Six Players, Zero Tables: Borgata's $5/$10 Phantom List

Borgata's $5/$10 no-limit hold'em game had six players on the waitlist and zero tables open at 4:45 p.m. PT on May 24. That's the biggest poker room on the East Coast, on a peak afternoon, posting a phantom list at its marquee cash-game stake.

A phantom list is what happens when enough players sign up to fill a table but the game never actually spreads. The demand exists. The supply doesn't. And the $5/$10 at Borgata is becoming a textbook case.

The Number That Matters

Borgata's median $5/$10 NLH waitlist sits at 1 player. On May 24, it spiked to 6 with zero tables running. That's a 6x ratio of waiting players to open seats, and because there were zero seats, every one of those six names was staring at a Bravo screen that would never beep.

Borgata's median $5/$10 NLH waitlist sits at 1 player; on May 24, it spiked to 6 with zero tables running.

This isn't a new problem, but the snapshot crystallizes it. Six players willing to put $1,000 or more on the table, and the room either couldn't or wouldn't open the game.

It's Not Just the High Stakes

Scroll down to the $1/$3 tier and the demand picture looks different but equally strained. At 12:45 p.m. PT on the same day, Borgata's $1/$3 NLH list showed 8 players waiting across 3 running tables, against a median waitlist of 2. That's a 4x ratio: four times the typical queue depth at the bread-and-butter game.

And Borgata isn't the only AC room feeling the squeeze. At 3:30 p.m. PT on May 24, Harrah's Atlantic City posted 7 players waiting for $1/$3 NLH with zero tables open and a median waitlist of just 1. A 7x ratio. Seven names deep, no game to sit in. That's a phantom list at the lowest meaningful stake in the room.

The Demand Map

Here's what the three snapshots look like side by side:

| Room | Game | Time (PT) | Waiting | Tables | Median Wait | Ratio | |---|---|---|---|---|---|---| | Borgata | $1/$3 NLH | 12:45 p.m. | 8 | 3 | 2 | 4x | | Harrah's AC | $1/$3 NLH | 3:30 p.m. | 7 | 0 | 1 | 7x | | Borgata | $5/$10 NLH | 4:45 p.m. | 6 | 0 | 1 | 6x |

Two of the three snapshots show zero tables open despite multi-player demand. The third shows a waitlist four times its normal depth. All three readings came from the same afternoon in the same city.

Why This Bleeds Players

A $5/$10 player who logs onto Bravo, sees six names and no table, and drives to a home game instead isn't coming back next week to check again. The feedback loop is brutal: thin supply discourages sign-ups, which makes the list look dead, which discourages more sign-ups. Each phantom list trains regulars to look elsewhere.

At $1/$3, the calculus is slightly different because the games do spread, but the wait depth still matters. An 8-deep list at Borgata or a 7-deep list at Harrah's means 45 minutes to an hour before you sit. For a recreational player visiting the shore for an afternoon, that's a dealbreaker.

The combined picture is an Atlantic City poker ecosystem where the low stakes are oversubscribed and the high stakes can't get off the ground. Demand exists at both ends. Supply is failing to meet it.

The six names on Borgata's $5/$10 list aren't a random blip. They're six potential customers telling the room exactly what they want to play and getting nothing in return.

Methodology: All waitlist and table counts are drawn from Bravo Live snapshots captured on May 24, 2026, at the timestamps noted. Median waitlist figures represent the trailing median for that game type at that property as reported in the Bravo signal payload. Ratios are calculated as waiting players divided by median waitlist (or divided by open seats where applicable, with zero-table snapshots treated as infinite demand-to-supply). No extrapolation beyond the observed snapshots is implied.