Peru Poker, Tournament + Limit Formats

[monstro]

I have been out of poker for the last 6 months due to moving to a new country, Peru. I live in Lima and am surrounded my 100s of small casinos mostly consisting of slots and enough smoke to give you lung cancer in 1 evening. Anyway, I stopped by the Marriot Casino today and saw they have live poker. They have a tournament every Sunday as well as 1/2 and 5/10 limit poker daily.

The 1/2 table has a $25 minimum buy in with a $5 rake (per player) every 90 minutes. The 5/10 has a $300 minimum buy in and $10 rake every 90 minutes. They say if you come in after the half hour it's 50% rake. I am very limited with casino poker in the USA so I am very curious how this compares to AC and Vegas.

The tournament is a $100 buy in and gives you 3000 in chips. The blinds start at 50/100 and go up every 30 minutes. After 90 minutes they go down to 20 minute rounds and you can also rebuy for $25. There are 2 more rounds followed by $100, $500 and $1000 rebuys. Finally you reach the last round. Antes start in round 3 after the first break and get pretty steep. It seems like a very fast turbo MTT. The first 5 places pay with 1st place getting $5000. What are your thoughts on this?

This seems like my only viable option for live poker as I don't really want to get involved in home games as I'm not familiar with laws and spending time in a Peruvian prison indefinitely is not my idea of fun. Thoughts, wisecracks, condolences?

[MicroBob]

My GF's family is from Lima and we will be visiting there in Dec. Not sure I'll have time to check out the smoky poker scene there but it has crossed my mind just out of curiousity as I was aware that it was apparently growing somewhat.
I saw that they were having a $1500 buy-in Majestic Poker Tour tourney last April or so.
So I'm guessing poker must be doing decently in that area.

A couple of my GF's cousins or aunts/uncles there have reported to her mom that they like to go out to one of the casinos and 'play poker' but I'm guessing they are referring to some Caribbean-Stud or 3-card poker type table-game.


Curious if they actually use dollars at the tables.
I would assume they just use the Peruvian currency (Soles) and you are translating to dollars for simplicity??


most tournaments in the $100 range in the U.S. will probably have similarly fast structures. So that MTT doesn't sound too atypical although you could probably do better (or worse) depending on how much you wanted to shop around in the U.S.

Also kind of hard to tell with the lack of info (how many chips per rebuy, how many chips do you need for a rebuy, how many players, how quick is the WHOLE structure).
Basically, how many players typically, how big is the total prize-pool at the end, how long does it take to get to play the whole-tourney and/or get to the final-table.
stuff like that.


For more details on how to analyze some of this on your own you could get a book such as Arnold Snyder's Poker Tournament Formula where he gives an idea on how to analyze the lengths of various MTT's.
You would have to order via Amazon or somewhere else of course.

But the point is, for a $100 or lower tourney there are lots of places in the U.S. where you really aren't going to get a lot of play for your money. With all the rebuys in there it sounds like this probably isn't significantly faster than a mediocre U.S. tourney.


$10 per 90-minute time-charge on a 5/10 limit game is probably decent I suspect.

If they deal 50 hds per 90 minutes on a 10-player table then they pull in $100 in that time (if super-slow dealers and lots of action on each hand I think 50 might be stretching it).

If every hand got raked $4 instead (like they do in Calif I think) then they would pull in $200 in that time.

Also worth noting that perhaps you don't have to tip when you win a pot there (not sure what the custom is)??

If all the other players are super-loose and you are ultra-tight then obviously paying the same rake-share per 90 minutes as all the players is kind of a rip-off for you.

But compared with $4/rake + $1 jackpot + $1 obligatory-tip on many U.S. games I think $10/90 mins looks decent to me.


On the 1/2 limit game I would guess that $5/90 minutes isn't great. But most people would consider that the steep traditional rake on limit 2/4 and 3/6 in the U.S. makes those games closer to unbeatable also.
So it's not too different.


Really looking forward to our 2-week trip to Peru in December.
We'll be staying with her parents in Lima and also taking a trip to Macchu Pichu.

