Bellagio's $1,000 Daily Tourneys Running StrongTournament Schedule Hasn't Stopped Expanding for Three Years |
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There are many ways to measure the popularity of poker, from auditing the U.S. Playing Card Company to looking at the fourth quarter financial statements from Party Poker.
An easier way would be to walk into the poker room at the Bellagio to understand just how popular poker has become in this country in the recent years.
Poker has become so popular - especially tournament poker - that for the last three years, the Bellagio has successfully run $500 and $1,000 tournaments that have attracted thousands of players.
The tournaments have become so popular that the Bellagio went from spreading its $1,000-buy-in event only on Fridays to twice a week and then, just recently, to every day.
That's right. The Bellagio now spreads a $1,000-buy-in no-limit hold'em tournament every evening at 5 p.m. Satellites, which run all day starting at 9 a.m., cost $240 and award two seats to the evening tournament.
"Ours got so popular we just outgrew them," says Jack McClelland, the director of poker tournaments at the Bellagio.
In April, the Bellagio stopped running its Wednesday night $500 tournament and replaced it with another $1,000. From April until December, the Bellagio has run three $1,000 tournaments a week. The casino went to a $1,000 event every day in December.
If the Bellagio could match the number of players who played in those tournaments Wednesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays every day, then 2006 will be an even better year for the casino. Depending on the night, the tournaments would usually attract between 60 and 90 people. Sometimes more than 120 people have signed up, sometimes fewer than 55.
Just to give an example, if 65 people signed up, first prize would be $23,330.
McClelland has his theories on why his tournaments have endured.
First off, players start with $5,000 in chips, which means they get more play for their dollars, compared to tournaments held in other casinos around the city.
"The bigger players really appreciate that. It gives you a real tournament experience," McClelland says. "You get some playing, you get some experience, you get a real feel for the game."
Also, the reasonably priced satellites attract many out-of-town players who are looking to get a taste of the tournament experience they've seen on TV.
McClelland has been in the poker business since 1975. He served as tournament director of the World Series of Poker from 1984 to 1998. He's seen just about everything that could be seen in a poker room. He's a guy who believed that poker could become as popular as it is now, but it needed help.
When asked why he thinks poker has become so popular in the last several years, he has a two-letter answer: "TV."
"What TV did is it made everybody want to get on TV and make everybody want to be a star," he says.
Poker on television existed before the World Poker Tour, but the old reruns of the WSOP on ESPN Classic, even the ones from the late '90s, look like they were filmed 20 years ago. It's no wonder that ESPN preferred to show them in the wee hours of the morning.
Help came in the form of a tiny camera that looked like a tube of lipstick. McClelland was at a tournament at the Isle of Man where they broadcasted the player's hole cards to an audience in a separate room.
He knew they were on to something.
"You could feel the electricity. You knew it would work," he says. "And the rest of its history."
Only time will tell if the daily $1,000 tournaments at the Bellagio will become as popular as the Friday and Saturday tournaments had. McClelland is optimistic. Before they ran the weekly $1,000 tourney, no casino ever was able to keep a tournament with that high of a buy-in on schedule.
But not every casino is like the Bellagio, which is one of the most famous hotels in America on one of the most famous streets in America, the Las Vegas Strip.
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