  We review some relevant results in the context of higher spin black holes in
three-dimensional spacetimes, focusing on their asymptotic behaviour and
thermodynamic properties. For simplicity, we mainly discuss the case of gravity
nonminimally coupled to spin-3 fields, being nonperturbatively described by a
Chern-Simons theory of two independent sl(3,R) gauge fields. Since the analysis
is particularly transparent in the Hamiltonian formalism, we provide a concise
discussion of their basic aspects in this context; and as a warming up
exercise, we briefly analyze the asymptotic behaviour of pure gravity, as well
as the BTZ black hole and its thermodynamics, exclusively in terms of gauge
fields. The discussion is then extended to the case of black holes endowed with
higher spin fields, briefly signaling the agreements and discrepancies found
through different approaches. We conclude explaining how the puzzles become
resolved once the fall off of the fields is precisely specified and extended to
include chemical potentials, in a way that it is compatible with the asymptotic
symmetries. Hence, the global charges become completely identified in an
unambiguous way, so that different sets of asymptotic conditions turn out to
contain inequivalent classes of black hole solutions being characterized by a
different set of global charges.
