Vegas Tourney Play

[JayLear]

I'm pretty new to this site, and I'm very impressed with the content. I've been playing poker for about 3 years now, and I'm at the point where I am soaking up as much information about the game as I possibly can, so two-plus-two has been a favorite place for me to visit recently.

Anyway, I'm from Chicago, but I love to visit Las Vegas whenver I can. The last couple of years that translates into about two trips a year. The last couple of trips I've ventured into the poker rooms, and sat in on a few NL Hold'em tourneys. I don't have a ton of money to play, so I try and keep my entry around the $50 mark. I've played tourneys at Luxor and Mandalay Bay, and on my last trip in April I made the other end of the strip and sat in a few tourneys at Sahara. I was pretty impressed with the tourneys there, and the poker room in general.

I'll be hitting Vegas again next Friday, and staying through the weekend. I hope to play a lot of poker, and I see that just about every casino in Vegas does tourneys now. I'd appreciate input on some of the tourneys and poker rooms around town, from those of you that have more experience playing there. Any input is very much appreciated.

Thanks,
Jay

[lgas]

MGM has $65 tournaments every day (I think) at 11am. No rebuys. I just came back from playing in one for the first time (fwiw, I took third out of 91 players). Its not a bad tournament except that the blind escalation gets ridiculous near the end... they start at 25-25, then go to 25-50 then double every 20 minutes, so you get 50-100, 100-200, 200-400, 400-800, 800-1600, etc... at some point it changes over because I remember winding up at 3000-6000 (then 5000-10000) but its pretty steep. The upside of this is that the tournament is over in about 3 hours (well, ours took closer to 4 because there was a snafu when coloring up to $1000 chips which caused about a 40 minute delay of game while they went to the surveillance tapes to straighten it out)....

But anyway, this is one of the better small tournaments I've played in Vegas. The MGM has a surprisingly nice poker room -- the tables are nice, they aren't crowded together like a lot of places (*cough* Wynn), cocktail service is great, you can order sandwiches at the tables, etc.

If you wanna stretch your budget a little you might also look into the $1000+60 tournaments at the Bellagio... they have satellites you can get into for $240 which gets you a seat plus some cash.

-
John

[JayLear]

[ QUOTE ]
MGM has $65 tournaments every day (I think) at 11am. No rebuys. I just came back from playing in one for the first time (fwiw, I took third out of 91 players).

[/ QUOTE ]
Thanks for the info. Any idea how much goes into the prize pool in the MGM tourney? I like the Sahara tourney quite a bit, but the house takes about 30% in that one, which seems a bit high.

Thanks again,
Jay

[A_C_Slater]

What did 3rd place pay?

I assume they pay down to nine?

[lgas]

In the one I played in they paid 6 spots, and the prizes were something like:

1. 1800ish
2. dunno.. gonna guess ~1000.
3. 650
4. 450
5. 250
6. 205

So if there were 91 entrants, that's $5,915 brought in, and $4,355 paid out, so $1,560 that they kept, or about 26%.

Since I'm not sure of the 2nd place payout it might be closer to 30% or it could be closer to 20% if they were more generous with 2nd (I doubt it).