ES
Room was clean, well laid out, and with comfortable chairs. Only negative was cigarette and cigar smoke from sports book seemed to enter the poker room in abundance, especially the tables nearest to the sports book. Can't wait for the day in the (distant) future when casinos are smoke free.
At a 4-8 limit table (with $1 and $2 blinds), you will find a wide variance in play quality - from beginners just learning the rules to highly skilled players. Usually half the table likes to chase hands, making it easy to get paid off when you have a good hand. Unless there is a raise from an early position player, there will be four or five players betting to see the flop. Most of the loose players are gone by 2 or 3 a.m. (usually because they hit the limit for what they were willing to lose), so after that the tables got pretty tight (I stayed until 5 a.m. on two nights and lost some of what I had won earlier in the nights). Played at a 4-8 table on both nights when the players who arrived after midnight were primarily dealers or casino employees from other hotels. Played in the two morning tournaments ($30 freeze out), again play varied from poor to very good. Because of the low buy-in, the atmosphere was friendly and everyone had a good time. Not sure I liked the format of limit for one hour, no-limit after that, but it was still fun. I prefer the tournaments that are no-limit from the start. But, if you are new to poker, the limit format might be a good introduction to tournament poker. The a.m. tournaments are limited to 30 players, top five finishers are paid.
The dealers were friendly and patient. They were also fast. A few were really funny.
Sometimes the service was very fast and accurate, other times it seemed to take forever for a cocktail waitress to come by. Servers were always friendly though. The coffee was really good.
Good, well-run room.
I won a high hand jackpot one night for about $80 with quad 5s and another player later won over $300 for quad kings. Dollar chips are changed with actual quarters, some of which fund the jackpots, some of the quarters are kept in the pot. Stacking the quarters after winning the pot is sort of a pin in the butt, wished they could figure out another way to calculate the rake for the jackpot so we didn't have to deal with the quarters.
