Greektown trip report

[Glurfle]

The short version:

Room still smoky and dirty.
Dealers still bad.
Brush still bad.
Players still really bad.

On the bright side, lines aren't nearly as bad any more. I managed to get into a 5/10 within 10 minutes on both Saturday and Sunday, which is about 7 hours better than before the expansion was opened. I'm not exactly wild about how they manage this, though. On Saturday afternoon they had maybe 6 or 7 5/10 games going, with a must-move in the non-smoking side. There's also one severely overworked or possibly undermotivated brush, so their setup more or less guarantees that every table is going to be a couple players short while they try to funnel players through the must-move. While there was technically a non-smoking 5/10 table, the 3 adjacent tables are all smoking, so really only the 1 and 10 seats guarantee a non-smoking neighbor. I have no idea why they don't just run the non-smoking table in the (gasp) non-smoking room, since there were certainly open tables throughout the entire weekend.

Dealers were almost all mediocre at best. Several who were clearly new and had no real idea what they were doing. A couple who were pretty good but liked to talk way too much and would hold up the game to share their vast knowledge with the players. One or two that actually made comments on play. They're still pooling tips there too, so I don't expect the quality will improve much.

The players were much, much worse than in L.A. Also much friendlier. I definitely enjoy talking to the players in Detroit more, since they tend to be a lot more touristy than those in SoCal. Only one total jerk over the course of 16 hours this weekend. Problem was that some of the really terrible players were also terribly slow. It's hard to complain about this since they clearly had no idea how to play the game at all. We're not talking just bad here, more like "I don't know what the ranking of the hands are". So playing 20 hands an hour is bad, but playing against people who will call with Q-high and 7-high on the river must be good.

Like I said, totally soft games. I lost $250. A hand that's pretty indicative of the level of passivity there: I raise 5 limpers on the button with AKo, flop comes AJ8 monotone, so I have TPTK and the nut flush draw, and I get check-called all the way with middle set and two pair. Oops.

I still don't really recommend Greektown compared to any other poker room I've been in, but it's the only game in town. It's congenial, the people are nice, the games are soft, but everything else sucks.

Edit: One last thing. They've gotten totally nitpicky about rules now. No cash on the table, no napkins on the table, no reading at the table, no cell phones (okay, I understand this, but it's a rule they didn't have before). I think breathing funny nullifies the bad beat as well, but they haven't figured out how to outlaw that without having people dropping dead on the table.

[Aces McGee]

Can someone explain to me the point of the must-move structure? What's the logic behind it?

-McGee