Excalibur's electronic tables--first impressions

Let me jump to the conclusion first: I ended up liking these tables quite a bit more than I thought I would. I expected to feel essentially neutral about them, with the pros and cons basically balancing each other out. In fact, a couple of acquaintances who talked to me there fairly early in the evening asked me what I thought, and that's basically what I told them--I didn't mind the newfangled tables, but didn't love them, either. As the hours went on, however, my impression became more favorable. By the end of my first session, my assessment was this: If I walked into a poker room in which there was an open seat at each of two tables of the same game and same stakes, one a traditional dealer-run game with cards and chips, and the other a PokerPro table, I'd have them put me into the latter.

May all my dealer friends forgive me.

And, no, I'm not being paid anything by anybody for this opinion. (I tried to score a free PokerPro hat, and was told that they were all out. That's as close as I came to any sort of bribe or compensation.)

The official announcement had put the opening at 6:00 p.m. I arrived at about 5:45, and there were already two full tables going, so obviously they got underway early. I had to wait in a line for about ten minutes before I could even enter the room. I found the sign-up process needlessly cumbersome and time-consuming. First I had to give them my MGM card and driver's license, select a PIN, pick a nickname that the system would display for me, and thus get entered into the system. Then I had to go wait in another line in order to put money in the account just created. As it turned out, for some reason the account creation process hadn't worked right, so they made me go through the whole MGM card/driver's license/PIN selection/nickname rigamarole AGAIN, which seriously annoyed me. Then it was back to the cashier with $200 cash. I had to sign a stupid receipt of some sort for that to work. Then I had to get in yet ANOTHER line to swipe my card at an automated kiosk and sign up for the games I wanted.

Cashing out was a pain, too, involving signing another receipt.

Probably due to opening-day glitches, they seemed to have no idea where there were open seats. Presumably, a person at the central desk can see this instantly on a monitor, but they sure weren't acting as if they could. Instead, a woman was constantly running between tables to see where there were open seats. When I signed up for a $1-2 NLHE game, I was about 8th on the list. But since I hadn't been hearing names called out, it wasn't clear to me how I was to be notified when it was my turn. So I asked somebody, and was told they had a seat open. I pointed out that there were a bunch of people ahead of me on the list, and they said to never mind that. I still have no clue what that whole mess was about.

I was one of ten people to start up a new game (so perhaps all of the other people ahead of me on the list were also among those seated). It was slow going at first, as everybody struggled a bit to figure out how to take the actions they wanted. But after maybe ten hands, it felt pretty comfortable.

After half an hour, we were clicking along pretty fast. In fact, speed is one of the main advantages of the tables. It offers on-the-fly session statistics, so I don't have to guess at it. Neglecting the first hour, when everybody was learning the system, we consistently got 45-50 hands per hour. Standard for traditional games is something like 36 hands per hour. It's not a night-and-day difference, but it's not insignificant; one-third more hands per hour should translate proportionately to that much more profit per hour for the better players.

My impression was that the chief time savings were not in the actual play of the hands, but the clearance time between hands. It may be that most of the time advantage comes from not having to stop for dealer changes, tray fills, making change, correcting dealer errors, etc.

The press release had said that there would be a number of big-name poker pros at the grand opening. The only recognizable person I saw was David Sklansky, who did not appear to have any underage and/or developmentally disabled young women with him. Perhaps I just overlooked them. You can see him in the second photo above, standing next to my table, chatting with Michael Hamai, "LasVegasMichael," site administrator for allvegaspoker.com, who happened to be seated at the same table I was.

We were also graced by a visit from the 33rd-best razz player in the world. F-Train is correct that I failed to recognize him at first, for which I was mightily embarrassed. I knew the face was familiar, but couldn't place where I knew him from. Then again, we had met only once before, and that for maybe 30 seconds a few months back, although we exchanged about a million IMs over the course of the WSOP. By the way, while I'm talking about him, see his interesting take on the newly opened Hard Rock poker room, for an opinion dramatically different from my own.

The PokerPro interface is pretty straightforward. You touch buttons for "call $_______," fold, or all in (see fourth photo above). To prevent errors, you then have to hit a "confirm" button. You can clear it before that, if you have made a mistake. If you want to raise, you click on a row of buttons with chip amounts. This is, I think, the most clumsy part of the interface. A numeric keypad would be much better, IMHO. For example, one time the pot was $36. I decided to bet 2/3 of that, which was $24. That required hitting the $5 button four times and the $1 four times--ridiculously inefficient to require eight button presses to enter the amount of a bet.

Some people apparently had difficulty getting the screen to respond to touches with their fingers, and instead used the corner of their MGM card. I had no such problem.

