Poker in Sydney

Star City Casino

I was given a tour early in the year of Star City Casino in Sydney, Australia, as a follow-up to my inclusion of the casino in The Ultimate Casino Guide. This large casino occupies a full square block in a business and residential area of Pyrmont, a suburb of Sydney on Darling Harbour. Star City, one of the largest casinos in the Southern Hemisphere, is the only casino in New South Wales.



The casino has a cabaret-style theater that seats 1,500, currently offering the smash musical comedy Menopause.



The hotel-casino has rooms and apartments in addition to gaming. Featuring three separate Australian themes – tropical, air and sky, and desert – the casino is divided into smoking and nonsmoking areas. The 12-table cardroom is entirely within the latter. Unlike many American casinos and cardrooms, Star City has large picture windows that offer views of the Harbour. The casino has thoughtfully provided a smoking balcony for patrons, with an outside exit adjacent to Bluff, the cardroom's dedicated bar.



Patrons are not permitted to wear hats anywhere in the casino except within the perimeter of the cardroom. If you leave the area, for example, to take a bathroom break, you need to remove your hat.



The casino is open 24 hours a day, seven days a week, while the cardroom is open from noon to 4 a.m. on weekdays, and continuously from Friday at noon until Monday at 4 a.m. The 12 tables are usually filled, often with long waiting lists for all games. It can take half an hour or more to get seated. To facilitate seating, players sign up for one or more games, and are then free to wander about. You can choose between getting a pager whose range extends just beyond the casino walls or leaving your cellphone number, in which case you get a text message when your seat opens. In either case, you have five minutes to claim your seat.



During play, you have 10 minutes at any time to take a break. If you exceed that time, your chips are picked up. The room has a "third man walking" rule. That is, if two players are absent, a third wishing to take a break must wait for the return of the two. You also can request a 45-minute dinner break, in which case your seat is then given to the next player on the list. However, upon your return, your name goes at the top of the list for the game and limit you were playing. Seated players always have preference on table changes.



The cardroom attracts a mix of regulars, occasional players, and drop-ins. Perhaps 60 percent of them play three to five times a week, and 20 percent about once a week. The remaining 20 percent are drop-ins who play mostly on weekends.



The cardroom offers many choices of games, but not all are played. As seems to be the worldwide trend, hold'em is king, although Manila is also popular. Manila is an Australian stripped-deck hold'em variant with three holecards, of which exactly two must be used in combination with three community cards. Omaha is played, but only in mixed games. The games are:

The amounts are Australian dollars (AUD). When I was there, an Australian dollar was worth about 72 cents, U.S.



By "offered but never played," I mean that the games are available and there are interest lists for potential players to put their names on, but no one ever does. I would have liked to play pot-limit draw with $5-$10 blinds, but was told that the game has never been spread.



Sometimes they spread a no-limit hold'em game with a minimum buy-in of $1,000 and no maximum.



There are regular tournaments, a weekly series offering cash prizes and entry into a big freeroll.



The games are dealt somewhat differently from anywhere else I've seen. The dealer shuffles the cards thoroughly. Two of the tables have shuffling machines, and the casino plans soon to have them on all the tables. After the shuffle, the dealer puts the deck into a small plastic shoe, just large enough to accommodate one deck. From it, the dealer quickly slides one card out at a time, exactly as in house-banked casino games. The dealers are good, and they get the cards out as quickly as poker dealers anywhere.



The rake in the games is unusual. In the $5-$10 limit game, each player antes 75 cents per hand. Those antes are then taken by the house. To facilitate this, there are special 75-cent chips, but almost every hand, someone runs out of these collection chips (or CCs, as they're called) and the dealer must make change. The dealer often doesn't have enough chips in his rack to do so, and either "owes" a player change, stops the game while calling for a floorperson to bring CCs, or sends one of the regular players to the desk for change. It's confusing, and the main result is that no more than 35 hands per hour get dealt. In the $10-$20 limit games and all pot- and no-limit games, $1 per player per hand is taken, rendering change-making marginally easier.



When a dealer leaves the box, he separates the deck into groups of five for counting, further slowing things down.



While the rake is a bit high, the games are eminently beatable. The players are generally loose-passive. In the game I played in, every hand had seven or more players see the flop, often four or five for the turn, and three or four would call a bet on the river.



I played $5-$10 limit. In two hours, I committed myself in only four hands. I got to see the flop for only the cost of the blind many times, but continued only once, that being on the first hand, when I had posted. Everyone else played at least through the turn three-fourths of the time. Of those four hands, I won three. I bet and raised as often as I could in those hands, and I was the only person exhibiting that kind of action. They probably attributed it to eccentric American behavior, and did not let it otherwise affect their willingness to call. In my short session, I won $325. And remember that every round cost $17.50 (except for the rare times when someone raised before the flop and I did not play the small blind, and those cost $15). I think a small-limit player could easily make a comfortable income from those games. I didn't get to experience the $10-$20 games, but an Aussie friend told me they are just as loose. He regularly plays the no-limit games, and told me that even when someone raises to $35 before the flop, there are usually five and often more callers.



Of course, there are many bad beats in such games. The players were consistently pleasant, and when they lost pots, would sincerely congratulate the winners on their good fortune. The player with the most chips at my table typified the play. Two hands in a row, he could win on the river only by catching an inside straight, to which he held only one card, the other being totally unrelated. In both instances, the same winning jack fell on the river. Both times, he check-raised on the river and was called both times.



Poker in Sydney is fun, friendly, and, for a visitor, potentially profitable.

Michael Wiesenberg's The Ultimate Casino Guide, published by Sourcebooks, is available at fine bookstores and at Amazon.com and other online book purveyors. Send prescriptions, problems, and proscriptions to [email protected].