Following is a set of suggestions and insights provided by Elaine Anthony, via e-mail to a GWWRA member who asked her for information about setting up a poker run. It contains a great deal of valuable information. 

---

Well, you have got a lot of decisions to make! That's the pleasure of being volunteered, hmmm? *grin* Please take the following as just the fruits of my experience -- not "black-letter law." *g*

One thing that will be important is to determine as well as you can roughly how many bikes will be at your event(s). If it's been done in the past at the same time of year, or in the same location, or by the same group and has been come to be an established event, you will have some history to look at. If you are having to plan a series of Poker Runs over some period of time, you'll want to consider some new ways to bring folks in and get them involved.

Part of the general plan for any poker run is deciding on the scope of your target 'market.' If you are trying to raise money for a charity, as well as cover the costs of producing your event, you need to get as many people as possible there, of course. If it's just a 'fun' thing, what's going to happen to the money? Will it go into the chapter treasury? Will the chapter bear the costs? (I regret to say that the poker run organizer -- you -- may find yourself spending a little here and there and so on, to get all the things that you decide would be 'nice.' Balloons at the checkpoints, a deck of cards with male strippers on them -- oops! *blush* Well, anyway, been there, done that, my husband knows. *g*)

Is the poker run you're planning part of a rally? Is it just for your chapter, like a weekend day-ride? Will it be over in one day, or will people be camping and covering part of the distance the second day? Is it just for your GWRRA chapter and a few others? Will outsiders be welcome? Do you figure you'll be selling things to your guests, as well as offering them a chance to register and go on your ride? Will you have a 50/50, or serve food at the start/stop point? (Don't forget to buy two-part tickets if you have a 50/50 or prizes to give away.)

Do you have enough people to man the checkpoints on the way, or will they be unmanned? If you play games, or have people draw cards, or get involved with anything you think a practical joker (!) might want to sabotage at some remote checkpoint, you'll need to have someone man the checkpoint, usually for hours -- most of a long boring day, they'll tell you!, and their comfort and safety become an issue, as well. At our Lone Star Ladies checkpoints for our State Rally each year, the riders are secretly awarded extra points by the people at the checkpoint if they have the proper safety gear on: full length pants, long-sleeved shirt, boots, helmet and gloves. The riders don't know about this until the run is through -- all they know is some people get a red sticker and some people get a green one. (Stickers put on the headlights are sometimes used to show a rider has been through a checkpoint -- depends on the kind of run.)

You can plan checkpoints with all kinds of purposes in mind, but you generally want to give the riders some pleasant way to compete that just about everyone can do successfully: Stopping to get a date from a historical marker (or one of the girls), going into a museum and answering questions correctly, looking for billboards or signs along the way that spell out a message, stopping to hunt for something that you've hidden, playing 'games' at the stop (Ring Toss, Straw in a Bottle, Balloon Toss, whatever, either On-Bike or Off-) ... there are lots of ways to send a group out on the road and make it entertaining for them.

I think it's better if whatever happens at the manned stops requires that the riders check in and DO something with the people there. The breaks from conversation with the riders who are coming through on the route are invaluable to ease the plight of the volunteers stuck at the checkpoints.. and sometimes the stops where the co-rider FINALLY gets to go to the bathroom *grin* and the rider gets his coffee break make up much of the fun for both competitors and 'officials', as you may hear a new joke, or get a tech tip. You should figure that a group of riders will spend a good 10-15 minutes chatting at each stop with their friends.

I have planned a good many different kinds of poker runs, including one that incorporated a scavenger hunt. One of the favorites was an inner-city ride (through as much open land as we could find on the west side of Houston), where the riders had to locate businesses with the words "Ace, King, Queen, Jack, and 10" in the names of the stores. They had to bring back the addresses (corner of x and y) and got a card for each correct one. There were extras along the route.

As you can imagine, it takes a rather long time for the poker run to be laid out if you want the riders to look for something specific on the road. Similarly, you don't want to make a rider do ANYTHING unusually dangerous in order to compete -- such as have to look at, memorize and/or write down the street number in an address. (Harken to the voice of experience on that one -- thankfully some of my friends overruled me on that silly idea, so no one was hurt looking for addresses on busy city streets.)

And, by the way, at the end, if someone has screwed up and not gotten all the questions answered, or not found everything he was supposed to find, you want to let him draw a hand anyway -- let him pay a little more into the kitty or make some kind of charitable contribution in order to be as likely as anyone else to win the whole game. The idea is to have fun, and not take the 'competition' too seriously, and not turn anyone away mad. Expect serious cheating, too. ;) Our ladies at the checkpoints usually 'sticker' the bikes, and initial something on the score card the rider carries. The terrain over which you are taking the riders on a poker run should, ideally (in my opinion, like all the rest of this) be an area with light traffic, but you want some areas along the route that have gas stations, telephones, food&water, and emergency resources. The length of the should probably be at least 50 miles, and 100 is not too long, but 150 is probably at the outside for a single day run. I try to avoid highways because they can be dull.

