Different View of HET Millionaire Maker BJ Trny
I thought the millionaire maker bj tournament was very poorly run. But, maybe I just have high standards. Here is a list of some of the problems I had with the tournament.
1) The chipset was very stylish with various shades of light brown and gray, mostly. Unfortunately, that meant that it was much harder than necessary to distinguish between denominations.
2) I didn't like the way in which the wild card drawings were held. Slips of paper with player names on them were put in a clear plexiglass drum by the people running the tournament. This meant that a player had no assurance that his slip was in the drum, and it meant that the person doing the drawing was able to actually see which slip they were drawing. I'm not suggesting that anything unfair actually occurred, but there have been casino drawings in the past that were rigged, and this one could easily have been.
3) While it was nice to have a detailed three page set of printed rules, the actual rules didn't deal with all of the important stuff. They never mentioned the fact that surrender existed (although I suppose this could be inferred from the fact that surrender exists in the shoe games at Caesars Palace).
The rules also didn't really address what would happen in the event of dealer
mistakes. Reading the rules left one with the impression that the tournament director really had the authority to decide whatever he wanted anyways, so the actual rules were somewhat moot. The rule about a player having 10 seconds to make decisions also struck me as absurd. It never came up at my table, and I don't know if it was a problem elsewhere.
4) The dealers did not seem adequately prepared. At my 18 hand table, the following mistakes occurred:
a) Max bet not enforced (corrected by me before hand was dealt);
b) Rule regarding bet could not be changed after it was made was not enforced (this happened twice, but neither time did it seem important to me,
so I didn't squawk about it)
c) Rule requiring bet to be a multiple of $100 was not enforced (again corrected by me)
d) Dealer tried to overpay player who doubled for less as if he had a full double down (corrected by me)
e) Dealer neglected to deal player a double down card (I missed this one,
and it wasn't discovered until the dealer had busted.) The tournament director ruling was that the hand stood as is since the player didn't even need his hit card to win. I thought that they had previously announced that in the event of a misdeal, the hand would be nullified, so I'm not sure that this was a correct decision.
f) A player did ask for a hit with a four card hard 17. I don't believe that the dealer had announced the player's total. In a normal casino game, one would expect that the dealer would say something like, "Are you sure you want to hit your hard 17?" What is appropriate in a tournament is of course another question. By the way, this wasn't on the last hand, and there was no particular reason why a player might want to hit a hard 17 in this case
(unless of course they knew that the next card to come would be a 4, which is what actually happened).
5) All in all, I never got the impression that Harrah's was treating this tournament as anything serious. Symptomatic of that was a cocktail waitress approaching me as it was my turn to bet on the last hand, and asking me if I wanted a drink. Combining this interruption with the 10 second rule could have lead to a very absurd situation. I think Harrah's did get what they wanted. From what I heard, 5 of the 6 players at the final table were wild card winners. I also heard that a player doubled down on a bj on the first hand of the final round.
6) I didn't notice any mistakes during the countdown at my table, but I
heard of some at other tables.
