[PokrLikeItsProse]

I've come late to this thread and I have little experience with live poker and no experience with games at this stake. So, really, I'm just tossing out ideas with no idea of what is feasible or what the costs are, but sometimes a fresh, outside perspective is useful.

As I understand it, the main problem is that you believe that have a player base who would happily get on the wait list if a full game is going, but who are disinterested in starting off short-handed. Is this wrong? If you don't believe this, why would you bother to try and start a 30/60 game? The wrong approach is to try and bribe people. The correct approach is to ty to convince them that their views on short-handed play are wrong.

There probably exists a niche-market for short-handed games, but it sounds unprofitable for card rooms to be spreading short-handed games full time.

So, what about a "must-expand game." You cater to a short-handed niche and make short-handed play seem special. Something like steamboatin's "Game Starters Club," for instance. With 6max tournaments in the WSOP now, you establish your own 6max tournament as an advertising leader. Are there any short-handed touranments currently running regularly in Vegas? If not, you can run an ad in whatever are the appropriate places that says you have the only short-handed tournament in town. Perhaps you sign a marketing deal with an established player which includes him writing a book on short-handed play, if you can find a publisher to work with.

In your "must-expand" game, you promise to start a game at a set time (4pm? 6pm?)6-handed action for the first three hours or some other established time frame, during which you also have incentives such as reduced rake, perhaps. The table will not be allowed to go beyond six players. After three hours or whatever period is appropriate, you let the wait list on and move to a full table. Perhaps to avoid the shock of a game shift, you dribble the players in one by one, so that you add a new player each orbit.

Once you establish a full table running regularly so that the 6pm 6max guarantee time rolls around, you might keep that full table going and think about starting up another table as your "must-expand" game. If the 6max concept succeeds beyond your wildest dreams, you may even be having a couple of full 30/60 games that serve as feeders with people waiting to play in the only regular short-handed game in town. And if this works, you just lather, rinse, repeat at the next level you want to establish.

With the prevalence of short-handed games on the internet, you might get some young, egotistical punks stopping by on a trip to Vegas thinking that they can own this game.

You attract players who may not have bothered to come to your room before. You encourage locals comfortable with short-handed play to stop by and see if this game is attracting fish. You discourage local nits from playing this game because they're not going to come in for things such as reduced-rake just to play for 2-3 hours before moving on to their regular haunts.

And one possible marketing decision is that, if the U.S. political climate changes, you jump at working with an online poker room to offer a prize package, like a weekly or monthly short-handed tournament where the prize package is airfare, a hotel stay, meal money, entry into a tournament or two at your casino, and a stake at your 6max table (with a guaranteed jump to first on the wait list) where you have to play at least a set period of time before you are allowed to walk away and cash your chips (but you can break up your requirement over multiple days). The table stake would definitely come from the prize pool from entry fees, but you can offer the online poker room deals so that the prize package value is more than their actual cost. If you guarantee a steady drip of occasional potential fish who may have only played small stakes before satelliting into a tournament and, on top of that, are used to playing no limit instead of limit, might a local player not want to consider stopping by to see if a fish does? Of course, that's probably a pipe dream right now, but it's a contingency that you should consider.

One possible change that isn't related specifically to the topic at hand is to put a video monitor of the poker room waitlist by the pit games. Encourage your players to believe that if they have to wait an hour, the easiest place for them to do so is sitting down at blackjack, because they will be notified right away when their seat is ready. I just bring it up because one possible comp is a match play at blackjack or roulette or another table game. Actually, since they are there to play poker, maybe a play at specifically three-card poker is the best comp or a similar poker-ish table game. You promise to have the players notified when a seat opens by the staff there, but maybe they'll like it so much, they'll stay in there rather than play poker. Isn't it also a good idea for these same ideas to ensure that you have a bank of video poker games right by the poker room? I haven't been to Vegas very many times, so I don't know if that is something they regularly do to ensure that poker players don't wander too far off while waiting for a seat. Another possible comp is to promise that, if they get on the list for 6max and the table is full, they get a pass to the short line to the buffet. I suppose that is open to abuse by people who might get on the list just to avoid the line and not come back. But now I'm just rambling, so those are enough ideas for now.

P.S. Do I get anything if my idea is actually used?