Looking at one's cards requires touching the screen on the icon/image of the face-down cards (see photos above). Your cards will be readily visible to players on either side of you if you don't cup your hand around that spot. One guy next to me was just tapping the image with his MGM card, and I could see his hole cards as plain as day. I advised him to change his technique, and he did. There's nothing about this that is much different from what happens with real cards. There's almost always at the table at least one person who just lifts his cards off the table to look at them, without the slightest thought or worry about who else might be able to see them. (Some of these people do so, I think, because they are used to home games with paper-based cards, which don't take well to bending, and they just can't convince themselves that good-quality plastic casino cards really aren't harmed when you just lift a corner for a peek.)

There is an "options" menu (first photo above). Here you can view session stats, move more money from your account onto the table, quit, sit out temporarily for a break, agree to always chop the blinds, have the straddle option turned on or off, and a bunch of other stuff.

They had a few technical glitches last night. First, the system was taking a rake even if a pre-flop raise went uncalled. Players objected to this, being used to the "no flop, no drop" practice. The PokerTek guys apologized profusely, said this was a set-up error on their part, and they would be correcting it as soon as they could shut the system down for tweaking. Apparently that's not something they could adjust while it was running. (No rake was taken if the blinds just chopped.) At one of the tables, one card reader couldn't accept any cards, so that seat had to remain unoccupied. At my table, we kept having the game suddenly paused for no apparent reason. After the third or fourth time, they traced the problem to the player on my right. The system has a built-in anti-tampering lock, much like the "tilt" mechanism on a pinball machine. The console on this guy's seat was a bit loose in its fit to the table, and when he bumped it with his knee (he was a tall dude), it would lock the game down. Again, this sort of thing is probably inevitable on opening day, and I'm sure they'll get it all fixed.

There is a rabbit-hunting option. I'm guessing it doesn't get used much, because the system charges you $0.50 every time you use it. I asked one of the technical crew on hand, and he confirmed that the computer shuffles the entire virtual deck before the hand begins, rather than randomly selecting a card from the available ones when it is needed, as some online sites do--so at least it's a "real" rabbit-hunt, in the sense that the cards it shows really are the ones that would have been dealt, had the hand played out to the end. (See this post and the Hard-Boiled Poker posts linked to therein for more details on this point.)

Here's an advantage of the electronic tables that I hadn't thought of before last night. Late in my session, a young man in an electric wheelchair joined our game. He was quadriplegic, with limited use of his upper extremities. It appeared to me that he had gross motor control of his hands, but not much fine motor control. Nevertheless, he didn't seem to have any significant trouble tapping the appropriate areas of his screen. I imagine that manipulating real chips and cards would have been a huge hurdle for him, however.

The system can, I'm told, be set up to take out money for house jackpots (high hands, bad beats, etc.), though Excalibur is not doing so currently.

For the first night, they had no time limit on players' actions, though I hear that eventually they'll set it up with a one-minute limitation. I don't know if there is some way to override that for those instances where an exceptionally difficult decision requires additional thinking time.

The most common reason for delay of game was, as at traditional tables, players not paying attention. The screen changes, bringing up the action options, and a yellow bar at the top of the screen flashes, but if a player is chatting with his neighbor or watching sports on TV, he's not going to see those indicators. Really the most effective thing would be to have some sort of a buzzer or shaker built into the seats, to get your attention like the rumble strips on highway shoulders, but I suppose that's impractical. Remember that early episode of the Simpsons in which the family went into therapy, and they could all deliver to each other an electrical shock? I found myself wanting such a thing for the one or two players at the table who were chronically too busy yapping away to notice that it was their turn.

At one point it looked like our game was breaking up, so I logged off. But then we were told a couple of new players were coming, so I swiped myself in again. Interestingly, the system would not let me buy in for less than what I had just removed from the table. This is a good thing, because otherwise players could easily remove virtual chips from the table immediately after winning them, yet keep playing with less money on the table. I understand that it is set up to only let you buy in from scratch, for less than what you removed from the table, after an hour, which matches the typical house rule. Because the tables are linked centrally, you have the same restriction if you change to a different table of the same game, again matching the rule in most casinos that you can't squirrel away chips just by changing tables.

I did not like the sitting-out process. It only takes three button presses to register sitting out (e.g., for a restroom break): call up the options menu, click "sit out," then confirm it. But coming back in requires swiping the MGM card and entering one's PIN again. Maybe that's necessary for security reasons, but it's a pain in the butt.

My game did eventually break, and I went instead to a $0.50/$1 NLHE game, with a $50 max buy-in, which is something that has probably never been spread in any Vegas casino before. Very fishy indeed.