[monstro]

Wow thanks for the lengthy reply. You will love Peru. Lima is a very underrated city and Peru's economy growing rapidly. I've not been to Macchu Pichu but am planning a trip for January. You are going at a good time since summer will just be beginning.

Regarding poker I was using dollar figures. Dollars can be used here for just about anything over $20 and are actually prefered by most retailers. All of the poker prices were listed in dollars at the casino. I'm a bit rusty with poker so I'm not sure I want to basically give my $100 away but I may go just to check the tournament out Sunday night. I also may go play some 1/2 to get a feel for the place. If I lose my buy in, so be it, I'm just going for entertainment value and to get an idea of the calibar of players. I'm interested to see how many players are Peruvian, I'm betting most will be gringo tourists.

I have not been able to find any other information on live poker here aside from the Sheraton. It apparently is pretty high-roller oriented but I still may go down to check it out. While the Marriot is walking distance from my apartment the Sheraton is a solid 20 minute taxi ride through a shady part of town. If I were to get lucky and win a couple grand I'd feel pretty damn terrified coming home. Other than the Sheraton and the Marriot I've only found machines. There is a casino called "Atlantic City" a few blocks from my apartnment that is building a huge expansion. I'm hoping included in that is a poker room. We shall see. By the way, I live in Miraflores for anyone familiar with Lima.

I appreciate your input and wish you the best of luck on your trip to Peru. You are lucky like me to have a Peruvian girlfriend. I am so crazy about my girlfriend I left my country. Being a work-from-home programmer all I cared about was internet for work and I was gone. Earning an American salary combined with the low cost of living has been amazing.

So anyway, there is a report from south of the equator. I'll update this post if I learn anything new.

[chopchoi]

a $100 tourney with $500 and $1000 re-buys? weird.

[Shaqizzle]

Lol, I might actually have a reason to go down to Peru with the family now, My mom's from there.

I have only visited there when I was really young, like around 2 or 3, been almost 17 years now.

[tribet]

To find out what type of tournament you have here we need a little more information. How many rebuys can you make what is the cost and how many chips do you get? When can you make these rebuys and do you have to be below a certain chip count to do it.

Take a look at 2 articles I wrote which will explain a system you can use to evaluate tournaments

www.twoplustwo.com/magazine/current/tribe0807.html

www.twoplustwo.com/magazine/issue30/Tribe0607.html

Is this the only tournament available in Peru? I am building a website which evaluates all tourneys in the United States but am thinking of adding some international type information as well.

[JesseUW]

Wow I am shocked to see this thread. I just got back from a 2 month vacation in Peru. Obviously I spent some time in the casinos while in Lima.

Heres the lowdown: Atlantic City has a much better poker room than the Marriot. They get two 1/2nl games going that run the whole night. They also run SNGs all night. The players, like most 1/2 players, are terrible. You would think most would be tourists but they actually have a lot of Peruvian regulars.

The smoke is incredibly awful. The Marriot won't even get a game going always. In both of these casinos they use $s for gambling, but the Marriot also has pit games that accept Soles. Right across from the Marriot is another casino with poker, blackjack, etc. but I haven't played there.

Some downfalls. Poker, blackjack, etc don't open until 6pm everywhere. I don't know when they close, but I've played as last as 530am. The rake is TERRIBLE. I don't know the %, but there is NO MAX. I have seen 8$ repeatedly taken out and there is no jackpot, just the rake.

Also, they probably only get in about 10 hands / 30mins. The dealers sell the chips, not the floor, so they are constantly stopping the game to sell chips. They also check the bills to see if they are counterfeit with the stupid pen. Only 1 table has an auto shuffler. And the other part that really sucks. Instead of just keeping track of the pot as the hand develops they count the entire fricken pot at the end of the hand, AND then take the rake.
WOW.

But at least you get to play in effing Peru. Miraflores is nice, but head up to Mancora, its basically like Hawaii or Tonsai in Thailand.