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Poker In Macau- Part 1 |
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POKER IN ASIA
I had to visit Macau a few of weeks ago for a number of meetings as well as the igaming conference they had at the Grand Hyatt at the City of Dreams in Macau. Over the past 4 years, I could say that myself and one other key person were directly responsible for much of the growth of poker in Asia. Now that quite the statement I know, but it is true and will likely stand as one of my greater contributions to poker in general (it also helped immensely that PS that was backing it all). But such a task, even with a big backer still has quite the high failure rate, even the great Walmart pulled out of a market like Korea. I probably know more about the Asia poker scene as a whole than anyone out there, at least from an industry and recent historical stand point. So I'd like to share some stories about a few places in Asia, starting with Macau.
MACAU
Macau and me, well we have a love/hate relationship and of course it involves poker, 24 hour work days and living out of a hotel room for most of the year, but I digress. The first time I visited Macau was back in 2005 and I was working as a business license negotiator at that time. A Korean client of mine had meetings with some Malaysian contacts, so we all met up in Macau. Macau is just a hour west of Hong Kong by ferry (or 15 mins by helicopter). At that time Macau was on the verge of becoming a mega city, there was only the gleaming Sands there, which had set interest ablaze regarding the gaming possibilities of Macau. But it was still a town that was very rough around the edges with more dirt than glamour. Fast forward to 2011, Macau has more annual revenue than the entire state of Nevada and likely by next year, more than Nevada and Atlantic city put together and every month it breaks gaming record after record. You have the Venetian Macao which is the second largest building by volume (if you forget something in your hotel room, you're looking at a 15 min walk back from the conference rooms) and right in front of it is the City of Dreams (Crown/Melco) which has the Grand Hyatt, Crown and the Hard Rock Hotel and beside the back of the Venetian you have the Galaxy Macau, which will open sometime this year and when it’s fully completed it will be bigger than the Venetian!
THE ISLANDS
Macau is composed of three islands and a lot of reclaimed land, Peninsula (main island), Taipa, and Coloane (no casinos but wonderful scenery). Between Taipa and Coloane is 'Cotai" which is the reclaimed land between the two island (thus the Co- and the Tai- from the other island names to make Cotai) and there lines the not-yet-overly-famous 'Cotai Strip'. Each island has a different flavour with the Peninsula being the most populated with most of the casino located there including the infamous 'Lisboa' (and the ‘walk’ on the b1 floor) and the newly build 'Grand Lisboa' both owned by Stanley Ho and through his public company, SJM. Other major casinos include the Wynn/Encore (which the main building is a smaller version of the Vegas one), Sands and the MGM. But it’s the Peninsula that has all the nightlife and cultural spots in Macau and nearly all of the smaller casinos are located here: Waldo, Rio, Pharaohs etc. Crossing over to the bridge to Taipa there are the new mega casinos with the Venetian, City of Dreams (Crown/Melco) and soon to be open Galaxy Macau and one mid-sized casino, the Grand Waldo. And the story about poker in Macau actually starts here.
THE HISTORY OF POKER IN MACAU
I'll try to do this story justice before it gets lost in the sands of time, but there was this young man named Elton Tsang from Hong Kong and he wanted to do a poker tournament in Macau. So he had the necessary connections to a single casino which was willing to do it. Elton had contacted the APPT and then it became one of our major stops in the 1st year in 2007. So the first name of the tournament was the Asian Poker Open APPT Macau, I can't recall if it was APPT presents Asian Poker Open or vice versa, but in any case, it was the first international poker tournament in Macau and in some way, China, but that would be stretching it (as Macau definitely isn't China on so many levels). At the time Matt Savage and Danny McDonagh ran the tournament and I was there doing my senior manager role and just making sure everything was as smooth as possible (of course it was a chaotic time, but exciting and we were professionals so we got the job done). It was a great success except that there weren't any cash games!
WHAT? NO POKER? WTF?
If you had gone to Macau any time before mid-2007, you would have been extremely surprised that you couldn't play any live poker! There wasn't any except for some poker pro electronic tables at the Galaxy Starworld, because previous to 2007, there was no legislation for the introduction of poker. Now there could have been, as Jeff Lisandro had actually gotten some type of real confirmation to open up the first poker room in Macau in early 2007 or so, but because of political issues (wont' get into that, but not really anything to do with Jeff, really more cultural business issues) the final approval didn't happen. So after the success of the first APPT Macau Asian Poker Open, PS was allowed to hand in a submission for the legalization of poker in Macau. So myself, Danny McDonagh and the Grand Waldo executives, worked on it and got it approved. But lo and behold, waiting in the wings were the Grand Lisboa, who had been waiting for months to start a poker room and after the approval was given, Grand Lisboa quickly opened a poker room of 8 refurbished baccarat tables and off they went! We were next with the PokerStars Macau room at the Grand Lisboa. After that it was the Galaxy Starworld, then the Wynn. Finally LKF has a poker room for a month (closed quickly) and then the Venetian opened one up just this past year followed by the Hard Rock Hotel.
THE START
Now, the player that had come to our room were relatively the better players and it was a beautiful room which was a converted luxury VIP junket room, but had you gone to the Grand Lisboa when it first opened, the players were so new that they were going all-in with Queen high on a board with flushes and straights. It was a crazy crazy time. But the real game changer was the Wynn. Wow, they opened fourth, but they did it right with two great operators from their room in Vegas, AJ and Beau. What set them apart was that they put the poker room right on the main floor where there was still some high roller junket foot traffic. The stories started to flood in of these high rollers who simply where curious about ‘poker’ and wanted to play and bought in for 10,20,30k USD equivalent amounts and it was their first time playing! Soon there were 50k buy-in in really short order and the local pros were pooling all their cash together for single buy-in to get a hand on these uber high roller fish. At that time the market still was quite small, so with four poker rooms having opened in such a short period of time, PokerStars Macau moved to join with the Grand Lisboa and a new era was really born.
True to things, PokerStars Macau mainly focused on providing tournaments and also cash games while everywhere else was just cash games (this eventually changed), but over a course of just a couple of years, the Macau Poker Cup (founded that with Danny), which started with just 30 odd players in the main has hit over 500 in recent weeks. So yes, things have changed drastically in the last few years. After the APPT was formed, the next year the APT was launched. Then a super duper major junket operator, Sun City took over the Galaxy Starworld poker operations and focused on created the biggest and most regular cash game in the world. Now how big? Like players losing 2-5M per session at times with some business men taking an 8M loss in one session. And yes, that is the USD equivalent. While they only get one cash game up, damn it’s a big one, but don't think if you have big bucks you can just get in, it’s by invitation only. But if you really want to get in and have at least a 2M bankroll and are willing to spend at least 2 weeks there to play, PM me and I'll see what I can do. =)
Please use the following link to be under LP and 35% rakeback at Heropoker.com
http://record.heropoker.com/_ZvdkqjISoXGVAv0U_Fv2nWNd7ZgqdRLk/1
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| | Last edit: 28/03/2011 13:15 |
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Highcard Canada. Mar 28 2011 16:01. Posts 5428 | | |
you can flood the blog pool all day and all night with this gold. |
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| I have learned from poker that being at the table is not a grind, the grind is living and poker is how I pass the time | |
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| | On March 28 2011 15:01 Highcard wrote:
you can flood the blog pool all day and all night with this gold. |
Thanks ^^,
hopefully I can keep the pace.
Cheers,
David |
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