What I still haven't figured out is the degree to which physical tells will be useful. So far, it's not clear to me when an opponent's appearance of doubt and hesitation is because of the poker situation or because he's having some trouble with the computer interface. Maybe that will become clearer with time. I am pretty sure, however, that players new to casino poker stand out less at electronic tables than at tables with chips and cards. It is in things like handling chips and cards, knowing whose turn it is to act, tipping, string bets/raises, etc., that newbies most quickly and obviously reveal themselves as such. I think that a few buttons will prove easier for them to master quickly than all of the various things one has to do with chips and cards to be (and look) proficient.

What did other players think of the tables? I heard almost all positive comments, including, surprisingly, from a trio of obviously local friends, who were--how can I say this diplomatically?--of an age that I'd be willing to guess that their home VCRs still flash 12:00, 12:00, 12:00 incessantly.

I saw exactly three unhapppy people. First, while I was waiting in line just to enter the room, somebody came up to the security guard who was controlling access (letting in one person every time a spot opened up at one of the registration stations), and asked, "Where is the poker room?" The guard said, "This is the poker room." The questioner asked, "No, I mean the room where they play real poker." The guard politely informed him that this was all they had. The guy said, "Well then I guess I'll have to go somewhere else to find real poker." There was little doubt in my mind that this was a pre-rehearsed little bit of theatrical protest this guy was engaging in. I think he knew perfectly well what was going on.

The other two dissatisfied customers that I saw, though, were genuinely caught unawares by the electronic tables. One dude stormed off quite loudly after discovering what was happening in the room, yelling, "I don't want to play on no damn machine!" The other one was a guy who joined our table, was clearly baffled by the whole process, and didn't like it one little bit. I missed the crucial hand because I was talking with a very bright and interesting guy seated on my right, but apparently this player mis-clicked something. He didn't know how to clear the error (although the "clear chips" button is prominent enough that this shouldn't be a problem), and somehow accidentally moved all in when he didn't really want to, and lost all his money. His reaction struck me as completely sincere, that the whole thing had been a huge mistake, and he left seriously miffed.

Speaking of accidentally going all in, one player cleverly figured out an angle-shooting technique. We had just had a hyper-aggressive guy sit down and immediately try to bully the table with constant big raises. On the hand in question, he raised from under the gun to, I think, $20. The player in the small blind pressed some buttons. The screens showed him all-in. He immediately got a shocked look on his face and said, "Oh no! That's not what I meant to do!" It fooled me--it looked perfectly genuine. But when UTG made the all-in call with his pocket queens, Mr. Oops was revealed to be sitting on K-K, and broke out in a big grin. He won. Nicely done, sir. I've occasionally seen people pull a similar stunt with large-denomination chips (particularly in tournaments) "accidentally" being tossed in, but it was a novel variation on the theme to have hit the "wrong" button on an electronic table.

Some of the objections raised to electronic tables are just, well, looney. For example, a contributor to the allvegaspoker.com forums with the alias of "Railbird" wrote, "I guess I fear change in this regard. I do not see any positive side. The reality that I see is a game that is not poker because it is not played with a real 52 card deck, shuffled and put in the air. Instead the "deck" is a computer program. What's not to say that the program will be written not to simulate a random shuffle, but rather to stimulate action. I just do not want to play that game." (See here.) To that kind of idiotic paranoia, I can only suggest having one's medication regimen carefully reviewed by one's psychiatrist. And watch out for the black helicopters following you home.

One of the most frequent comments I read in advance of the room's opening was some version of this: "If I wanted to play on a computer, I could stay home and do it." Most, though not all, such objections, I think, come from people who haven't tried it. My subjective sensation was that the experience is far, far, closer to traditional casino poker than it is to Internet poker--something like a 90/10 blend. Being able to chat with other people and watch them make their moves is worlds removed from sitting solo at my desk at home. Yeah, you press buttons instead of lifting cards and pushing chips, but I think that's pretty minor. I felt that the great majority of the experience I'm used to remained intact.

As regular readers must know by now, I generally dislike handling chips and cards, because, well, they're disgustingly filthy. (See here for my full rant on this.) PokerPro pleases my aesthetic sense on this point.

There are two main things I liked about the electronic tables that will keep me coming back for more. First is the relative paucity of unnecessary delays and errors. The game just moves along better when there aren't dealer changes, fills, exposed cards to figure out, misdeals, time-consuming split pots, making change, manual shuffles, out-of-turn action to sort out, etc. I played for about 7 1/2 hours, much longer than my usual sessions, but it felt like time passed much more quickly without those kinds of delays.

