PLO No

Ever since coming home from NYC, I'd had yesterday circled in red on my calendar. At least, I suppose if I had a calendar I might have circled it in red. That's what people used to do when they had calendars, yes? Anyway, there was a $340 PLO tournament at Caesars for the WSOP-C that I wanted to play.

Now long-time readers probably know my feelings about the Caesars poker room, which are: I fucking hate it. I've never had a good experience there other than winning the blogger tourney in 2006. But they W-2G'ed me for that $2200 win (wtf) so even that was tarnished.

Live PLO tourneys aren't that easy to come by and I figured the field would be somewhere around 100 players. It was enough to overcome my aversion to the room. I rocked up to the window at 3:50pm yesterday for the 4pm start and asked how many players were registered.

"Nine."

"Nine? Like, the single digit nine?"

"Yes, nine. No wait. Sorry, I'm looking at the wrong number. It's 24."

24 players is better than 9 players but it is not a tournament. It's a 3-table SNG. I hated to waste the trip to the Strip so I grabbed a copy of Bluff from the magazine rack by the entrance to the poker room while waiting things out. It was unlikely the field would grow that much by the start, but there was no sense in leaving yet. By the time SUAD was called, 35 players had registered.

They started playing 6-handed, intending to fill in the empty seats with late registrations. The time period for which, by the way, was the first three 40-minute levels. If anyone can explain to me why a $340 tournament needs two hours of late registration, they should be doing more important things with their lives than reading this blog. Maybe start by ending world hunger.

Another twenty-five minutes went by, with the field reaching 50 players. Now or never. Even though the field was about half the size I was expecting, I decided "what the hell" and went to the cage to register. Andreas Hoivold got in line behind me. The cashier took my cash but then was having trouble finding me a seat. A few minutes went by. Nothing. A floor finally came to the cage and told me, "You'll be the first alternate."

Say what now?

The field had grown to six 9-handed tables and apparently six 9-handed tables it would stay. If I wanted to play I was going to have to wait for someone to bust, a pretty dumb thing since (let me remind you) there were only 54 players in the field.

I asked for, and received, my buy-in back. Sure, given that it's PLO I probably wouldn't have had to wait all that long. But in light of my past experiences at Caesars the whole thing rankled me. It was another example of the epic-fail that permeates the Caesars poker room on a regular basis.