Thanks for joining me for another episode of the Lowlan mccash Games podcast today.
Today it's another room review, and today we'll be talking about San Dia Casino
and resort in lovely Albuquerque, New Mexico. So I want to give a
big shout out first of all to jose Ian Dan, some great guys who
I met while I was over there playing. All of them been members of
the Patreon. They were very helpful with suggestions, they were very nice and
courteous. Enjoyed time at the table with them. Just some great guys,
and everybody that I met over there, as a matter of fact, was
really great. I don't think I met anybody, and we were there I
think four days, and I never really met anybody that was rude, just
chris, friendly people. I'll be honest with you. When we told some
people we were going to Albuquerque to spend a few days to play poker,
me and a friend of mine who is a professional player, we went over
there together. We had a lot of people warn us about how dangerous Albuquerque
was, Oh, it's so dangerous. It's so dangerous. And then interestingly
enough, our first day at the tables, I'm playing and people ask where
I'm from, and you know, obviously I stand out like a sore thumb
over there, being from South Alabama. But we had this one guy at
the table who was being very friendly, and he would be like, Hey,
you should check out this restaurant. It's it's downtown and they have this,
this is they have this, and it's great. And then this other
guy at the table would be like, I wouldn't go down there after dark,
and I'm like, wow, is it is it that scary? And
then well, it's not that it's there's nothing to it. What was weird
as our hotel was downtown, and so this one guy at the table has
me terrified that we're staying downtown. But I have to tell you, I
never saw anybody downtown. Now. I think during the daytime they have maybe
a bit of a homeless population at times, maybe maybe they have some you
know, it's downtown for any city. Like, I didn't find it to
be that different, never felt unsafe there, and it was just beautiful.
You got beautiful views there. Anyway, that's not why you're here. You're
here to hear about the room. So let's talk about it. So the
poker room in this casino The one thing I liked is once you figure out
the entrances, and there's several entrances, once you figure out what entrance the
poker room is by basically you can avoid other parts of the casino. Now,
if you're like me and you have a roulette problem, and man,
do I have a roulette problem, it was really nice being able to park
in front of that particular entrance and walk straight through the main doors and turn
right right into the poker room. I didn't have to pass blackjack tables.
I didn't have to pass roulette tables, and so for somebody who has a
problem like me, that was really good. Now, you know that's not
everybody. Maybe you want to play a little black jack, maybe you want
to play a roulette. Well, of course that's there, and they have
all those games and they can facilitate you there. But it's just better for
me to avoid those things because I do have a bit of a roulette problem.
The actual poker room not that large. It's fourteen tables. The type
games that they had running, I guess the main game is a one to
three no limit hold them game. There's a three hundred dollars cap, but
it's a match to the stack. So these games get pretty deep pretty quick.
So you know, when a game first starts, you combuy in for
three hundred, but you know, within a half an hour or an hour,
you could pretty much have a five hundred dollars stack or a thousand dollars
stack because you can just continue to match the biggest stack at the table.
So these games get really big pretty quickly. They did spread a three six
limit. I think I saw that run two different days. I saw it
run there in the morning. You know, it's typical that some some casinos
and poker rooms you'll see a limit game will run sometimes in the morning.
They had a five to ten high low game that I think ran every day
I was there, so amaha, hi low, big five to ten game
that ran. I know, I saw it three of the four days I
played there for sure. And then the locals there told me that on the
weekends a five to ten no limit would run, which would be a big
game. It did not run the week the week that I was there.
But I don't think that you really need a five to ten game. I
mean this one three match stat game. You know, once those games get
going and they start getting deep, I mean, it plays like a five
to ten, it's a it's a big game, plays like a normal five
to ten. Does it play like one of these big crazy uncapped everybody's got
ten thousand dollars five tens? But what a typical traditional five to ten would
play like? So plenty of action and great stakes. We played the one
to three no limit there, ran really bad the first day, ran a
little better the second day, and then the last two days that I played
there, we ran really good. Plenty of action. I was probably most
impressed by the rake. So they only dropped four dollars for rake. Now
they do take the two dollars promo that is not rake. I don't consider
that rake. You know, if you're a person that's only going to be
there for three or four days, you may not recuperate the two dollars that's
dropped every hand you win for promo because you're not there long enough. But
if you're there all the time, if you're a local or that's your home
room, you will eventually get those promo dollars back a good percentage of them
over time, because they just collect them and give them away in term and
promotions. It's six dollars total, but only four dollars rake, which I
thought was pretty good. I always started to comment on the dealers, so
we established a plan in Austin to try to make my you know, evaluation
of the staff, you know, more consistent across rooms. I do more
room reviews, and so every dealer that came to me, I would take
a note on them, and I would give them a rating between you know,
one and ten. And then after my visit was over, I would
take the total number of dealers and add all the points up and divide by
the number of dealers, and we eat an average. And they had a
very high average. It's like eight point five, which is really good.
