The room is huge and beautiful. Plasma screens show the wait list and sports can be viewed from just about whereever you are. What I liked most was how spacious the room was. They could easily fit 10 more tables in this room if they wanted to be like Bellagio, but thankfully they've not left plenty of space open for moving around. You never get a feeling of being cramped at any of the tables. The only reason I don't rate the room a 5 is because of the tables themselves. There is a marble rim around the tables where you can stack your trips, but for me this is very distracting and akward. It makes the playing surface seem very small. To peek at your cards they have to be out in front of your chips because it's impossible to lift them up if they're on the marble surface. Between this and the room that the auto shuffler takes up it seems like there is not enough green space on the table. Maybe not a big deal for some, but to me it's almost bad enough that I wouldn't want to play here. Might just take some getting used to. As for the noise issue, I've only played in the day and it was very quiet and easy to concentrate. I would probably not play at night or whenever the adjacent bar opens.
Mostly tourists, some of whom were lacking in the basic skills. When you have a poker room inside of a hotel with 5000 rooms, there's always going to be a large percentage of tourists. I would suggest this room for someone who is a beginner, or someone looking to prey on beginners.
Had mostly very good dealers, but others who were openly grumpy and/or bored. The grumps did not do a good job of calling the action, i.e. when somebody raised without announcing "raise" the dealer would not announce it either, which is annoying. Good dealers call the action so that there is never any confusion about what the current bet is. Also had a dealer call a string bet on me which was interesting because it's been my experience that a player usually has to be the one to call the string before the dealer can enforce it. I don't mind the dealers calling it, and I was guilty of it because I was still getting used to the weird tables, but I had just never seen that before. At one point there was a dispute when a player apparently announced a bet but his opponent thought he checked, so the player got mad at the dealer for not being in charge of the game. I'm not sure who was right, but the dealer got defensive and only made the situation worse. A simple aplology probably would have made the player happy and cooled things down, but the dealer did not seem to want to admit that he made a mistake. Overall pretty good dealers, but definitely not in the same league as Bellagio, Mirage, etc. yet.
Excellent in the late morning when the room was still pretty slow. They actually give you very large glasses of whatever fluid you order rather than the tiny glasses at some other places, or worse, the cheap little plastic cups you get at Foxwoods. The waitress even brought me a fresh black coffee without me having to ask for it. I also witnessed players being served Red Bull. When I played later at a busier time the service was not as fast, but still quite good.
Seems to be very well organized and the folks seem friendly.
They swipe your MGM players card at the table when you sit down. Depending on who the dealer is they may or may not ask you for it.
