Mountaineer Trip Report- WV

[Witzo]

Got to poker room around 9pm. Place was packed. The room is super nice and spacious. When you first get into room they have the typical desk going with all the automated boards of what's being spread. I saw they had a seat open for 10/20 limit so I tried to get on that list.
Go to find out that there wasn't a 10-20 game going and that table was actually a 1/2 NL so I end up playing that.

The 1-2 NL is $75 min, $300 Max, 2-5 NL is 500 max and the 5-10 NL is 1000 max. The only limit games actually going were 2-4 and 3-6 and I think there might have been a low limit 7 card stud game going.

They had a 5/10 limit O8 game going that I played for a little bit shorthanded and it was very tough. I was definitely the fish at the table and gave up on it after I dumped about $200 in it.

The dealers are the worse I've ever seen. There was definitely grade fixing going on at dealer's school if all of these people passed. Dealers couldn't count pots, make change, pitch cards, figure out who's action it was on, etc.

I used chips to keep count of hands per half hour and the average was about 10. A good chunk of the dealers were 40+ year old women who had no idea what the rules of Hold'em were, let alone how to deal. Not a single dealer counted their tray, nor used any of the $3 chips in it for the rake. Any time a person wanted to buy chips at the table the floor had to be called over and the purchase verified. Slowed the game down drastically more.
The floor themselves were mediocre. They were very nice but wasn't structured well from what I can tell. The floor people wander the very large room as opposed to just supervising a quadrant of area to keep the games moving.

The players themselves were the worse I've ever seen. .01/.02 NL online is 10x tougher then the 1/2 NL game. I made $1063 playing 1/2 NL in a span of 7 hours. The players just wanted to give their chips away.

The waitresses were all 2.5's. Service was slow. Alcohol is not free at all and bottled waters are $2, but fountain drinks and coffee are free.

For a very large poker room there was only one exit/entrance in and out of the area which sucked. Theres multiple emergency exits but you couldn't use them. They need to open up a couple of these so you can get in and out of the area much quicker. Even the waitresses had to go way out of there way to get out of the poker area to fetch the drinks.

Theres no smoking in the poker area but on the rails there was tons of chain smokers which caused the smoke to blow into the play area. They definitely need to make the smokers move further away from the poker area.

The training that the dealers and cashiers got was apparently terrible. The cashiers were so bad when I bought chips, the person who waited on me counted out the chips 2 at a time! Buying $300 in chips is a simple 2 stacks of red, 1 stack of white + a stack of red - 4 chips. The cashier couldn't grasp this at all and was to incompetent to even use stacks of 5's.

I really can't reiterate enough how bad the dealers were. Players were stiffing the dealers left and right and I wouldn't be surprised if many of the dealers quit. There was a fair amount of abuse towards the dealers and with the few numbers of hands they were dealing a down + poor tipping and only a base pay of $3.65 an hour; the bad dealers aren't going to afford to last for very long.

The tables themselves are fantastic. They're roomy, comfortable enough chairs, nice arm cushions on the table and automatic shufflers. If it wasn't for the shufflers, dealers would have got in 4 hands a down.

Mountaineer has a lot of potential to be a great room but they definitely need to work out some bugs. I still recommend going highly based off the softness of the games alone. It's easy to forgive bad dealers, some suspect floormen and bad cashier and waitress service when people are spewing chips like they are.