Instead, the drops go to pay for player comps and freerolls for the players who play the most hours - local regs. This additional rake is ridiculous: none of these rooms offer high hand jackpots or bad beats. All rooms dropped the standard 10% up to $5 rake, but the rooms with better games had an additional $2 jackpot drop while the grindy rooms did not. I talked about this with quite a bit during our stay, and the only substantial difference we could come up with was the jackpot drop.
They were much less common in Bally's, Planet Hollywood, and Venetian, and the ratios of bad to good players at these rooms was (in my very limited experience) higher. But the '1-3 grinders' only seemed to show up in certain places I played: Aria, Bellagio, Caesars.
I regularly ran into players who appeared to be relatively skilled locals playing tight, exploitative poker at the 1-3 $300 max NLHE game that has become the standard low stakes offering in Vegas.Īre the drunk partiers and the fish gone? No, definitely not. Until this trip, I have never seen tight, grindy NLHE games consistently at the lowest casino stakes. I just got back from my first trip to Las Vegas since 2016, and I noticed that things have changed since then - and mostly not for the good.
