Q. What were your other tournament expenses?
A. Well, we had welcome gifts, robes with the tourney logo, slippers, digital cameras, beautiful prints of Frank Sinatra dealing baccarat, room gifts every night, special passes, just things gamblers don't normally get. Our Player Development Project Specialist Nancy Hendricks comes from five-star resorts and knows how add those little touches that make guest feel special.

Q. Are you going to do it again?
A. Yes. We're going to do the million-dollar event again next February and we're going to do one for $500,000 in August for players with $50,000 lines. It will be limited to 50 players and cost $5,000 to play.

Q. Do you run smaller tourneys, too?
A. We do a lot of slot tournaments, and we're developing some other blackjack events right now, but nothing that we can talk about. Yet.

Q. You must have run some smaller blackjack tournaments to get ready for this?
A. No, just went for the gusto. This was our first tourney ever.

Q. That's pretty ambitious. How did you ever manage to get your senior management to buy in to spending $800,000 on something that's never been done before?
A. We've been struggling for a long time to come up with a way to overcome the negative perceptions about California casinos. We like to think of ourselves as the Nordstrom's of West Coast gaming. Our ads and brochures just couldn't do us justice, so I had to come up with a unique way to show high rollers how fantastic Barona was. I came up with something no one has ever done and thought this was a good way to get them to come see us [laughs]. Then I begged. I worked hard to convince them that we needed to do this to put ourselves on the map. It took awhile, and before we knew that it was going to work, everyone around here called it "Iris' Tournament." But once we got such a positive response from so many good players, it became "Barona's Tournament" and everybody did everything they could to make it work.

Q. How did you figure out how to run a tournament of this scale so quickly?
A. It wasn't that quick. Basically, I'm a player, so I started playing tourneys in Vegas, did a lot of research, found out what players like and don't like, interviewed tourney directors, got their rules, then tweaked them to make something special. And, as I mentioned, we took all of our key people to play in the Hilton tournament, too.