Monday, December 08, 2008

Define "most"

I forgot to tell you about another little incident from the Mirage Saturday night. Because it's a place I don't visit often (once or twice a year), I couldn't remember if they had any jackpots that I needed to be aware of--bad beats, high hands, etc. So I asked the dealer. He said there were none. As if he felt the need to justify this state of affairs, he added, "Most of the poker rooms on the Strip don't have them. You'll find them farther out in the city and at the locals casinos, but not on the Strip."

Oh, really? This is all done from memory, but it's probably pretty accurate. The following poker rooms on the Strip do have bad-beat jackpots, high-hand jackpots, aces-cracked bonuses, or some combination of the above on a regular basis: Stratosphere, Treasure Island, Caesars Palace, Monte Carlo, Excalibur, Luxor, Mandalay Bay, South Point, Riviera, Sahara, Harrah's, Imperial Palace, O'Shea's, Flamingo, Bill's, Bally's, and Planet Hollywood. The poker rooms at Paris and Tropicana also had them, though both closed recently. No such jackpots: Mirage, Bellagio, MGM, Venetian (though they occasionally throw one in as a special limited-time promotion), Wynn. Unsure (because I almost never go there): Circus Circus.

Hard to see how the list of no-jackpot Strip poker rooms constitutes "most." Looks like at least 3:1 the other way.

I should add that I don't see the absence of such things as a negative. I'm happy to leave the dollar in the pot and win it by my allegedly superior skill, rather than have it taken out and awarded by dumb luck. Besides, the net effect of most such promotions is to take money from no-limit games and transfer it to players in the limit games, because the events they are rewarding happen much more frequently in the limit games.

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