So all the dealers did great while I was there, and as far as
that goes, the staff in general was good. The floor was good,
brush was good. So let's talk about a few oddities that I discovered while
I was there, And there were a couple of them, and I found
quite a bit odd actually. The first is you don't call for cocktails.
There's no cocktails. You don't call for drinks. You call for concessions.
When I think about concessions, I think about being at the high school football
game, and going to the concessions, and I don't know, it was
just an odd word. I don't know if that's unique to the Southwest.
I don't know if it's unique to this casino specifically. But you know,
any poker room I've ever played in, if you wanted to get somebody to
come over and serve you, you would call for cocktails. So calling for
concessions was interesting. I think maybe one of the reasons is because you can't
really order actual cocktails. This was something else I learned. There's no drinking
while playing, So at first I was like, well, they don't serve
alcohol here if nobody can drink, right? Not true. They have a
sports bar, so right up by the roulette tables, there's this little elevated
part of the room, so you step a step up and then you're in
a sports bar area and you can drink drinks in there. I don't know
what all kinds of drinks. I didn't actually go in there, but I
know you could drink alcohol in there, but you cannot bring any alcohol to
the poker table and play. And the best I could tell, unless I'm
wrong, you can't carry any alcohol out of that sports bar anywhere. In
the casino and play. So if you want to have a drink while you're
playing, you can't do it there, which is fascinating. Now, look,
maybe I missed the mark on that a little bit, but I know
for sure you couldn't drink in the poker room, which was kind of odd.
I'm assuming it's a tribal thing. I'm not sure what exactly the rule
reason for that rule was. One other interesting thing come up. We had
a player at the table who was getting bad cards, and you know sometimes
when that happens, people ask the dealer to wash the cards. So but
before they shuffle again, they'll spread them all out on the table and spin
them around and wash them and wash them and then put them together and shuffle.
They do not do washes there. You cannot ask for a wash,
they will not do one. But they will do a setup, which is
crazy counterintuitive to me. So if you're running bad and you're one of those
players that you think getting a dood deck will help you, you can call
for a setup. They'll bring over new cards, the dealer will fan them
out, the dealer will wash them, the dealer will shovel them, the
dealer will put them in play, all of which tacks way longer than just
doing a wash. So this makes no sense to me from anybody's standpoint.
It doesn't benefit the casino, it doesn't benefit the dealer, it doesn't benefit
the players. Like, for the life of me, if somebody asks for
a wash, I don't know why, you just wouldn't wash the cards next
time that takes like fifteen twenty seconds, whereas that's not allowed, but a
full setup is allowed, so you could request the setup. I mean that's
going to take a minute to a couple of minutes. I mean you're easily
going to lose a hand or two of hold them during a setup. So
it's kind of weird. Didn't really understand that rule makes no sense to me,
but every room as its quirks. And then the other weird thing was
these promos, So you know, they have different high end promos or aces
Cracked. They had one day was while we was there, which by the
way, is my least favorite promo. I've never liked Asis Cracked. Nevertheless,
my friend who was there with me, who is a professional poker player,
he was there with me, he hit one of these promos and they
don't actually bring you chips. I think it was two hundred dollars. I
want to say it was two hundred dollars. They brought him a voucher for
two hundred dollars in slot play, so he didn't actually win cash. He
won slot play. Now, as you know, slots generally pay out about
eighty percent on average. Looks some pay more, some pay eighty two,
some pay eighty five. You may find some really good slots to pay ninety,
but I think on average, the general rule of thumb is that slots
play out about eighty percent of every dollar they take in. So right off
the bat, instead of receiving two hundred dollars, you know, for the
promotion which they've claimed they're giving you it's slot play, well it's not slot
play, it's games play. And I'll talk about more that in a second.
