2025 Las Vegas Summer Series - non-WSOP

I was as surprised as you when I first heard/saw it. If the alternative is to just outright cancel them though.....

It's an obvious Lose/Lose.

We're seeing the results of all the early changes, and it's not good. We've got our work cut out for us to regain the trust of the poker community, but I'm definitely up to the task. If they're gonna have me back in this role next summer, I'm going to much more staunchly in the corner of being way more conservative so we avoid ever having a summer like this again.

Just know that we truly care about this and want to put forth the efforts to turn this thing around. We have to.

Has anyone played any of the Nugget tournaments? How are the dealers and the floors? I have been playing a couple of their tournaments for over 20 years and have always been satisfied with how they were run but now they have me worried.

Am arriving Sunday and planning on playing the 2-7 triple draw and then Monday Super Seniors and mixed games thru Friday. If they are imploding I will need to make alternate plans.

From the latest schedule (it would be nice if they would somehow identify which schedule is the most current by marking them “Effective as of xxxx” or such) I see that they are not going to run the Omaha Hi on Friday that I was considering – also the 4 pm $120 NL events are gone. And the guarantee on Thursday’s HORSE is reduced.

How was the turnout on the Mixed Triple Stud yesterday? Or the Triple Stud today? I suppose they need about 45 to cover the $15k guarantee. For the $10k on Sunday that would be about 30. FWIW I am generally okay with smaller fields unless we are talking about only 2 or 3 tables.

Appreciate any feedback.

Slightly biased opinion here, but our dealers definitely aren't an issue. We've got an awesome group who deal mixed very well.

The schedule I posted on page 17 in this thread is the most up-to-date schedule and FFS I hope it's the one we finish out with 🤣

Our issues are not staff-related, in fact we've had a lot of great feedback to that end.

Hope to see you at an event or 2, I'm the big dude with a big beard who is probably running around all over the place! Always happy to say hi though, met a lot of awesome folks from here who have stopped me and chatted for a bit.

Oh, and our mixed events have been getting 80-110 people for the most part

When people can't even find your schedule and look at old information, it makes it hard for anyone to plan on your tournaments.

Outside of a few days here and there. The other properties have been killing it. Aria, venetian, wynn, Orleans, their numbers have been beating the guarantees.

WSOP events have both been up and down, thats largely just due to event variance for the most part and probably some events cannibalizing others.

It's worse than that. I found two sources of current information for tournaments for the golden nugget and they aren't the same:

Twitter/X:

https://x.com/GNLVpoker

GoldenNugget.com:

https://www.goldennugget.com/contentasse...

Apologies and listening to feedback is nice, but stopping an ongoing easily fixable conflict of information would be a great actual start. Which of those two live pieces of information is the actual schedule? That was rhetorical by the way, I don't want an answer via two plus two--I want you to take down the wrong information.

I played the $600 Main yesterday and felt it was run very well -- competent, if not stellar, dealers, well organized, comfortable, and in a large room. Just a shame that there weren't more entrants. There are three more day 1s so hopefully the numbers will be increasing. I would gladly return in the future

This has been pushed up the chain. Hope to have movement on this soon.

Unfortunately I realize the damage is already done and this is way too late in the Series to be correcting this.

I played the 250k and the 8 game mix at the beginning of June. Both were run well and the dealers were good. I had Jay and two other floor at my table on a few occasions for procedural stuff and they all did well.

And still no schedule posted on twitter which doesn't seem like it'd be that hard to do. Misinformation seems to be the name of the game despite what you are trying to do bigjaypoker

*Sigh*

I wish you could see how hard I'm trying to get this taken care of. It's SOOOOOOOO frustrating

I guess we should have just left it as a $500,00 guarantee because we got there anyway.

So we basically put ourselves through the negative public sentiment ringer for no reason.....

Oops.

I played yesterday and also made it to Day 2 which starts in a couple of hours. Yay!

I think it was well organized and the Dealers are SO MUCH better than in other venues. That certainly isn’t an issue. I appreciate the hard work and will be back for the Goldenaire. Thanks Jay!

Played yesterday ... made it past the dinner break, but not to the bubble. Anyway, thanks BigJay for your honesty and transparency. You deserve credit for putting on a fine tournament despite upper mgmt panic!

Appreciate the kind words regarding our events. But 100% of the credit goes to our dealers. We're so incredibly lucky to have a very skilled group that helps us put out fantastic events, even if the other stuff is a bit of a ..... "work in progress" shall we say? ��

Seriously I know it seems cliche to say, but our dealers let us focus on what we need to and not be bogged down by floor calls that result from mistakes.

Played the 2-7 at GN yesterday. All the dealers were great. Had 124 runners - misplayed 1 hand and out in level 12. Will be back at it with Super Seniors in a few hours.

I made day 2 of the main at GN and agree the dealers were great - better than WSOP and Orleans anyway. My only minor gripe is that I feel like the floor person was stretched a little thin. There were times a payout or floor call was made, and she was over in the 2-7 making a ruling, or behind the payout desk, or not in the general area. We were 6 handed for a good 5-10 minutes before she had time to move players to our table. She was doing the best she could, she just had way too much going on. The player count also wasn't updated very consistently. There was a point where the board read 68 players for a long time, but there were only 7 tables and a couple open seats, putting the count at 61. But other than that, it was a fun tournament with a good structure and I'd definitely play it again next year.

I registered just to provide some feedback regarding the Golden Nugget summer series. For background, I've played at nearly every Vegas poker room running tournaments this summer, I chopped/won a tournament at the GN earlier this month, and I busted the $600 "Main Event" at the GN last week. I also played the GN summer series last year.

