Many people come to the WSOP to fulfill a lifelong dream, but end up at a chaotic poker series in a cheap casino with terrible dealers and terrible organization. They also constantly stand in lines and suffer from questionable food and disgusting temperatures both outside and inside.
However, despite everything, it is still possible to fulfill a dream here, although not as beautifully as one would like. And this is already a huge plus that outweighs all the minuses.
Pavel Pleshuv
Pros:
– EV. There are a huge number of fans with money and a desire to gamble. Every day there are a large number of tournaments in different casinos for a month and a half.
– Lots of friends and acquaintances gather. Joint activities and get-togethers.
– A variety of leisure activities – shows, restaurants, concerts, sporting events.
– Daily practice of spoken English.
Minuses:
– Jet lag upon arrival and upon returning home.
– There are air conditioners everywhere, and in some gaming rooms it is constantly very cold.
– Smoke-filled casino halls. Something is always breaking here – either the taps in the toilets or the tournament registration system.
– Because of the constant scorching heat due to Las Vegas being in the desert, there is not enough walking. Too much time has to be spent indoors.
– There's a lot of fast food. You have to work hard to organize more or less normal food.
– The lowest skill of dealers is at the WSOP. There is a lot of paperwork for any operation in the casino, and considering the queues, it all turns into a decent waste of time.
Nikolay Fal // t.me/Poker "chronicles"
Why I love you 🫶
1. The most important thing is the meeting place. Only in Vegas during the WSOP can you communicate with people you haven't seen for a long time, sometimes for several years.
2. Great tournaments, of course.
3. I don't know what else to add here, but let it be steaks 🥩
Why I can't stand it 📛
!!! Fucking 14-hour flight!
1. It's hellishly hot outside 🥵
2. Sometimes it's really cold inside the casino 🥶
3. After just a couple of weeks, you start to miss your loved ones.
Lesha Istomin // t.me/Aleksei Istomin – Life Poker Vlogs
The main advantage is the choice of games. Such an incredible number of tournaments for every taste and budget can only be found in Vegas in the summer. You can play in a beautiful casino and enjoy a pleasant atmosphere at the Wynn, or you can grind the WSOP and end up at the same table with Negreanu, Hellmuth, and other poker legends. This year I played with Phil Laak and Alex Foxen, who after a tournament for $250k jumped into the Million Maker for $1.5k.
For me, the pros outweigh the cons, the most significant being the incredible heat, it's very difficult to be outside. Despite the fact that many casinos are within walking distance, you still have to take a taxi.
Food. It is very difficult to find decent food for reasonable money. Good restaurants require a reservation, and if you need a quick bite, you will have to settle for fast food. There are also problems with good parties. It sounds paradoxical, because Las Vegas never sleeps and there is a lot of action, but finding an underground party in a small place with good music is almost impossible.
In my next YouTube episode I'm going to go into detail about living in Vegas – where to live, what to eat, and how much it all costs.
Anatoly Zlotnikov // t.me/A Breakthrough from Poverty
This is my first WSOP, and I don't have enough distance to draw any conclusions, but the dealers here are, of course, a separate art form. The weather here is also harsh, there is nothing to breathe, there is no humidity and 40° in the shade, but the lineups are just meee ...
And the funniest thing about the WSOP is the faces of the guys in the $1,500 tournaments, they are 10 times more serious than the people who play the $250,000 tournaments 😂😂😂
Egor procop13 // t.me/Egor's Witnesses
I love the WSOP for the huge number of tournaments with top lineups and structures. The atmosphere and scale of the series are simply amazing. The Russian-speaking community adds pleasant emotions. The atmosphere here is like at international school competitions in sports poker 😂
I am ready to forgive this place for all its flaws, even the astronomical price tag.
Mikhail Petrov (healthy person)
I love Americans for their blessedness, but I don’t love them for the constant line ups.
Denis aDrENalin710
I love the WSOP for the atmosphere and the chance to see friends. I hate it for the dreadful dryness and the lack of food options in the tournament area.
Andrey Pateychuk Angier // t.me/I'm in Angier.
Pros – you can win a lot of money
Cons – you can lose a lot of money
But seriously, I think the advantages are clear to everyone. A WSOP bracelet is the dream of most players, it is the largest series in the world where you can win “life-changing money”, and the lineups are excellent.
But in the minuses, I will insert a piece from a never-published post for my channel:
Is the WSOP a dump? My favorite part, which I would like to talk about separately. It is amazing how low the level of customer service is specifically at the WSOP. This is a trend that has been going on for many years, and it feels like it is getting worse every year. What can I say, the WSOP is the worst series in Vegas in terms of organization. And this is just amazing, considering how magical the WSOP brand itself is – every year a lot of people come to Vegas to take part in the most prestigious series in the world, but get an experience on the level of an underground gambling club.
Caesar Entertainment's policy for many years has been to cut costs as much as possible, not to make your stay in Vegas attractive. Tables, chairs, felt, cards, endless lines for everything, disgusting dealers, delays and postponements of tournament start times, etc., etc. What can I say, even on Day 5 of the Main I encountered dealers who made a bunch of mistakes every hand, and if it weren't for the help of the players, it would have been a disaster. Could you find better dealers on Day 5 of the Main, where huge amounts of money are at stake?
It's great that the WSOP has finally moved to the Strip, but the Horseshoe is also a dump. A very cheap, dirty casino. It's amazing how much you can ignore the organization of the series, considering the money you make on it. Imagine that you came to the Olympics, and you have to play in old Soviet stadiums and live in some dorm ( Ed. – I don't want to deprive Andrey of illusions, but the conditions in most Olympic villages are much worse than in a dorm ). It's even more surprising that at the same time as this chaos, there is Wynn, Venetian, Aria nearby, and it's just like another planet. I really hope that in the coming years someone will buy out the WSOP brand, and we will finally get the series we want.
Last year I didn't play a single bracelet event before the Main Event. Simply because it was much more fun to go to a one-day tournament at the Wynn instead of some cheap 10-max at the WSOP.
Well, okay, we are professionals and have a simpler attitude towards all these disadvantages, but what can we say about people who have dreamed of going to Vegas for half their lives, saved money, came and saw all this mess called WSOP?
I will also add that Las Vegas is located in Death Valley, and the WSOP is held in the hottest part of the season with all that entails – hellish heat, dust, the air is so dry that literally from the first day of your stay, roughly speaking, you blow your nose with dried blood. At the same time, in the halls, on the contrary, the air conditioners work like hell. Many players get sick in the first days of the series. In general, it is not a very good adventure.
Well, and the most important thing, this is really worthy of a separate mention – the dealers. I have not met worse dealers than at the WSOP anywhere in the world. No, of course, they have a team of super professionals, but since the series is gigantic, and they need to serve a huge number of people, they recruit literally by advertisement. A huge number of weak dealers who do not speak English, deal slowly, make a lot of mistakes, and so on. And this is in Hold'em, so what happens in mixed games or PLO, where you need to calculate the size of the bank – I'm not even talking about it. Every year there are a huge number of complaints about dealers, even this year this topic was raised on Twitter, but as everything was 15 years ago, nothing has changed.
