FULL TILT POKER BLOG

Staffing Issues at the WSOP

Posted by jgreenspan | Filed under Uncategorized

I won’t go into the specifics of the hand, but suffice to say that it was the kind of thing that could only happen in Pot-Limit Omaha. Three of us were all in on the turn, and when we turned our cards up, we saw that we all had the nuts, and we all had redraws. It was sick and brutal and there was nothing any of us could have done about it.

“Want to run it two or three times,” one opponent said.

“Sure,” was my answer. I had $2,000 invested in this pot – a lot for me. And there were plenty of cards that would cost me any share of the pot.

“You can’t run the river multiple times,” the dealer chimed in.

“What are you talking about?” a tablemate replied. “We’ve been running multiple rivers for the last twenty hours.”

He was right. We had been.

“Well, I was told that you can’t run the river multiple times in low-limit games.”

“There’s $6,000 in that pot. I’m not sure this is a low-limit game exactly,” chimed in another player. He then noted that there was about $25,000 on the table.

“Call the floor,” I snapped.

The floor man confirmed what the dealer had said, that we couldn’t run the river multiple times. But at the high-limit table, a mere ten feet away, that was perfectly okay. When we said that contradicted the way we’d been playing for the better part of a day, he had no response.

The story has a happy outcome for me – I took the entire pot. But the situation highlighted some of the problems at the Rio this year. Harrah’s is using its third tournament director in three years, firing Matt Savage and Johnny Grooms, who by all accounts did admirable jobs in 2004 and 2005, respectively. Many of the dealers and floor supervisors seem to have little experience, and, as in my PLO game, there is no consistency to their rulings.

Worse yet, according to many accounts the dealers are not being treated well all and have threatened walkouts.

Some have complained of preferential treatment of celebrity players that is unprofessional.

Harrah’s has a reputation as a tough-minded corporation, the type that won’t give up a dollar easily. And while they have every right to run a profitable WSOP, it’s hard to believe that unhappy dealers and untrained or unqualified staff will set an atmosphere that will encourage visitors to return in future years.

Let’s hope upper management at Harrah’s gets wind of the problems this year and goes about putting a permanent staff in place that can address these concerns for future years.

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