Overall Comment:
The Golden Nugget seems to be unsure of their target player. An unusually high proportion of the fields are made up of travel and temporary dealers who deal the GN summer series. The tournaments around the Bar Poker league folks are clearly catering to them and assuming they are staying Downtown. Mixed game events scheduled around the WSOP mixed game events imply GN is trying to attract the non-holdem crowd. Then the (previously) advertised guarantees are aimed at serious players trying to make money to get them to drive to Downtown instead of going to any of a dozen more convenient options.

This is a bad overall business strategy and a bad strategy for a poker room.

I would strongly suggest determining what your "ideal poker player" looks like, then designing the summer tournament schedule around that person. Travel dealers staying at the GN care less about the rake. Bar Poker league folks would want faster drink service that doesn't involve one unfortunate waitress trying to cover the entire tournament room. Mixed game players want their tournaments to actually run (see below).

Once you figure our who your ideal poker player is, then pay less attention to the non-ideal players and focus your offering around the ideal player.

Good:
Dealers and floors were competent, friendly, and fast. The dealers look particularly good when compared to the WSOP median dealer.

Affordable food available at the table is a big plus. The Italian sandwich and the fruit bowl are winners for me.

Validated parking is a must if you want players to drive from elsewhere. The process of getting the validation was seamless.

The schedule--as initially provided--was great. Golden Nugget was very competitive in the overall $200 to $600 tournament space with a good offering of mixed games. The "free entry for first" overlay for many of the tournaments was a good bonus and provided a direct competition to similar concepts at South Point and the Poker News Daily Deepstacks.

Bad:
I don't want to rehash this more than was already done, but advertising a guarantee, then reducing or canceling the guarantee is atrocious. Why should anyone ever believe any guarantee ever advertised by the Golden Nugget ever again? I certainly won't.

I drove to the GN specifically to play a Big-O tournament. I did check X and PokerAtlas before I left to make sure there was no news about the tournament being canceled. After I got there, about an hour after the start, I was curtly informed the tournament was canceled. I was then given a verbatim salespitch to signup for the NL Hold-em tournament.

I did signup for the NLH tournament since I was already there. FIVE players at my table had driven to the GN just to play Big-O. I didn't take long for us to figure out what had happened. The GN poker manager was afraid of missing both the Big-O guarantee and the NLH guarantee. So he unilaterally canceled the Big-O tournament and PURPOSEFULLY did not announce the cancelation to make sure the players who had intended to play Big-O would feel like they had no choice but to register for the NLH tournament. By doing this, GN did not have to honor the Big-O guarantee and did not incur an overlay on the NLH tournament.

Just canceling the Big-O would be deceptive advertising and a poor customer experience. Purposefully doing it this was to make the NLH guarantee is downright shady and unethical.

Final Thoughts:

Planet Hollywood, Horseshoe, Caesar's Palace, and others have decent $100 - $200 tournaments on the strip.

South Point has a better overall offering for <$250 NLH tournaments.

Orleans has a better offering for mixed games in the $250-$500 range.

Aria, Wynncore, and Venetian have better offerings for the $800-$2500 range.

WSOP now has a full range of buyins and structures for most of the summer.

Why should I drive to the Golden Nugget in the future?

They are in a tough spot.

On the one hand, you can see why they feel the need to run a steady diet of hold 'em events. NLHE is the default variant of poker. Walk-ins and random visitors who stumble upon the series will want to play NLHE and are likely to lose interest quickly if no NLHE options are available. There is pressure on Nugget to provide NLHE options to their captive downtown audience. On the other hand, NLHE is a crowded space in this price range. The Orleans, WSOP, and Resorts World all offer comparable options. For someone staying on the strip without a rental car, there is very little incentive to eat transportation costs to go play the Nugget when you can just stroll into the Horseshoe or RW and play a similar tournament. Personally, I am not going to pay $30 in rideshare fees to play a $200 event. It is also why I have only been to the Orleans once in my life.

There may be some value in counter-programming the other venues. For example, they could become a default PLO, stud, or HORSE venue. Then you have to ask whether there is enough demand to consistently draw players in more esoteric variants. I'm not sure. At least it would give them an identity. "We are the mixed games casino. You won't find NLHE here." That would be a bold departure. They would be losing the downtown NLHE players and walk-ins.

I don't envy their position. By and large, it's not their fault. They are physically isolated from most of the other poker venues. That means they need to be especially attractive to draw business. The path of least resistance when staying on the strip is just to play the WSOP or nearby rooms (Venetian, Aria, Wynn).

Just want to mention that I played 2 tournaments at Golden Nugget in my recent trip to Vegas (2/2 for cashing, yay), and I found them to be super well organized with competent floors & dealers, and many fishy opponents! In other words, a great experience 😀

When we made a 6-way deal in the €150 nightly, the floorman was especially helpful with immediately coming up with ICM numbers + explaining how we could work out a deal even if the casino wouldn't technically facilitate it for us.

I think that was me (big dude with big beard).

Glad to hear you had a great time! We're definitely trying to make the in-house experience great. Need to fix all the other stuff for sure

Just woke up to see this.

Frankly this is all getting harder and harder to defend. I'm going to step away from typing on this right now because this and things happening behind the scenes have me so unbelievably pissed off and I need to not say something I regret later.

I'm at a loss for words and have so much to say at the same time, so I'll simply step away for a bit and leave you with this.....

What the actual ****?!?!?!?

Man it's gotta be tough to be so active on here and be involved in running the series, but not the one calling all the shots.

Respect where it's due for not running away the moment things got dicey.

When I saw that pokernews article the first person I thought of was the floor-guy from twoplustwo.