ES
The casino poker room at Maryland Live! is nicely appointed, the dealers are pretty sharp and most are fairly good (Although quite a few are international and therefore hard to understand at times which makes them not very interactive or sociable). The cocktail waitresses are nice, but somewhat scarce. You will be paying for every single drink (except soft drinks) and its regular bar prices, so be ready to pay for your buzz or play strait.
I recently moved to the Annapolis, MD area. I'm primarily a LV player. I try to get to Vegas at least 3 times a year and poker is always the main priority while I'm there. I rarely leave much money in Vegas either. I like the fact that low cost tourneys seldom have more that 1 couple dozen players and my odds are good of finishing in the money. This is do to the shear volume of opportunities to find a tourney LV. And cash games are rich with guppies wanting to know what it feels like to sit at a big casino poker table and throw chips into a pot with someone other than their drinking buddies at their regular home games. And in the rare instance that you do find yourself at a cash table with someone else who's there to make real money and not just playing games with a quarterly work bonus, you cash out walk across the street and fish in another pond.
In Maryland on the other hand, although there are now several casinos to choose from, there are not enough yet to thin the herd at any one. So, all the serious players are there all the time. The last low cost tourney I played in at Live! was a $100 buy-in, Monday morning game. I was playing with over 100 other players. I broke out in 23rd place and was still nowhere near the money bubble.
I play cards a lot. I do it as practice for my Vegas trips. But, I find the game play in MD at Live! to be very different from the poker room play in other cities with a more heavily diluted player pool.
I saw another review of Live! on PokerAtlas that claimed Live! has a 30% fish population... I'm no mathematician, but that sounds like Live! has a 70% shark/semi-pro population. If 70% of the population are sharks... It sounds like Live! is a shark tank. That's not for me. If I want to be challenged to that level of play, I'll wait for the big tourneys. I play poker for the pay off... give me the fish ponds of Vegas and AC, I prefer not to swim with sharks unless I have a cage around me.
Add to all this the fact that not even drinks are comped, I'll stick to online apps and tavern leagues for practice and continue to save my money for the neon streets of the strip.
