Turning Stone Resort & Casino poker boss Jason DiBenedetto may have a cure for those under 21 blues, the I'm-too young blahs among poker buffs.
It's the fact a player only has to be 18 to play in the poker room at the mid-state New York resort owned by the Oneida Indian Nation near Syracuse.
"This for us is huge," he says, noting that there is not another casino for about 200 miles in any direction. "We get a lot of the players that don't have anywhere else to go because of the age factor, except to the Internet."
For some of the Turning Stone's bigger events, players come to the casino's poker room from all over the country, even the world.
"And people are always calling us from just about everywhere wanting to know if it's true they only have to be 18 to play here."
DiBenedetto remembers 18-year-old Annette Obrestad of Norway stopping by the Turning Stone to sample the poker action, even before she won the roughly $2 million first place prize at last year's first World Series of Poker Europe main event in London.
"She was playing here before she won in London. She actually flew all the way from home for one of our events because there were so few significant opportunities for her to play in live tournaments."
Thanks to a rapid fire series of promotions over the last roughly 14 years since he went to work as a dealer, the Turning Stone has made it easy for DiBenedetto to stay close to home since he joined the resort in January 1994 just months after its opening the previous year. "I started working as a dealer," he says, "and was promoted to floor supervisor in April 1998."
Other promotions followed over the next several years and in January 2005 he became the Director of Poker Operations, just in time to help craft the policies that have helped Turning Stone take advantage of the growing worldwide interest in poker.
DiBenedetto adds that even if he didn't tend toward a certain prejudice about Turning Stone being a great place to hang his hat, the poker room and the poker program offer just about everything a player could ask for-good action at the 32 tables and the kind of comfortable appointments that make it easy to forget the time of day.
And by the way, Turning Stone and the poker room are open for business 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The poker room also adheres to a non-smoking policy that was put in place about six years ago. The prohibition against lighting up at the card tables pretty much mirrors an industrywide trend, as far as card rooms go, although there are restaurants and areas of the casino where smoking is permitted.
What is it that makes Turning Stone's approach to marketing poker unique in its market place? There are the large screen plasma TVs and the fully electronic boards that make it easy for players to see where they are on this or that list. But DiBenedetto is particularly inclined to talk up the fact that, "We have people coming in all the time who mention what a beautifully appointed place this is."
A steady expansion program over the last decade has seen the addition of a long list of amenities, including three championship golf courses that are the site of an annual PGA tour event. There are about 800 hotel rooms, entertainment and fine dining restaurants.
Easy to get comfortable there, he grins, but let's get back to the big selling point. "What really helps us is the fact that you only have to be 18 to play at the Turning Stone ."
The Internet and the fact that Indian nation-owned casinos generally allow 18 year olds to play has made poker one of the Turning Stone's most popular features. "There are so many young adults out there playing poker now. They just live for poker, getting the kind of experience that it took old timers years to acquire. It's not like a lot of them have adult responsibilities, no family they need to get home to, no full time jobs."
This probably makes a player yearn for the moneymaking opportunities that come with turning 21 when they can head for Atlantic City or Las Vegas. But in the meantime DiBenedetto offers the means to "... scratch that itch," so to speak. He doesn't even want to guess what percentage of his card room seats are usually filled by players falling into the 18-21 category. "I don't know, but it is obviously a factor because the players themselves are talking about it."
As the London champ Obrestad informed an interviewer in a decidedly gloomy tone, "It's really tough, this being under 21." "I remember this one 18 year old a few years back who came from Michigan for one of our $500 buy-in tournaments," DiBenedetto says. He ended up winning... about $20,000, as I recall. He was with his mother. Definitely not the sort of thing you'll see in Las Vegas or Atlantic City."
Turning Stone offers two daily tournaments Sunday through Thursday and one on Fridays and Sundays with buy-ins ranging from $65 to $120. DiBenedetto says the tournament registration is fully automated and the tournament clock is a 46-inch LCD display.
"We have several larger scale tournaments every year," he says, "buy-ins ranging from $300 to $5,000. The biggest of these is our Empire State Hold'em Championship in August. It's a 10-day event with a main event buy-in of $5,200. Last year's main event had a field of 123 players with a prize pool of $615,000.
"Our approach to marketing is locally based except for the larger tournaments when we have players coming in from all over the country."
Probably 95 percent of the games available on a regular basis are either limit or no-limit hold'em. There are occasional stud or Omaha games; a big change from the days when most of the action was stud.
"But the people have seen all that hold'em on television and that's what they want to play."
One of the year's big events is coming up May 5-11. It's the Sixth Annual East Coast Poker Championship featuring a main event with a $1,000 buy-in that will probably attract close to 200 players. Di Benedetto's career in the casino business was one of those things that took shape while he was thinking about what he might really like to do some day. After college, he decided to take a blackjack dealer's course, something that would pay the bills while he waited for his life to unfold.
But good things began to happen as promotions moved him up in the Turning Stone administration. While the explosion of poker saw many people decide to play for a living, DiBenedetto saw the poker boom as a chance to get comfortable in an improving job situation that was rewarding his administrative skills.
Going on the road, maybe moving from room to room as a manager was not his cup of tea. "I like the idea of a steady job I can feel good about. Besides, my parents are still in the area."
As lifestyles go, he sees no reason to start tinkering with something that isn't broken.
