Just back from this in Mullingar. Thank God I live in Dublin. Here's a quick summary:
Good points:
1. Good set-up, with decent poker tables, although they're round rather than the usual casino table.
2. Good chips.
3. Loads of staff.
Bad points:
1. No Dealers.
2. No chip races... with 4 tables left there were still some "25" chips on the tables.
3. No idea how to balance tables. The general way was to let tables go down to 6, then move in players. Everyone is then dealt a card, and the first Ace becomes the button!! I sh!t you not!
4. A combination of 1, 2 and 3 turned the game into a crap shoot almost as soon as the freezeout started. No dealers meant slow hands. No chip races meant that a guy would come around in the middle of a hand and start changing chip denominations, causing everyone to stop playing. But the biggest problem was in "balancing
" tables. When you let the TD know that you were down to 6, someone would go looking for players. I'm not sure how they were selecting the players, but in one level we went 7 minutes without a hand. Of course the clock wasn't stopped.
5. And here's the biggie: 247 players, average spend of 100euro, and the prize pool was... 10,000 euro. No wonder they never mentioned in any email replies about the percentage of the buy-ins going to the prize pool. Fair enough, there are a lot of staff to pay, and there were some spot prizes during the night, but ffs.
There is no value in these tournaments. They're f**king terrible. An indication of how bad the structure was: by 1.30am, 247 players had been reduced down to 30! (it started around 8pm). I'd love to see Keith Barry try that trick! And one of the most annoying things was that I heard people say how much better the game was than their regular home games. A lot of people outside the main cities just dont have a clue, the poor unfortunate souls.
After tonight, I really sympathise with NickyOD, Jem, and all the other guys who have to put up with this sort of crap.
