Mohegan Sun Poker

PokerNews has a review today of the new poker tables at Mohegan Sun. As they point out, it isn’t a technically a poker room, as they are just electronic tables on the casino floor:

“They have PokerPro™ poker machines. No dealers, no chips, no cash at the table, and no cards. Everything but the play itself is done by a computer – like playing poker on the Internet, only with the opponents all facing each other around a large table that is in essence a large computer screen.”

The review of the automated tables is fairly positive, though the reviewer correctly points out that given the casino’s lack of overhead (no dealers to pay), the players really ought to see a greater reduction in rake. I haven’t been myself, and I am kind of curious about the new tables, but I can’t say it’s a priority for me. It sounds like they most commonly spread 1/2 NLHE and 3/6 FLHE.

My major complaint with this review is that it hedges on the matter of why Mohegan closed its poker room four years ago:

“Mohegan Sun used to have a great poker room, but that room closed on Labor Day, 2004, with the announced reason that there wasn’t enough interest in poker in New England to support two poker rooms. This left Foxwoods with a monopoly on live casino poker in New England. This also meant that Mohegan Sun’s poker room was closed, allegedly due to lack of a player base, during the period that will be remembered for the greatest increase in poker players in the history of the game. It’s a curious circumstance at the least.”

I don’t have any first-hand knowledge of this, but everything I’ve heard suggests that there were some serious allegations of misconduct in the way they ran their tournaments, specifically that they were shorting the prize pool. PokerNews insinuates something like this, but a serious news agency (which of course PN is not) would look into these allegations and what steps, if any, had been taken to prevent similar abuses in the future.