For funzies, I tried one tournament in Laughlin, at the Colorado Belle Casino. Here's the gory details.
Entry Fee: $25, of which 20 goes to the prize pool, and the house and dealers get the other 5.
Tourney Structure: 200 in Tourney Chips, blinds start at 5/10 and escalate every 15 minutes. Essentially, every time it was your BB, the next level had always started.
Fast Action: If you didn't make a move quickly, you would be bled to death by the third or fourth level. You can barely wait for S-Class 6 starters, to say nothing of pocket Aces.
This kind of tournament had very little social interaction between the players, and was deadly dull to me. I played one, and after that, decided I would stick with standard limit games where I could wait for decent starters, and fold J8os.
The Colorado Belle had a nice poker room with good dealers, and a lot of regulars. I was happy to play their limit tables for an hour before the tourney and an hour after. Since it wasn't my home casino, I eventually migrated back to my hotel to play.
Their limit game was 2-6 spread, with only one blind ($2) and a non-escalating structure. This made it easy and cheap to wait for starters, and it also lead to some very healthy pots when more than one player got excited about the flop.
