APC Survey Results
I’d like to first thank all APC’ers for playing poker with us and taking your time to fill out our surveys and give us some incredible feedback! I wanted to share with everyone the results of the survey and let you know that we are taking this feedback to heart and are actively working to constantly improve the quality and enjoyment of Atlanta Poker Club poker. We also hope to have a compiled list of total numbers, but this is a good overview of what the APC 2008 survey told us about how we are doing, what we can do to improve, and how we can continue to make the Atlanta Poker Club the best place to play no limit texas holdem in Georgia!
So here goes, shall we:
Better Offline Communication – The majority of Atlanta Poker Club members do not visit the forum or blog and miss out things going on with the APC. We are working on a monthly newsletter that will be printed and distributed throughout all of our venues featuring the upcoming events, promotions and news for the APC. We’re looking for sponsors and advertisers to help offset the cost of printing, so if you own a local brick and mortar business in the Atlanta area and want to advertise in our monthly printed newsletter, the price is $100 per month. APC’ers get a 10% discount for each season they have earned 200 points or more, up to 50% off. Email support @ atlantapokerclub dot com to order. Only two sponsored ads per month.
Prize Choices – For our grand championship and end of season prizes the majority of you would like the choice of either a poker trip and tournament seat or just the cold hard cash, ala gift card. We are looking closely at your suggestions and are taking them into careful and close consideration for our next year long promotion and budgeting accordingly. Our requirement is to maximize our budget so APC’ers get the absolute most bang for their buck while also allowing us to operate, grow and continue to invest into remaining a viable business. We are working to find more sponsor donated prizes as well as a finding a way to incentivize a sales person to solicit sponsorships and if and when this happens these will be added in addition to any prizes we are budgeting for already. We are also looking at adding prizes for 2nd and third at our major events instead of the winner take all style of the past as we know it stinks to get so close, but so far.
Better Dealer Training – I first want to say that the vast majority of our feedback on our volunteer dealers was excellent. Yes there are a few instances of dealer misconduct but I’m just being honest with you when I say it can never be completely avoided. We are, however working on an APC Dealer Certification program where our regular volunteer dealers will be given a completely free and in-depth training course that consists of online videos of Tami D, who was the best poker dealer the Atlanta Poker Club ever had and who now deals on a part time basis at the Bellagio in Las Vegas. If you are relatively new to the APC you probably never had the pleasure of sitting at one of Tami’s tables but it was awesome. Along with this online video dealers will go through an ‘on the job’ training course and a seasonal class held by our best dealers. We will have full details on what it means to become an APC Certified Dealer and the perks of the job coming soon.
Equipment refresh where necessary – We will be getting tables replaced and recovered over the coming weeks where they are needed the most. I would also like to take this opportunity to ask all players of the APC to please remember that these are your poker tables. If you help us take care of them and help us make sure others take care of them, we will commit to upgrading to finer and finer materials. We are even considering speedcloth for some of our tables but but we need to be shown that the tables will last and not be abused. We are, however getting the worst of the bunch recovered in the short term and will be looking at more and more ways to continue to improve our quality of equipment.
Dedicated Wait staff – A dedicated wait staff serving 60 APC’ers will make the host venues more money and keep you guys happier playing poker. While we cannot control the quality of the venues wait staff directly, we can and are going to emphasize that a wait staff that makes a point of visiting the tables on a regular basis and those who ask for orders get them. We will stress this to new venues as well as encouraging player communication and feedback so it’s a win win win.
Smoking vs Non-Smoking – Ahh, the age old battle. I understand both sides of this argument, believe me I do. If a venue allows smoking in their establishment then at the normal nightly events smoking will be allowed at the tables. This is a venue specific rule. We are, however going to emply a “no smoke at the tables” only during the league wide special events, like grand championships, allstars, etc… You can still smoke inside the venue, just not at the tables, assuming the venue is a smoking venue.
Turbo Tourneys – are enjoyed, but they caused some confusion. I certainly understand this because the turbo tourney is something that has been added fairly recently to our services and many TD’s do it a bit differently at their venues. We are firming up the details but the short answer is that the Turbos will start a minimum of 1 hour prior to venue start time and must end by 15 minutes before main event starts. 5 minute rounds are standard and 10 seconds to make a decision. There are a still a few loose ends to tie up (like alternates) but we should have a clear explanation of how turbos will work but we will have that detailed soon.
How You found the APC – Most found the APC from word of mouth and from signs at venues for the most part, with the internet being the third most common. This tells us that we need to figure out more ways to encourage everyone to invite your friends and co-workers out to play poker with us. We also need to make a better effort to have current signs posted at all of our host venues, as well as work on other offline marketing efforts. We have a few ideas in the pipeline for this as we go forward.
The APC Poker School seems to have willing participants and many of you would encourage it to your friends. This is being looked at closer and we’ve got most of the details worked out on the first installation of the APC poker school. This is going to be a basics course designed for new and inexperienced players to come learn the game in a no pressure environment. More advanced classes may be offered in the future for advanced coaching.
Common situation procedures – we need to uniform our procedures up in some areas, such as in what to do in the event that an all in player turns his cards face up with two players left still to act, or even dealing for the button at every table or one table. While we don’t want to have an official rule list three miles long we do want to have standard operating procedures covering situations that happen on a somewhat regular basis and are sometimes handled differently by TD’s. We will add this both to our online TD area as well as printed out for materials.
Venue nightly prizes – bar certificates were wanted for nightly prizes from all venues. We will make every effort to encourage our host venues to give away something each night, but realistically we can not guarantee that. The venues themselves are responsible for nightly prizes and we will encourage all venues at the point of signing to agree to at least modest nightly prizes.
TD’s -Feedback on our TD’s was overwhelmingly positive. There are always areas for improvement and we are going to strive to better communitate with all of our TD’s for consistency, accuracy and standards and make sure that our TD’s ensure an enjoyable atmosphere and a fairly ran event for all players.
Forum – could be friendlier but I’ll say that over the past 9 months I’ve personally seen the forum turn friendlier or at least less rude from the get go with newbs… he we were all forum newbs once here right . Anyway, I don’t have a ton to say on this because other than Spam and the french thread, we don’t go around deleting threads as common practice, but I do want everyone to know that getting members to join and become active members of the forum is one of the best ways to encourage play at live events, so it helps the APC when noobs are treated respectuflly when the venture into the forum.
Promotions – Our promotions need to be clear and consistent. We were a little suprised by the amount of player base that really doesn’t visit the forum (i know, who’d of thunk it right?). And we have so many people who just come out to play every now and then or might just be looking for a reason to come and play and if they hear of the promotion they might decide to come out and bring some friends. We have areas to work on, on making our promotions better known and widely distributed. Don’t worry we will never spam, but we should work to have at least 1 email sent out per week to all players who are registered Atlanta Poker Club members, as well as a newsletter handed out across all venues.
Again, I’d like to say a huge thank you to all the players who took part in the survey and promise that we will work on evolving the APC to better serve your needs, wants and desires. Thank you to all the advisory members who worked tirelessly behind the scenes to make all of this happen, and who continue to work to design and implement positive changes to the APC. Thank you.
Visit the forum to discuss the survey results.
