The Bicycle Casino Tournament Director Mo Fathipour's Innovations And Creativity Fuel Growth

One of the largest poker rooms in the country, the Bicycle Casino, in Bell Gardens, California also offers one of the most trailblazing and creative tournament rosters in the nation.

Who is behind such offerings? Mo Fathipour.

Fathipour invented a tournament concept called quantum reload tournaments. Quantum events offer low, affordable buy-ins and a generous tournament structure. Players can choose their own buy-in level, choose to come early, pay less and play longer. Players who come later in the tournament pay a little more and receive more starting chips. Each session has one optional add-on regardless of the amount of chips players have. Players can reenter the second session if they are eliminated in the first — a second chance opportunity.

“At the Bicycle Casino, you get lower buy-in events that offer bigger prize pools,” Fathipour says. “You have affordable buy-in events with great structure, more starting chips, and bigger guarantees than other casinos. Our tournaments are incomparable, and unbeatable due to the quantum reload concept.”

The Bicycle Casino offers 19 tournaments weekly, all of which are quantum reload events. The most popular is Saturday’s 2pm $20,000 guaranteed event. It has a $40 buy-in and draws, on average, roughly 450-to-500 players. The average first place prize pool is more than $10,000.

“There are not many places you can invest $40 to make $10,000,” says Fathipour.

In addition, the casino offers an Omaha-eight-or-better event on Mondays and a Mexican poker event on Thursdays. Tournament action is hot and heavy, with the property paying out more than $250,000 weekly on its tournaments.

The tournaments draw lots of entries and smash guarantees at the Bicycle Casino, leading to very large payouts. For example, the Bicycle’s Mega Millions event starts with a $160 buy-in that creates a $1.7 million prize pool. First place guarantees at least $250,000

Humble Beginnings

Fathipour, originally from Iran, learned the game of poker in his home country. He says during the Shah’s reign, there were no-limit poker games taking place in the city of Ramsar. He went abroad and received an electronic engineering degree from the University of Bradford, United Kingdom but could not shake his love of poker. He traveled to Rome, trying to cut his teeth as a card professional until an extensive five-card draw losing streak shook his resolve. “I won for six months straight then lost for three months. I felt jinxed after telling a bad player to play better, in hopes of maintaining the game that the bad player was contributing to.”

Gambling In His Blood

Fathipour says gambling was in his blood. And he made a huge gamble in the summer of 1985, when he came to the United States, without any money, as a refugee with his wife and baby. He found work in the medical x-ray supply industry, an industry he ended up working in for 19-years, but he missed poker.  Within a month of arriving in the US, he started playing weekly in $0.25 five-card draw and lowball games he found in the major Los Angeles card rooms, and he played there consistently for 14 years.

He continued as a player, eventually evolving into a high-stakes regular. Despite managing a medical office, he has always played the larger ($10-25 no limit hold’em, $5,000 buy-in no cap) cash games and has six-figures in lifetime tournament earnings. His favorite games are the mixed variety including: badugi, deuce-to-seven, badeucey and badacey, and he still plays these games semi-regularly and travels to play these tournaments wherever they are held.

He has always been involved in high-stakes action. In the mid 90s, Mo went heads up versus Men “The Master” Nguyen for a Cadillac car.  Unfortunately he lost the heads-up battle and ended up with a Cadillac key-chain as memorabilia. He says Men no longer has the car. As a high-stakes host, he’s played live cash games on “Live At The Bike” and scooped a $37,000 pot. He’s played in the WSOP main event. He’s been eliminated by Phil Hellmuth in a tournament. Bottom line is Fathipour has poker chops and knows what poker players want.

He joined the Bicycle Casino in 2004 working as a public relations player and became a no-limit poker host in the high-stakes section. In June of 2010, he was reassigned to coordinate tournaments at the property. Mo, as a tournament player, says he knew what the tournament players wanted, and says he was able to turn the Bike tournaments into a more profitable business by creating new and innovative poker tournaments such as the Mega Millions (multiple ways to enter and qualify creates more than $1-million guaranteed prizepools), quantum reload, and now the “cash & chips” tournament.

Card Player Poker Tour Event Offering Quantum Reload

The Card Player Poker Tour is proud to have partnered with Bike for its tour and will use the quantum reload events as part of its next series stop at the casino.

The Mega Millions Series 11 will be during the September 20th to October 14th Card Player Poker Tour stop at the Bicycle Casino.

“There will be daily main event satellites and double qualifiers of the Mega Millions will receive a $1,100 CPPT main event seat plus cash,” Fathipour explained.

He expects that the CPPT main event will exceed a $500,000 prize pool. Winners will appear on the cover of Card Player and on the Bicycle Casino billboard. So if you have not yet made it to the Bicycle Casino to play in these juicy events, what are you waiting for? ♠