Re: What is the deal with all the new rooms not having players?
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2. Not complaining, but why did MGM give up that much prime real estate to a poker room? Those tables are just ridiculous roomy and it's a great location.
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Casinos seem to me to be a little bipolar about poker; there's this love/hate thing with it. Most seem to have figured out it's better to have a poker room than not, since not having one will cost you business--the number of times I've heard someone at a poker table say he doesn't really gamble but he's staying with a full comp in a 1200sqft suite that his wife's $5 slot habit got 'em can't be counted. Those are the folks a casino just won't get without a poker room for the hubby to spend time in while waiting for dinner and a show. Yet the casino would make a lot more money if all these poker players were dropping dollars into slots or betting greens on odd. So the other casino management (slots in particular) look jealously at the realestate the poker room takes up and probably monthly presents a report to the execs showing how much more the casino could make if they'd just put slots in where the poker room is.
So you get the whole range of poker rooms in Vegas. You have the little "rooms" that are really just 8 tables stuck in an obscure location, like Paris. And on the other end the Venetian and Caesars who actually spent a lotta money and devoted a lot of space to creating a real poker room.
As for MGM realestate... they do have a lot of it. They can kinda afford to devote some space to poker. When the MGM first opened, the area that poker is in was actually just a giant Wizard of Oz display (I think...my memory is a tad fuzzy going back that far, but I recall a big dome with projected skies and Dorothy/ScareCrow/Tinman/Toto in the center). So they've found something better to do with it since then.
As for why Vegas can't keep the poker rooms filled despite having 200,000 tourists in strip hotel rooms on busy weekends, I don't know.
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