The floundering Revel Casino in Atlantic City made the strategic decision to close their poker room last week, and despite grumbling about the backwater location and 2-star amenities of the Revel’s poker room since it opened in 2011, the poker community is now trying to save the room, or at least keep poker at Revel in some way, shape or form.
The Revel thread on 2+2 has seen several players pushing for a letter writing campaign in an effort to keep poker at the casino, even if it means just a couple of wayward tables somewhere on the casino floor. Unfortunately this might be a case of nobody caring until it’s too late; something like the Hartford Whalers moving to North Carolina and becoming the Carolina Hurricanes, and then suddenly lifelong Whalers fans came out of the woodwork saying “how could this happen?”
Well, it can and does happen all the time, and if the poker world continues to operate reactively, it will keep happening. The Revel closing their poker room, and then the poker community making noise about it is something that seems to happen across poker; whether it’s legislatively or in terms of cheating and scamming in poker. It seems like poker players don’t care about something until it happens, when it’s already too late to reverse course.
Take the Ultimate Bet Super-User scandal as case #1 of this. In 2006 you were roundly ridiculed if you claimed a poker site was cheating you, or players could see your hole cards. You were called a “rigtard” or conspiracy theorist who was only saying this because you sucked at poker and couldn’t win. But lo and behold, some of these rigtards were right! And after the fact everyone and their mother were screaming about how people were stupid for not seeing this coming: The sheer beauty and elegance of postdiction.
More recently it’s been computer hackings and poker bots that have gone from, “what are you worried about” status to “oh my god, how do we stop these things?”
So back to the letter-writing campaign: While I applaud the effort I really don’t see how they are going to exact a change. For one thing, even if they are successful, the Revel had a lousy poker room when it was a full art of the casino; why would Revel suddenly go to great lengths to see that two wayward tables were being run at a higher level?
Secondly, looking at it realistically, the campaign won’t work. But I don’t understand the problem to begin with as there are several other poker rooms on the Boardwalk? Several nicer rooms with better reputations.
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