If you can divide up the responsibility, you may want to have one person or a team lay out the ride (we pre-ride our Lime Run three times, minimum). One of the last pre-rides should be the day before the run or the morning of it, to be sure road conditions haven't suddenly changed. Then you will want one person to be handling registration the day of the event (minimum -- again, depends on the scale of your event), and someone who knows how to score a poker hand to handle the scoring after the run, unless you use dice or something like that.

What goes on at the registration table is subject to a lot of controversy, by the way: your club will probably want an event release of liability signed there. Who is going to prepare it? Are you just going to use the AMA Release? (There's a whole seminar on dealing with the AMA for such things, BTW.) You will want to know something about risks when you sponsor such an event for the public, and insurance, depending on the size of your group (talk to your chapter officers about this). You will want to decide if you're going to sell patches, T-shirts, maps, pins or anything else at the registration point. You'll want to know who and under what conditions your volunteers are authorized to turn a rider away at registration or call for help or call the police, in advance. You'll want a box for money and change, and someone to keep an eye on it who won't let it walk away.

If you want to sell something, you've got to get it designed, produced, and priced before the event, so that is its own can of worms. Pins and patches can take a long lead time. Get someone who works with or knows the novelty world to help with this, or just skip it.

Again, depending on size of the event, you may have to think about porta-potties and traffic control. We are way too small a group to do these things, but the first year, before we realized that ours is a VERY small event, we worried about it. The big benefit runs, like the March of Dimes Bikers for Babies Run, require a YEAR's advance planning, because there are 3000+ bikes involved. Our biggest turn-out for our LSL Lime Run has been about 60 bikes, I would say, but this year I hope we can get over 100. It takes years, literally, to build up an event.

Pre-registration for events just doesn't happen here in Texas -- even for the big rallies, and even when there is money to be saved by registering early, people tend to just decide to come and show up. But you can put out flyers if you want to, with a registration section to clip and mail in, and see if it works for you. By all means, put it in your newsletter several times and put some flyers in friendly dealerships.

Unless you are doing a big benefit with lots of free publicity (as in the ones where the dealership hosts, and gets a band to come in, or a DJ from a radio station, and so on), you will probably have to go on 'a wing and a prayer' as to the number of bikes to expect -- but for a small group (fewer than 200), I suggest you don't try to sell food. Even home-made food, like cookies and cakes, make a mess and don't bring in much considering the difficulties of preparing, transporting, storing, serving, selling, clean up, etc. Then there's the health department concerns. If you're going to sell food, contract it out.

You'll want to check with your chapter officers about where to start and stop the ride. It's very common for poker runs take off from a park or a camp ground as part of some other event. In such a case here in Texas the counties are adamant that we cannot sell anything on tax-payer supported public property, so we don't start our run from a state or county park.

We 'cheat' on our registration location and use an old shopping center where there is essentially no Sunday traffic, but I don't know how long we're going to be able to do this. I was asked (this is tricky, me being a lawyer) if on behalf of our group I would call the management of the shopping center to let them know that we wanted to use their parking lot. I said no, I wouldn't do it myself, and I hoped nobody else in the club did. I see it as just a gathering spot for people to get together and decide who is going to ride with whom, and pick up the instructions. We don't sell anything, and the registration fee is a charitable contribution to the Houston Area Women's Center. This can be a rather tricky problem, though. With just 40-60 riders going off at different times, I didn't want to make a big deal of it, but there's usually a pretty good size group at the end, and when we give out the awards. So far, no one has complained and I hope it stays that way.

I see the problem as follows: If you ask for and get consent from a property owner to engage in a motorcycle event on their parking lot, THEY stand to be sued if someone goes down on their property because they 'knew or should have known' about the hazards of a motorcycling event, just because it is one. If the property owner has not given consent but we all just show up and ride off (leaving a table next to someone's car for the 'return' point), I expect that the property owner is unlikely to have any responsibility for a use of the premises that he knew nothing about. Just an opinion, and mind you I am NOT giving legal advice, it's not a legal opinion, I don't know the law where you are and if I did I wouldn't opine on it, it's just 'off the top of my head'!!! *grin*

When your people get back from the poker run, you need to figure some way to reward the winners. Allow time for 'scoring' if you give out awards. You can haunt the dealerships for contingency prizes or come up with some creative ones yourself -- get your membership to ask restaurants where they dine for a gift certificate, or make good triangle bandages to put in a First Aid kit (the storebought ones never have any), offer a paid-up course providing a training certificate (MSF, ERC, First Aid, CPR, etc.), or ask your members for pieces of chrome that are new but just lying around in someone's garage because it didn't fit. You don't have to have trophies, but if you're going to do that, do it well in advance. One of our members generously gave us her PERSONAL trophies for a run, and all we had to do was have new engraved plates made. (She had so many from her days as a motorcycle racer that were sitting in her attic, she was glad to see them be put to use.)

We have a lot of ambitions about our Lime Run, but so far, most of what we can offer has been the RIDE. If you lay out a good ride, most people are really very forgiving about whatever other glitches there may be.

Return to