Cardrooms: Everything Bad and How to Make Them Better: Reviews, Comments, and Discussion

It looks like I’m the first poster to write a full review. If there’s a better place for this post, Mods can feel free to move this review to a more appropriate area.

I highly recommend this book to anyone working in a poker room, and it will also be of interest to many regular players. Most anyone who reads Cardrooms: Everything Bad will find areas to quibble with, but I think the real benefit of the book is that it can get people to think about areas of poker room management that they might otherwise take for granted. The suggestions for speeding up fills in the “Lammers” chapter is an example of this.

Two chapters that contain advice that is imo essential for the long-term health of poker are the chapters: Excessive Rake and Promotions. In fact, one of my minor quibbles with the book is that, while the Excessive Rake chapter is good, I would have liked to see it go further in depth on just how devastating the effect that high rakes have on the game. Nevertheless, it is great to see Mason’s advice in print, and I hope poker room managers implement it. The Promotions chapter has some great ideas. I particularly liked part 3 of that chapter and it’s suggestion to have jackpots for “steel wheels,” as opposed to Royals as this will both encourage poor play and reward action players who play suited low cards anyway. The book starts with the importance of balancing luck and skill, and the advice in these two chapters would go a long way in fulfilling that goal.

In summary, this is a great and imo needed book for live poker. If poker room managers follow the advice in it, or start thinking about the concepts presented in the book and finding their own ways to satisfy these concepts, B&M poker will be better of for recreational players, grinders, and the longterm bottom lines of the poker rooms themselves.