I played two sessions of 3-4 hours each over the 4th of July and WSOP Main Event weekend, so my experience may vary from the typical experience for this room. The room has 8 regular tables, though 6 more had been added out front for extra WSOP traffic. The location is good, by the sports book. Only half of the tables have auto-shufflers. The chairs were well below average for better Vegas poker rooms. The ambience of the room was a weird combination of tacky, sterile, and dingy. The best features of the room were that the tables were newly re-felted, and the location seems a good one for generating walk-by traffic (as I found on a prior visit a year and a half ago). Certainly no reason to go out of your way to play here unless you find the action is routinely softer than the many Strip options. Considering the Rio hosts the WSOP (and that layout was fairly impressive in the conference are of the hotel), the poker room itself is remarkably shabby and not at all a fitting "host room" for the home of the WSOP.
Play here was soft at the 1/3 NLHE level, even with a lot of WSOP player traffic. There were a number of solid players, but there were more weak casual players and hyper-aggressive tourney style players (who I find easy to play against in cash games).
Many of these dealers had trouble with game management, including counting chips, controlling action, and enforcing rules (particularly the English only and one player to a hand rules). There were a couple of top notch dealers, which made the shortcomings of the others even more painfully obvious; these dealers are the only reason the score is not a "1". Most of the dealers were notably unfriendly or disinterested in their job; understandable given the hours they likely work in the WSOP, but friendliness is still part of the job description. It's possible some of these dealers with skill or personality issues are only WSOP part-timers, but they have the Rio logo on their badges, and the Rio poker room is responsible for the dealers they put out on the floor.
Service was fairly decent given the level of WSOP traffic. Service was notably unfriendly, also likely due to the level of WSOP traffic.
When a casino hosts the WSOP, the room should reflect a certain level of quality. Instead, this room lacks auto-shufflers on all tables, has a bad beat jackpot, and is in fairly poor condition compared to the leading Strip and Downtown tourist poker rooms. List management was pretty good given the WSOP traffic, but I was called for 2/5 NLHE and seated at 1/3; after pointing out the error, I was told that because I had been seated at a game, they would put me at the bottom of the lengthy 2/5 list if I wanted. Rulings seemed correct. Friendliness was notably lacking, again possibly due to WSOP traffic.
They had a badbeat jackpot advertised, but no HHJs listed. Hours were tracked, though I'm not certain of the amount; I presume the fairly standard $1/hr. per the Harrah's family of poker rooms.
