2025 Las Vegas Summer Series - non-WSOP

I'm sorry to see the GN struggle with their early series guarantees. I do believe the other than WSOP venues over value their guarantees. I rarely make my decision based upon event guarantee. I consider myself a typical recreational senior player that has been coming to Vegas each June since 2003, and my criteria for chosing a tournament any given day are the comfort and amenities(chairs, bathrooms, food options, ease of getting there etc) of the venue, the professionalism and orgaization of the staff and tournament, the structure for the price of the entry fee, and the player pool (in June the senior tournament player pool will overlap significantly based on entry fee between MGM, GN, Orleans and then Venetian, Wynn, Aria and WSOP).

My advice is focus on what you can control, the venue, amenities, he staff, the organization, the structure and the schedule, but dont over commit to a guarantee. When the summer is over people will remember how well the event was run, how good the structure was, and the venue. The only time they remember the guarantee is when you miss one, change one, or cancel one.

FWIW the Daily Deepstacks at the WSOP are designated Senior one day a week.

Golden Nugget changes buyins / lower gtds! Where's the pushback like Orleans or MGM? Not seeing much complaints.

GOLDEN NUGGET TIP - If you’re coming here for poker, parking is free HOWEVER…

In the parking structure, they have QR codes to scan when you park. DON’T SCAN THE CODE! Instead, park and go directly to The Grand Ballroom and have your license plate number handy. When you register, ask them to validate your parking. Give them your plate number and they validate it digitally in the system.

For me the guarantees are somewhat useful to evaluate what size field the event is expecting to draw. Divide the guarantee by the buy-in (after fees) and you'll see how many entries they believe they'll get. When I'm looking for a couple of non-WSOP events to fill my schedule, I like to find events that will likely have 80-200 entries, and also have a good structure. My local card rooms just don't provide great tournaments, they're all lower buy-in super-turbo affairs. The best tournament you can find in the greater Seattle area is a monthly $470 buy-in freezeout that attracts around 100 players, but while it's a 30k/30min structure, they skip so many levels that it comes out to just 38 S-points. The next-best tournament is just 24 S-points and only gets around 50-60 entries. So when I go to Las Vegas, I want to play a deeper/slower structure event with a shot at a bigger payout. Unfortunately, the Golden Nugget falls short of that, as their structures look much faster than comparable events at Orleans or MGM Grand, let alone the higher buy-in options at Aria, Wynn, and Venetian. I think the one I was seriously considering for my schedule was only 44 S-points, just barely better than the monthly I play at home.

All that being said, I agree that I don't pick an event based on the guarantee, and since I love poker and what card rooms to succeed so I have more tournament options to choose from, I'm never really happy to see an overlay. I know I should be, it increases the value to the players, but I have too much empathy for the people in charge who misjudged. It's an awfully difficult thing to do in the first place, I'm not going to root for them to fail.

I think it's also the fact that their day 2s are on the same day as the WSOP day 2s. Once you cash one, you can't play the other. Last year when WSOP had their day 2s on Monday, you could safely play both. I'm not sure why GN/Orleans, etc. didn't go for Monday day 2s once they saw WSOP moving day 2s back to Sunday.

We're obviously not loving what's going on. It sucks. For us. For poker. It just sucks. We look around town and we see many venues with big overlays or just barely meeting guarantees and it's starting to become a bit of a worrying sign overall for poker.

We made some changes. We were pretty ambitious initially, and we'd love to remain so, but the suits upstairs are pretty obviously not enjoying this so far so we have to try and stop the bleeding.

We don't want to hide behind the excuses of "the economy" or "people just aren't in Vegas yet". Those are very real circumstances, but we don't want to hide behind them.

We have the Bar Poker Open group coming in and we hope that's as raucous and busy as it always is.

This. 100%

Thank You

Fellas, flight 1a of the $300, $250, 000 guarantee has just over 60 players.

Flight 1b just started and is at 19 players.

I highly recommend getting to GN now/tonight if able to. Field sizes will likely be bigger closer to the weekend so get in now, if you can.

I come in in an hour, but I've been monitoring all day. Happy to see our Big-O overperform. Need more love in the 2-card events 😂

I strongly believe that there is money to be made in wsop in certain rooms on cash games 2/5 mostly because it attracts a lot of recreationals. I think there are some private games also running then for sure. Thoughts?

What is min age for GN super seniors? Asking for a friend.

Orleans Chip Chop Survivor.

Whatisit?

Keeping an eye on things—grinding cash at the Nugget for now. Honestly, the cash room isn’t really giving off the usual WSOP energy this year either. I’ll probably hop in the mystery bounty tomorrow, but I’m not a fan of the whole “top 6 to make Day 2” setup. It adds final table pressure just to have a shot at the money and the bounties. Hoping Friday and Saturday bring in more entries so the advancing numbers feel a little more reasonable. I get that it’s all relative, but playing short-handed and still not being in the money just feels off. That said, I think there’s gonna be some serious dead money in that $250K guarantee..

The main problem with GN is that day 2 is on the same day as WSOP day2 thus it's directly competing and GN will lose that battle

Compared the revised GN schedule for the last two weeks of June and didn't find any changes to the starting stacks or level lengths. The $200 6 pm NL dailies are now $150 ( they were $130 last year) and the 6/24 Grand Stack is $300 instead of $400. Most of the guarantees on the smaller events are reduced sometimes by half but the $1 million and $500k are unchanged. I can't remember ever considering the size of a guarantee in deciding whether or not to play a tourney. Am just happy for the chance to play 2-7, triple triple draw, razz, horse and Omaha hi instead of the regular diet of NL.

The limited number of Golden Nugget events >$400 entry fees have good S ratings in comparison to the other Casinos for the same price range. Overlays are always sweet but let's all face it Casinos aren't in the business of giving away money. It's unsustainable in the long run and guarantees (unless it's an inadvertent overlay) aren't a draw to players making tournament choices as you seldom can isolate the overlay in advance anyway.

I think this is sort of the point you’re making, but overlays are actually terrible for poker players. Not only do they make venues hesitant to offer aggressive guarantees, but they also make the powers that be in casinos more likely to limit poker operations. Even an overlay at another property can cause pressure.

I see players often getting excited when overlays occur. If they intend to play more poker in the future, they shouldn’t. Nor should they get up in arms when venues take drastic steps in anticipation of or in response to overlays. At the end of the day, guarantees are nothing more than marketing gimmicks. They are not contracts. Players acting like they are serves nobody’s interests in the long run.

Anyone played any events at the orleans this year yet? I have in the past and the registration process was slow. How is it this year?

Anyone know how many entrants the GN $300 250k guarantee ended up having? Was there an overlay?

Anyone know how much the prize pools are for the Orleans And Nugget 6pm dailies or MGM 9pm dailies? I want to see if it’s worth it to play on some of them compared to the WSOP daily deep stacks.

It just appears slow because they don't allow you to reg until about an hour before the start. So there's a long reg line that doesn't move for awhile.

We did not have an overlay, actually ended up about 220-ish to the good.

1262 was the final number.

I went to sleep Friday night thinking we'd end up 100 short, but we churned through 700 entries on Saturday to make it happen. Our dealers absolutely killed it on Saturday.

I played two events last week. Both times I turned up 30 mins before start time and there was no queue at all. Immediate registration.

However, one of those events was 2-7NL which attracted only about 40 players anyway, so efficient registration was no great achievement…..

On average how many runners for normal NLH tournaments ?