Why the recent rash of poker room closings is a good thing

I think I speak for the vast majority of poker players when I say that if you are a casino and you have a poker room with fewer than eight tables just shut the thing down please –unless you are the only poker provider (or one of the only) in the area then PLEASE STAY OPEN!

The most recent casualty was the Circus Circus Poker Room which closed down this week, adding its name to the following list (just off the top of my head) of poker rooms that have closed down over the past year or so:

• Tropicana closed the “Jamie Gold Poker Room”
• Riviera
• Circus Circus
• M Resort
• The Plaza switched to Electronic tables
• The Revel Casino in Atlantic City

So why don’t all of these closings bother me? Don’t I want healthy competition so I as the consumer can find the best games and the best value? Of course I do, but this is not what these rooms were providing. The reason I say this is that you are obviously not making any money, so it’s highly unlikely that the casino would cater to poker players, offer good promotions, or to be absolutely blunt, give two-shits about what goes on at the poker tables.

More importantly (from a player’s perspective) when you own/operate one of these small rooms that cater to low-limit players you are siphoning off players (most likely not the best players in the world either if they are playing a low limit game at Circus Circus) that should be at other poker rooms.

And let’s be quite clear about something, if these rooms were managed properly and/or offered player-friendly promotions they wouldn’t be closed; they would be expanding. So what we have are some extremely small poker areas inside “locals” casinos (these can’t even be considered “poker rooms” in the classical sense) that were either poorly managed or utterly neglected. It’s not as if poker players are losing their favorite local Mom & Pop business: We are simply losing the restaurant that nobody goes to more than once.

What I want is the 50-100 players playing at these tiny, out-of-the-way, casinos to head over to the Bellagio, the Venetian, the Wynn, and other poker hubs and play the low limit games there. Let the money stay in these poker eco-systems instead of a table full of random tourists losing to some local low-limit grinder at Circus Circus who grinds out the $1/$2 NLHE tables day in and day out, because once that money is in his pocket it’s never coming out.

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