[BCl]

i found this as part of another story on another site but i think it answers some of your questions....

One of the biggest spin-offs of the increased interest in tournament poker is the massive player fields that have surfaced at each major tournament event in the past year. I just got home from playing in the Tunica Mississippi World Poker Open and was amazed at how busy the poker rooms were and how many people were in each tournament. On day one at the Gold Strike Casino's $500.00 No-Limit Hold’em event, the player participation swelled to 950 people vying for 36 paying positions. The small number of spots that paid was a sore point with many players, but we'll talk about that another time. The numbers in every tournament in Tunica over the month of January broke every casino record for the Gold Strike Casino.

Another Tunica cardroom, the Grand Casino, ran a smaller but no less popular tournament series concurrently with the World Poker Open. I stayed and played at the Grand Hotel and was treated amazingly by the hotel and the poker manager Dale Carden. The Grand Hotel obviously realizes the value of its poker customers and is taking steps to woo card players o their hotel by not only increasing the size of their poker room in the next year but remodeling and renovating it to make it one of the nicest places to play in town. The Grand's tournaments, which ranged from $100.00 buy-in to $1000.00 buy-in, not only filled the auditorium set aside for the tournaments but overflowed into the main poker area. The tournaments were well run and a lot of fun to play in.