Las Vegas poker site has tournament details

Chuck Blount
Whenever I book a trip to Las Vegas, the first thing I like to do is develop a game plan for how I will occupy my time.

The goal is to maximize my table time in the city's poker rooms, while finding the best places to eat during my downtime.

Finding a cash game is easy. All you have to do is walk into a casino and head for the poker room, where there is bound to be a table running.

Small-stakes cash games can be found virtually anywhere on the Strip or downtown on Fremont Street. They all spread Texas Hold 'em games (both limit and no-limit), and some will have an Omaha or Seven-Card Stud game going on.

Bigger games can be found at the Bellagio, Wynn, Caesars Palace, Venetian and the Mirage, where there's a good chance of running into a player you have seen on television. The legendary "Big Game" is hosted at the Bellagio in a secured area called Bobby's Room. That's where legends such as Doyle Brunson, Barry Greenstein, Jennifer Harman and Johnny Chan will play pots the size of a standard home mortgage.

It's much trickier to find the tournaments. Most of the casinos will hold only a couple of tournaments per day due to the time needed to run them and many won't run them at all due to limited floor space in the poker room. Some tournaments require large buy-ins, in excess of $500, and others may be entered on the cheap for as little as $35.

A good resource for vacationing tournament poker players is a website called allvegaspoker.com.The site is updated regularly and provides a listing of every tournament held each day of the week in a Las Vegas casino.

The amount of detail provided in the tournament listings is impressive and it allows players to do their homework before the trip. The site lists the buy-in for each tournament and breaks that money down to see how much of the entry fee is returned to the players, compared with the house take.

For example, one of the best values is a $125-buy-in tournament held at noon every Sunday to Thursday at Caesars Palace, where 88 per cent of the money is returned to the players.

One of the worst values is a small $60 buy-in at Harrah's, spread Sunday to Friday at 11 a. m., where the house takes 33 per cent of the entry fee money.

It's exactly the kind of information that a player needs before deciding to enter a tournament, because there's nothing worse than buying into an event with a poor structure or a surprise rebuy period when you intended to play a freeze-out.

THE LINGO:Freeze-out -A tournament where all players start with the same number of chips and play continues until one player has all the chips.
Niagara Falls Reviewer

News Added: 27 October, 2008

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