How Highly Are Poker Players Valued by Casinos?

I have news that will tilt the life out of some people.
The gap between Grosvenor and Genting is starting to widen when it comes to value for money in the Midlands.

We all know that Grosvenor have made the registration fee for their standard comps £7 now as opposed to £5 at Resorts World and Genting Coventry. I personally still think that £7 is reasonable to provide dealers, card room managers, valets (I couldn’t keep a straight face when I typed valets*) chips, tables etc etc for our evening’s entertainment.
However on the £7 reg fee I believe that we currently get 70p back in player points which equates to 10% and I use mine to get a “free” meal now and then.  So it’s really £6.30
The first bit of bad news is that the 10% rebate on reg fees in the form of player points is being reduced to 2% so my £7 reg fee will now earn me 14p instead of 70p. By any standard that is a huge % drop.
The news gets worse!
Well unless your name is Jamie Bott it does, because the player point earnings on cash games is being reduced from 100 points per hour to 60 per hour.
So going forward your cash back instead of being £1 per hour is now going to be just 60p an hour. This equates to a 40% earnings drop.
When it comes to session charges the earnings will also reduce. It’s going down from 10% per hour to just 4%.
Now if what I’m told is correct these changes will come into effect on the 25th September (just 5 days from now)
On a slightly positive note, poker will count towards the next “Every Visit Counts” (EVC) promotion at Grosvenor that starts from October.
I think several vocal complaints went in about poker not counting towards the last one and that is possibly the reason for this. Though if they are dropping the rake by these huge amounts just for the EVC promotion I think I’d rather they left us out of it and gave us the higher point earnings back.

Goliath costs on the rise also
Not only is this happening to us all at our run of the mill comps/cash games the price of playing the Grosvenor’s flagship tournament the Goliath is also on the rise.
The next one will be £100 + £25 reg fee (up from £20) which is a bit steep in percentage terms. I’ll continue to play it though as it’s still the best comp of the year in the UK by a country mile. In fairness it must cost an absolute fortune to run the Goliath event with literally hundreds of top notch agency dealers etc so I’m sure they are not making much if any on the event.
I sincerely hope though that they don’t ever start taking a percentage from the prize fund like the WSOP do as that is absolute robbery and I think players deserve transparency in what they are being charged.

What do people think?

I like to get 2 separate sources before posting this type of story as I have been misled by people in the past but due to the importance of the story and the fact it starts taking effect so soon I’ve taken it on the fly and posted it. If it’s proved wrong then I will own up to being “Fake News”.

Things can change though, so even if true Grosvenor may change their minds if the feedback is negative? What do you think? Please leave a comment below.

If all these changes do come into effect Peter Djiallis will blow a gasket 🙂


Poker players valued?
This new blog post has a similar theme to one I wrote on the 30th October 2010. You can read that here after reading this one.

*In fairness Walsall valets are very good and deserve high praise.