally...it could be because I have actually overheard floor men telling other players that "he (Jesse) is bad for the game", not realizing that the reason they are about to spread a third game is that I have been sitting in the same seat for 7 hours and have single handedly buried EVERYONE and not nit-quit and therefore nobody has gotten up from my game since lunch time lol).  They seem to have lost their players to The Gardens, which is weird since those two places are pretty far about but sort makes sense because they are very similar (just one mid stakes game to play, all daisy chained must moves, etc).  The thing that you'll see in common with those two player pools is that most of the members have admitted that they simply cannot stand the toxicity at Commerce.

The Bike over the last few years has really just been kind of an oasis away from Commerce.  We had a nice 40/80 game there for a while, but it never got very strong.  Now they have a 20/40 half kill game that seems to just have its own little ecosystem, run from 10am to 2am everyday, and genreally just be a happy little game.  Again though, most of the players that go there do not play at commerce because....

Commerce is just a fucking circus.  You can play 20/40, 40/80, 1/2, 2/4, just about anything you want and there can literally be a dozen or more games running at once and everyone is a jerk (ok not everyone but really it's ugly).  But there are some people who just accept it....everytime I play there in the 20 game (or even the 40) it just occurs to me that everyone is so....freaking...miserable.  Like, I just don't get it.  At the bike people are gambling and having fun and drinking and in general a good time is had by all.  Less so at Hustler and The Gardens but for pure pound for pound misery commerce simply cannot be beat.

I have no idea what I just said but there is my two cents;  if you build another casino who knows what's going to happen to specific other games, but in general more options for players means more total games which is good.