But if you go take it to a slot machine, you know you're
only going to be getting about one hundred and sixty dollars in value back from
your two hundred dollars because the slot's going to just keep twenty percent of it.
And that's over the long term. Over the short term, you can
just lose it all. And of course, you know how these these free
play things work like you put the voucher in there to play, and you
have to play through that amount, Like you have to play through the whole
two hundred dollars before you can withdraw. So you know, if you lose
all two hundred before you've played through the two hundred, you don't win anything.
So that's kind of interesting. The other thing that sucked is you can't
use it that day. So let's say you're in there at eleven o'clock in
the morning and you hit a high hand promotion or aces crack pross or something,
and it's two hundred dollars and they bring you the they bring you your
voucher for free play. Well, you can't use it that day. You
can't use it till the next day. Now I get why they do it.
They want you to come back, they want you to play slots.
They're trying to encourage playing the casino. And look, if that's what it
takes to keep the poker room going, and it's a great poker room with
great action in which this one is, then look it's a minor thing.
I can overlook it. You know, a lot of casinos just don't have
poker rooms because they don't think they're profitable enough. So if this is what
the casino needs to do to justify having a poker room, you know,
sometimes you got to accept the little bitty necessary evils in life for the greater
good, and the greater good being that we have a poker room. I
will say this to what my friend did is one of the things he already
does is he will play the video poker, which is, you know,
just the best thing you can play on a casino floor. As far as
far as payback, you know, you can get like ninety eight ninety nine
percent payback, So for every hundred you bet, you'll get ninety eight ninety
nine dollars back. That's what he did. He played it through and he
actually wound up up, so he wound up with more than two hundred dollars.
So it worked out well for him. But still a little quirk.
I don't love it, I do understand it. So we'll just give a
general recap overall pros of San Dia the poker room at San Dia and Albuquerque,
New Mexico. Great games were great. Action man, the games were
great and the action was phenomenal. The staff was great, everybody there I
found to be really awesome, didn't have a problem with any of the staff,
and low rake. I mean four dollars rake is like nineteen ninety eight
rake. So anywhere you can go and be raked four dollars, it's just
incredible. Cons of the room, cons of being there a crazy expensive hotel.
Don't go there and think you're gonna stay in the hotel and pay for
it with poker winnings, because unless you're playing that big five to ten cash
game and doing well in it, you're not going to cover the cost of
the rooms. So at the time we were there weekday rooms. This is
weekday rooms, maybe like four five hundred dollars a night weekday. Before I
recorded this episode, I went and checked their weekday room rates as the time
I'm recording this, which is late fall, almost winter, and it's like
two fifty a night weekday, which is still a bit pricey. I mean,
if you're gonna play poker and you're gonna meet that nut, you gotta
make two hundred and fifty dollars a day just to break even, which is
look not impossible to do in these one three matches that games. But you
know, you'd be cutting it close, be cutting it close. The last
thing I'll note is we were there in August, and we had actually been
staying in Austin, Texas, and we were playing at the Lodge, which
I also have a rum review on. If you haven't heard that, you
can go back, it's in a previous episode. But we actually left Austin
for you know, four days to go over and play at Sandia in Albuquerque,
and the difference in weather was amazing. It was one hundred and fifteen
in August and it was like eighty five in Albuquerque. It was beautiful weather
to be there third week of August. I really enjoyed it. Just amazing
weather. And for that reason, I have now added Albuquerque to my list
of summer places to go play poker. So previously it mostly has just been
Colorado. So generally every summer, during the most intense heat of the summer,
I will just go to Colorado and play in Blackhawk because the weather is
amazing there. Now I have found another option that I think I'm really going
to like, and that will be staying in Albuquerque and playing there sometimes in
the heat of summer. So I highly recommend the room. It has a
few quirks in it, but all poker rooms do. But other than that,
I really can't say enough good things about the sand Dia Resort and Casino
poker Room in lovely Albuquerque, New Mexico. If you decide to go there,
good luck to you. I hope you enjoy your time there, and
I hope you have enjoyed this room review. A little reminder, if you
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Hope you enjoyed this room review. We will talk to you next time.