Atlantic City Poker Rooms

If you are going to play poker in Atlantic City you will find a great disparity among the poker rooms at the various casinos. By far the largest and most comfortable room is at the Borgata where the variety and depth of the games goes unmatched in Sin City East. That of course is the upside. The downside is that the room is filled with hundreds of regulars, grinders at every level who spend their lives inside those glittering walls seeking to pluck clean the tourist or amateur who happens to wander in. Sharks and pirhana feeding on guppies and minnows, the grinders often only play monster hands and you would be more likely to make a profit from Bernie Madoff than any of these people. The high limit room has been host to many notorious people aside from the local pros. Regulars include a former Yankees manager, a multi-gold medal winning Olympian and of course celebrity poker pros who find themselves in the metropolitan area and who wouldn’t be caught dead inside any other A.C. poker room. The fact that the room boasts the most attractive cocktail waitresses and massage therapists simply adds to the panache, as do the facts that the Borgata uses the most proficient dealers, runs the most organized tournaments, and has a bad beat jackpot that seems to defy the laws of mathematics, being hit more often than Rocky Balboa was by Apollo Creed.

But as I mentioned, this is the room in which a novice player is most likely to have to hitch a ride home. If you are such a player who won’t be deterred though and you want to play here, the time to do so is definitely on the weekend when you may have a chance of being seated with other novices. A few weeks ago I was playing in the high limit room on a Monday night. Monday nights are usually pretty quiet except when a major tournament is in progress. This was one of those quiet nights and the game was very tough for everyone when suddenly a young Asian pro looked around the table which was filled with all Borgata high limit regulars and lamented “This is no good. Everyone here is equal. The only way to win here is to get lucky,” Sharks trying to eat sharks simply is not the way to consistently make money.

So where is a player to go if he wants to face a generally weaker field? My first recommendation would be Caesars, which by virtue of the fact that it is on the boardwalk, attracts street people who wander in pulling three crumpled 20 dollar bills out of their pockets and smoothing them against the felt before handing them to the dealer for chips. Moments later, after having their bottom pair felted by a straight flush they repeat the ritual, and continue infusing crumpled dirty cash into the game until they finally stare forlornly at their empty tattered wallets and slowly stand for the agonizing trip back to the boardwalk where they will spend the rest of the day sitting on a bench and playing target for seagull droppings. The smart ones wear hats.

The Tropicana is another casino that attracts the boardwalk crowd but also boasts a bunch of grinders in its low limit games (for the most part the Borgata is the only casino that offers high limit games on a regular basis in Atlantic City). It is a seemingly larger room than Caesar’s but somewhat more claustrophobic, with very closely-placed tables. I should probably frequent the Trop because I don’t think that I’ve ever lost there (I’ve gone with my wife and friends a number of times and I always cover dinner at the Palm for all of us by playing for an hour) but it is a depressing room (actually two rooms) and the entire casino has been on a downhill slide for years now.

The Taj boasts the largest poker room along the boardwalk and also the dirtiest. Most of the poker players that I know have vowed never to set foot into that room again, although some do play in the annual U.S. Poker Championship at the Taj. Years earlier, before the Borgata was built, the Taj was the place to play, despite the annoying distraction of having a noisy conga line with minimally attractive people clad in togas. It offered the best games in a large comfortable room. Not any more though.

As for the other casinos, I have played poker in all of them and none offer much in the way of competition (so if you have been banned from Caesars for card counting or vomiting on a craps table, you can find pretty easy pickings at the Hilton, Harrahs, Bally’s (where the poker room is on the 6th floor if I remember correctly) or any of the other
rooms where a game might break out.