Continued....

First Place Procedures
Having seen the first-place procedures at Fallsview when a friend from K-W won the final WPT event, the following is what happens at Rama. After we made the deal, a final hand is required where Duffy goes all-in then mucks his hand, probably so that there can be a video record of me officially winning the tournament. Just like at Brantford, they get confused on where the puck should be on the first hand of heads-up, but I don't bother correcting them. I end up with a full house so I have horseshoes up the wazoo even with a fake hand!

When the staff mentioned if I wanted the casino photographer to take pictures with the first-place final hand and other publicity stuff, Duffy got excited and asked if second place gets his picture taken too, but they said only first-place. I was thinking "Meh, I don't care. Just show me the money!" and I asked if they can take a photo of Duffy instead and put him in the casino newsletter, etc., but they said that Duffy will have to be officially recorded as the first place winner. I thought, "How can compuease or other skeptics believe that I won first place when the official record shows somebody else?" I asked if Duffy can be in the photo with me to make him happy and they said yes. Duffy was indeed very happy but now wanted to "freshen up" first and go to his hotel room to take a shower! I thought to myself that even if I freshened up and had an extreme makeover, I'll still look more like Mike Duffy than Patrik Antonius, so why bother?

I was asked if I wanted the $5,985 amount in cash or cheque, and I asked for a cheque as usual. The first time I made a decent cash in a casino tournament, I mistakenly asked for $500 or $1,000 bills but it seems that Canada has nothing larger than $100 bills so I had the nice problem of not being able to close my wallet. I met another player from Oakville who cashed higher, and I asked for Brantford security to escort us to our cars. When I got home, my wife looked at me and asked, "So did you get lucky at the casino or are you just happy to see me?"

Another reason is that with cash, my wife can ask if it was all withdrawn from the ATM, but with a cheque, I can prove my winnings and I can asthma wife if I can go out to play poker again. I was asked if I wanted a huge presentation cheque and I said sure. I love unfurling those to my family and it makes for a nice souvenir long after my wife has deposited the cheque "for a rainy day" (that will probably never come).

Rama has the weird procedure of giving you only cash in the poker room, then having to walk all the way to the other end of the casino just to convert the cash to a cheque. Imagine if Fallsview required the K-W winner to carry his $1.3 million in cash from the tournament area down in the ballroom all the way up the escalators to the VIP cashier just to get his cheque! I held on to the $5,985 cash in my pocket and felt like calling for Brantford security again, but a casino bigwig escorted me to the cheque room. The employees looked as the bigwig walked with me as if it was Donald Trump walking around his casino.

I was ready to leave with my two cheques, but Duffy was nowhere to be found and had not finished freshening up. I asked if he can have his photo taken by himself without needing the first-place person to be with him, and Rama was nice enough to do it for him. As I was leaving, I finally saw Duffy all freshened up with a new set of clothes and shook his hand goodbye.

Structure
By doubling the starting chips to 10,000, Rama's structure is much better compared to before. While Patience Factor is useful for showing how much play you get for your money before you get blinded off, it does not measure how the structure is at the late levels when the money matters most. Rama's blind structure is similar to OLG's normal blind structure ("A"), while OLG structure "B" used in the $330-$1,090 Deep Stacks is much better.

As Wetts1012 mentioned to me, Rama jumps too much in some levels (like OLG's "A" structure), e.g.,
- The CPR (cost per round) more than doubles (2.3x) :-[ from 300 in Level 4 to 700 in Level 5 (150/300 + 25)!
- CPR goes up 1.6x from Level 6 to 7 (200/400+25 to 300/600+50).
- CPR goes up 1.8x from Level 11 to 12 (1K/2K+200 to 2K/4K+300) so the remaining final table becomes a turbo.

While it took only 7 hours when I won the Rama tournament, it took 11 hours for the Brantford $300+$30 Deep Stack with the same ~60 players, and over 12 hours for the $550 Deep Stack. While bad players usually prefer quick crapshoots, skilled players usually think "the more play, the better."

Since 60 savvy players have been buying up all the seats every time, I have suggested to Rama that the buy-in be increased for at least some dates, e.g., $380+$20 or $475+$25 starting in October.