An open letter to Caesars Palace poker room management

This afternoon I felt like entering a small-field, low buy-in poker tournament. Scanning an online database of what's available, I noticed your daily 3:00 p.m. tourney: $65, 50-player maximum, with 30-minute blind levels. That sounded perfect.

I was aware, though, that the Mega Stacks series was still running, and wondered whether the daily tournament schedule might be suspended for that. Easy enough to find out, I told myself--check the web site. So I did.

As you can see below, the relevant web page distinctly shows today's date, with the unmistakable impression that the tournaments listed are, in fact, being held today. With that confirmed, I drove to Caesars, parked, made my way to the poker room, and attempted to register.





Imagine my surprise, then, when I was told that not only was this event not running today, but it hadn't been running for the entire duration of the Mega Stack series, i.e., since May 28, five and a half weeks ago. While you're at it, you might also imagine how annoyed I was.

Let me explain something to you, as it is apparently a concept too technically advanced for you to have figured out on your own. One of the advantages of having a web site is that you can change and update information whenever you need to. At the beginning of the Mega Stack series, one of your employees could have added to the tournament schedule web page a note such as this: "The usual daily tournament schedule is suspended during the Mega Stack series. It will return on July 9." That should have taken somebody less than two minutes.

But not only did you not take that simple step, you have the page deliberately set up to show the current date, so that it looks for all the world as if the information is updated daily. Had the page not shown today's date, I would have wondered if the information shown was really valid while the special series was going on, and, as a result, I would have called to verify before wasting my time with the drive.

I saw no need to do so when today's date is shown on the page. After all, what kind of friggin' moron sets up a web page to look like it's showing information very specific for today, when it actually is doing no such thing?

Furthermore, what kind of lazy, inattentive, uncaring, sloppy, negligent, service-impaired poker room management lets this go on for 39 days without fixing it? Please do not try telling me that I am the first one who was led astray by the erroneous information your web site is putting out. I refuse to believe that. I suspect that a substantial number of other people have had exactly the same experience that I did. As some confirmation of that hunch, when I protested to the woman in the cage that your poker room's web site specifically said that the 3:00 p.m. tournament was running today, she said, "I know. But it's not."

This means that you either have your room set up so that employees do not pass on to you information about problems that customers encounter so that the problems can be fixed, or they have passed this notice along to you, and you have willfully chosen to disregard it--or, worse, decided deliberately to leave it in place, the better to lure in more customers with a bait-and-switch. (I understand that the Mega Stack series is doing very poorly compared to the competing offerings at the Venetian, Binion's, Golden Nugget, etc. Good. You deserve to fail.)

This is not the first time that you have behaved dishonorably. Two years ago, you radically changed the promised structure of a freeroll tournament without advance notice, changing it from relatively skill-based event to an all-in card-catching shovefest. I have not entered a tournament in your establishment since then, until attempting to do so today. Imagine how thrilled I am at the prospect of ever trying it again.

Is it really asking too much of you to have your web site display accurate information that actually matches the date that the page claims it is giving information about? Or do you just not give a rat's ass?

Incidentally, while poking around the web site to be sure I hadn't missed something before writing this rant, I noticed that you have conflicting information. The page shown above clearly specifies that the blind levels are 30 minutes. But clicking elsewhere, one gets to this page, which announces "All New Blind Structures," and says that levels are only 20 minutes long. There is no way for a user to know which information is newer and, therefore, presumably correct. Once again, though, I suppose that you just don't care enough to bother fixing it.

It is an astounding level of some combination of incompetence and indifference that you have on display here.