Letter From America

I spent much of this month in California, home of Hollywood, the Orange County beaches, and more live cash action than you can shake a stick at. Europe might have its own established and upcoming tours, its casino chains might be expanding their poker operations, and the standard of play amongst the brightest and best live and online is growing ever higher, but when it comes to sheer scale of live poker card rooms stateside do it bigger and better, and California does it more so than most.

Qualifying poker as a game of skill, and licensing places in which to play it, has provided a wealth of opportunity to play poker, alongside other pursuits which often fall under the mysterious heading of California Games.
Examples of these are pai gow, blackjack, and super pan 9 (of which I admit total ignorance other than the inclination that any game with the word super in the title must be good).

Only within the established American gambling hubs is there more on offer. There might not be a scale model of the Eiffel tower or a pyramid with a laser visible from space coming out of it in the Commerce Casino, but you can play on one of 243 tables, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

A quick browse on Google turns up in the region of 70 legal places to play poker in California. Overseeing licensing, and regulating them all is the California Gambling Control Commission, who incidentally state somewhat oddly that “there are approximately 91 card rooms currently in operation”. A trustworthy-looking Arnold Schwarzenegger peers out from the top left of their home page, reassuring the gaming public and the staff, proposition players, and tribal casino managers that their interests are being taken into consideration on a state level. There is simply nothing like this in Europe.
The detail in which you can research, for example, what you will be raked and how much can be taken for jackpots dependent on numbers of players seated in a game in an individual venue, is huge. Every game offered by every card room appears to be listed on the Bureau of Gambling Control’s website.

Not sure what will happen if you are dealt the wrong number of cards in a Crazy Pineapple game at the Bicycle Casino? Well, look it up: “If a player is dealt more or less cards than the game he is playing in calls for, and it is discovered before two players act on their hands, it is a misdeal. If it is discovered after two players have acted, then all monies, antes, and blinds are forfeited by that player.”

Grammatically shaky, perhaps, but the endless debates raging in UK and European casinos regarding just such rules would be ended instantly with such a set presided over by a regulatory body. As it is, players short-haul hopping from Spain to Germany to the UK are confronted with a surprisingly large number of discrepancies in the way things are done from nation to nation and even from card room to card room. Arguments over rulings made by dealers and floor managers rage during games and on Internet forums thereafter.
To be fair, British casino chains are trying to present a unified front when it comes to poker rules. There are a pretty comprehensive set of rules governing all legs of the Grosvenor UK Poker Tour, for example, and although the proliferation of semi-legal card rooms and private members’ gaming clubs in recent years has seen many autonomous-feeling little rooms spring up, their rulings are roughly uniform.

Cross the English Channel to Paris, however, and they do things differently. As they do in Vienna, Barcelona, and Prague. Ask any veteran traveling player for a story about an outrageous rule/example of rake and it is guaranteed they will pick somewhere other than their home country and tear apart some decision or management rule with a colourful smattering of expletives.

This is not to imply that all Californian poker aficionados are more content than their European brethren. They might be treated to comps, cheap meals around the clock, and valet parking (more of a safety concern than a luxury in some parts of L.A.), but they still whinge about the regulated, though sometimes eye-watering, loss of rake plus tips which dent their potential profits.

On the one occasion I visited the Hawaiian Gardens Casino on this trip, two of my table mates complained quietly but continually about it, while sitting for hours at a strange game of $100 max buy-in no-limit hold’em with blinds of $2/$3 which seemed just outlandish enough to my British sensibilities to be fun.

I was not entirely right. While explaining that such a low table maximum would be seen as an oddity in the UK, as would the extra juice which funds the large bad beat jackpots, I couldn’t help but notice that the room was heaving at 9 a.m. on a Thursday, with around ten tables playing this very game.

Whatever they had to complain about, the availability of games whenever they were wanted was not included. Unless of course they wanted to play online, thereby circumventing the slower, rake-heavier live game entirely. That remains, for now, illegal.
The biggest difference between UK and Californian card rooms, apart from the mode of regulation and the scale on which they are run (imagine a card room like a small shopping centre with a car park to match and you come close to the size of the Bicycle, Commerce, or the Pechanga Resort), is the spread of games.

Limit cash games are as rare as ring-tailed lemurs in Britain, but across the pond you can play limit-stud, Omaha, crazy pineapple, lowball, and the frankly leftfield Mexican poker, along with hold’em.

Perhaps the difficulties surrounding online play in the U.S. contribute to the abundance of different games at different limits available day and night around the state, but it could just be that the popularity of the game especially in its lower stakes incarnations has just always been higher there.

Regulation in its current form is only around 10 years old, but poker has been popular far longer. Americans often make the irksome point that they have it bigger and better across the Atlantic, and when it comes to brick-and-mortar poker, they may just have a point.

Jen Mason is a part of www.blondepoker.com. She is responsible for its live tournament coverage in the UK and abroad.