I stand by the convo I had with a card room manager. I said "Thousands of
Internet only poker players will swoop down on card rooms with automated
tables. He corrected me "Tens of thousands."What if one major group like Boyd took the lead and converted to all
automated. Imagine state wide tourneys interlinked. Imagine the WSOP prelims
played
at Boyd casinos and the final few tables at the Horseshoe. Imagine the number
of players and prize money if WSOP hooked up on automated tables all over
the world. Imagine sitting at your seat and being able to play many more poker
games ,sit and goes or cash or what ever while you were in the game shown on
the center screen. Imagine pressing a button to summon a cocktail waitress, or
food. Imagine toggling to another part of your screen to watch a sports
event, Channel 8 News, horse race or make bets on sports. Imagine the
politicians, same ones who banned offshore poker, realizing they could squeeze
the
"nuts" of Poker Stars and put them out of business by allowing onshore USA
poker
Internet sites [reaping tax $$$$$$] with games linked all over the country.
You ever heard of PowerBall?
Most of what you've described is internet poker, but with the requirement that the player go to a casino to play it.
The only advantage is the cocktail / food service, which is not a big problem for the internet player who can carry his laptop into the kitchen (or bathroom for that matter) and keep playing while eating or drinking.
We'll see whether internet players switch to in-casino automated tables -- one of the MANY reasons that some play internet-only are that it takes too long to get to a bricks-and-mortar casino and that some of them (many?) are not yet old enough to enter "real" casinos.
I don't think the casinos are ready to (and in most states, allowed to) put "branch offices" in everyone's neighborhood to make the geography a non-issue; neither will they allow people in to gamble on poker machine tables who they can't allow in to gamble at their other games.
The casino problem remains for small-stakes, where again, just the additional expense of buying and maintaining the computer (ignoring its installation into a table and the floor space it takes) puts the casino at a disadvantage against the internet for those small-stakes players, where the "host casino" just needs more computing power at their server, but usually no significant additional investment in hardware or maintenance to serve these low-stakes players with their small rakes and low return to the house.
The internet players who will now go to casinos will be those who haven't found a way to get around the ban on putting money in your account (and associated difficulties getting it out) with online casinos - and I will agree that a majority of those will prefer the familiarity of a monitor-based game.
Certainly the ability to network multiple physical locations to permit, for example, me to get a game of $20-40 limit seven stud when there aren't enough interested players at my own casino, would be an advantage -- for me -- but the casino now has floor space taken up by one of these tables with only me and maybe one or two others generating rakes for the house -- IF (and this varies from place to place and with time of day) they are already able to fill their poker room with live players for other games, they have nothing to gain by taking down one of those games to give me an option to play a game I like that they can't get going on-site.
Of course, if they require me to sit at a full table and play a "live" game in order to have the option to play, in a second "window" on my monitor, another game, they could possibly fix that part of their problem.
And multi-casino tournaments would be a big plus, I would agree -- again, with the "problem" that if the final table consists of players from nine locations, nine of these tables will be tied up finishing a tournament that would otherwise be in one place.
And in that case, I don't think you can force those final table players into another game to play at the same time they're playing a final table in another window.
Maybe what the casinos should REALLY be looking at is regular slot-style single-player machines, linked together to other players, with the option to play one or more games with those other players, whether they are at the next machine in the row, or a casino across the country with the same linked machines. This would be something the casinos can understand - it looks like a slot machine, they're used to linked machines for progressives and to multi-casino linked machines like many already have for "regular" slots, and it wouldn't occupy excess floor space. It would basically be internet poker with the terminal in-house at a "real" casino -- and this has a few small negatives, but mostly has a lot of positives.
As far as the states and feds figuring out ways to get the internet-gambling revenue, the issue is not that simple, since many of them want to ban internet gambling because of "moral" concerns. However, if they want to get that revenue and can get past their moral objections, all they need to do is legalize, license, regulate, and TAX the existing internet gambling operations, to make them "legal" to accept money from the U.S.
--BG
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