The second big advantage is simply profit. To explain this, let's talk about my actual results last night. I dug myself into a $100 hole early, when my J-J lost an all-in race to A-K with a rivered king. (PokerPro is TOTALLY rigged! That would NEVER happen with a real dealer and real cards!) I rebought, then just couldn't make any headway, sitting for more than three hours at about the same amount. Finally I had a couple of big hands (especially this one: Q-4 in the big blind, unraised pot, flop of Q-4-4, and a guy with A-4 in the small blind; I think he, too, may have concluded that PokerPro is RIGGED!) and got ahead. I was up by about $150 on the night before the final hand. I lost virtually my entire profit in one of those horrible flopped set-over-set situations: my 9-9 against somebody else's A-A on a flop of A-9-4. (See? RIGGED, I tell you!) It was nearly 2:00 a.m. at that point, so I decided to call it quits, and left with exactly $13 profit for my efforts. Bleah.

Anyway, let's consider the situation if I had left one hand before I did. As I said, it had been a pretty unimpressive session, with about $150 profit. The session stats screen informed me that I had won 45 hands. That means I would have tipped the dealers $45. Furthermore, the maximum rake was only $3 instead of the $4 plus $1 jackpot that the Excalibur previously took. You might argue against counting the jackpot money, because on average you get back what you put in, theoretically, so I'll disregard that. I can't say exactly how much rake was saved, because I don't know how many pots were of what size. But I think it's fair to estimate that the average saving was $0.50. So even if flesh-and-blood dealers had put out the same number of hands per hour as PokerPro did, I would have been up by about $67 less than I actually was ($45 in tips and $22 or so in additional rake). Furthermore, as I noted earlier, human dealers on average get out about 1/3 fewer hands per hour. Put all of this together, and it constitutes a huge fraction of my profit that would not have been realized playing the same cards a week before the electronic tables were installed.

As one more small part of this equation, the tables are set up to automatically reduce the rake (I'm not sure exactly how far) when the games get short-handed, as opposed to having to remember to ask for a rake reduction at traditional games.

Those are the main two reasons I plan to keep going back to the Excalibur: I can play with less annoyance and less fatigue, while simultaneously making a greater profit. I had not anticipated that the differences would be so dramatic, but they were.

Don't mistake me for saying that I hope all poker dealers get replaced by computers. My view isn't that extreme. I'm only saying that these tables have real, tangible advantages that, for me, definitely outweigh their disadvantages. I have no desire to see them take over every poker room in the city, but I'm quite happy to have them available in the mix of rooms I visit.

I don't have a keen sense of whether this experiment will succeed or fail, in financial terms, for Excalibur. It may be that people will take to them as I did. Or they may stay away in droves, as the saying has it. I don't know. But I hope they carve themselves out a nice little niche.


Addendum

Immediately after posting the above, I went to http://www.allvegaspoker.com/ to see what other contributors to the site might have been at the Excalibur opening yesterday and what their impressions were. Perhaps the best overall observation I've seen on the controversy was just posted a couple of hours ago by a person calling himself "lesvegas." I liked it enough to quote it in its entirety here (see here for the whole discussion):

I suggest to any of you focusing on the negative aspects of the change to
an electronic poker room through emails to MGM/Mirage, boycots of the Excalibur,
posts on this site etc., that you give equal time to focus on the positives of
the developing Las Vegas poker landscape by doing the same for the companies
that have invested heavily in their poker rooms.

Railbird, have you also emailed the execs at Hard Rock thanking them for
providing poker players with a beautiful new room to play and promising to visit
their property frequently? Did you write to the owners of the new East Side
Cannery and thank them for including a state of the art live poker room when
they designed and built their new casino?

I love Las Vegas. There is something for everyone here. Locals have places
that cater to them, rich people can stay at some of the most luxurious hotels in
the world. Fremont Street offers everything the budget traveller could hope for.

And now, poker players have more options than they ever had before. We have
the class of the Venetian, the swankiness of the Hard Rock, the coziness of TI,
the nitiness of the Stations, and the low stakes, drunken, swear at the
tableness of Excal. This is great. I want to try all of them.

As with most things, people will find their favorite room to play. For me,
its the Golden Nugget. I like the vibe, the atmosphere, the comps and the way
the room is run by managemant and dealers. Nobody talks about the Nugget on this
site, and thats ok by me. Its only one of many rooms. And that is the best part.
Many rooms, and choices for everyone.

Now, with new rooms and new ideas, we as poker players have even more
choices, and I cannot see this as a bad thing. All the doom and gloomers
predicting the death of live poker really need to see the big picture here.
There is a great deal of focus and investment in poker in Las Vegas and I, for
one, am very excited and cannot wait until next week when I come to town to try
out both the Excal and Hard Rock rooms.