I have a special place in my heart for Hustler Casino. On January 17, 2001 (yes, I remember the exact date), having just read Lee Jones' "Winning Low Limit Holdem" poker book, I showed up at Hustler to play my very first hand of Texas Holdem, shortly after work. I broke exactly even that night at my $3/$6 game. When I walked out, I couldn't wait to come back. Over 21 years later, I'm still at it.

Hustler is a medium-sized card room in Gardena, California -- the southern part of Los Angeles County. It opened in 2000, and has maintained a pretty good reputation over the years. Larry Flynt really enjoyed poker, and personally supervised the project. He also played in high stakes games there for awhile. For unknown reasons, he eventually stopped playing at Hustler, long before his death last year.

Hustler is not in a huge building. It simply does not have the space that the Bike or Commerce have, so it can never fully compete with those rooms. Still, it seems to do okay, and is by no means a small operation.

In recent times, Hustler is best known for hosting "Hustler Casino Live", a venture founded by former Live at the Bike producer Nick Feldman, and his business partner Nick Vertucci. Feldman took his list of contacts from Live at the Bike (which had fired him) and his general talents in producing such shows, and created a very well-liked show which quickly eclipsed Live at the Bike, and became the top streaming poker show in the world. It is almost exactly one year old at this point, and has been a rousing success. It is likely that Hustler Casino does not own any piece of Hustler Casino Live, and this is probably some sort of business arrangement. Feldman appeared last year for a lengthy interview on PFA Radio, and I've always gotten along well with him.

This recent controversy has nothing to do with Hustler Casino Live or Ryan Feldman.

It has to do with a $250k guarantee tournament, held this week at Hustler.

There has been a lot of controversy recently regarding guaranteed tournaments, and players are getting increasingly frustrated. Casinos all over the country are finding various ways to worm out of paying missed guarantees, or they are inserting little-known terms in the fine print, such as the minimum number of players needed to trigger the guarantee. Others simply have cancelled guarantee tournaments in advance, when they aren't seeing promising early registration numbers.

Hustler does not have any such controversy in its past. However, they committed one of the worst violations of a guaranteed tournament to date. About 8 hours after the vague announcement (which hadn't yet gotten a lot of mainstream attention), I asked for some clarification:

https://twitter.com/ToddWitteles/status/1554707592542203906


Shaun Yaple, the general manager of Hustler Casino, then gave an odd response. He stated that there were "many layers" to this decision, but he would not state them on Twitter. Instead, he offered people to find him "in person", and promised to tell them face-to-face. This got a very poor response (as you might expect), and that response is now deleted.

However, I took up Yaple on that offer. I did not go visit Hustler, but I did ask him to DM me and tell me there. Indeed, he did so, and told me what happened. I will not reveal the exact content of the DMs, because they were not intended for public consumption. However, I will summarize them by saying that Yaple essentially blamed another LA area casino for starting a competing series at the same time as their $250k Guarantee event, which he insisted was non-standard in the market. He told me that up until this incident, the LA casinos basically stayed out of each other's ways when it came to major tournament scheduling.

Yaple also conceded that indeed he made the decision to yank the guarantee because Hustler was on pace to lose "low six figures" on the event, and that such a hit to the room of Hustler's size was too devastating to accept. He acknowledged that he knew there would be a lot of angry people, but said that was what he felt was his only realistic option.

I countered (also in DM) that Hustler isn't a small room, and while it's never pleasant for a business to lose six figures in one day, I believed Hustler was large and profitable enough to absorb it, and that their reputation hit would ultimately be more costly.

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