Im pretty sure I heard they have a big mix game once in awhile at The Isle in Pompano beach. Give them a call to find out for sure.

Yes, John Wenzel of Poker Pro Magazine wrote something up in last months mag about hosting a regular game there that could be morphed into a mixed game . . . medium stakes I think.

I love this State and Poker... Finally, after soo many years of waiting for something close to a real poker game... we have something close to a real poker game, lol. We've got the WSOP and the WPT coming to Florida for the first time. Major Poker names coming to the soon to be Major Poker State!

I'm excited (obv)

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hi , im intesred in playing 5-10 nl in florida !!! are there games running ? whats the buy in and are the game are good ?? where should i go ...

had a guy tell me that some poker rooms in central and south Florida did away with the bad beat and went to 1K high hand ever hour. True? if so which rooms.

I have been traveling to SoFla a lot lately and Calder and the Hard Rock in Hollywood got rid on the bad beats. They both take $2 JP and have $1K High Hands at different times, but not all the time. The Isle just started to take a $2 JP and will have $1k high hands too.

I'm glad the rock did away with the bad beat. Now they are having great promotions. Was at the hard rock lastnight and they were giving a 1,000 every hour. They had the heat game on with sound and was really fun. The Isle is a really nice room but they give nothing away. When is the Isle going to give 1k an hour?

The Isle just popped their jackpot rake to $2 per hand and have a bad beat jackpot over $120k. Pretty sure they're going to give out plenty of promos soon enough. Plus, their room is nicer and cleaner. Their dealers and floor are better. The fish are juicier.

Hi folks,

I'm a fairly straightforward 1/2 NL player. After a long time grinding online tournys, I'm looking to start playing local live tournys. I'm an HR reg, live pretty close to Calder, Dania, HR, etc. Any advice on the field, best bets for easy cashes, early level play, etc?

Would appreciate any words o' wisdom.

Sois los mejores. Thanks mucho. Any HR peeps, you'll know me as the well spoken, polite white boy with skinny tshirts.

Warmshaw and anyone else,

Here's the rundown in south Florida to the best of my knowledge

There are absolutely brutal aspects to every single poker room in the area. Some of them also have some positive aspects as well. One thing to be aware of in Florida is that the poker is so promotion driven that a lot of the time it is not traditional poker that is played at all. People often silently try to get $10 or $20 in the pot and then do a lot of checking just to try to win high hands and aces cracked and other promotions. There are many people who play at these rooms who do not even think of the concept of trying to win money off of the other players at the tables. Instead they are just there to try winning high hands. It is very strange and backwards, but it is what it is. With that said...

The Isle - A solid room with a good game selection. They always have the following HE 1-2NL, 2-5NL, and 5-10NL. They also always have 2-2 Limit (florida thing), 2-4 Limit, and they often have higher limits as well. Their omaha games are relatively solid as long as you know when to go play for both limit and no limit. The crowd that plays there is a bit on the tight side during the day mixed in with some decent action. I am not sure about their current promos. They run some solid tournaments as well. Overall, the room is run a bit more on the relaxed side. Players usually hang out and watch games if they want, and it is not uncommon to find players setting up camp a couple feet from the final table of a $15K tourney without anyone saying anything to them. You will also occasionally find some strange floor rulings, but you can say that about anywhere. Most of the chairs are uncomfortable and the tables have a strange wooden frame inside the rail that provides a unique experience. They have been lower on the promotions for poker recently but I hear that is changing soon or has already.

The Hard Rock in Hollywood is a combination of the closest thing to the look and feel of traditional poker and an absolute mess. They have some fantastic action and game mix at that room which makes sense since it is one of the only properties that has table games for players to wander over from and makes many players (myself included) ignore all the bad things about it and play there anyway. The chips are the same ones they use for table games which is also nice. They are low on the integrity side though. The guarantees they post for their tournaments, when not achieved in the natural prize pool, are regularly not honored. Their dealers are known for making their own floor rulings to fix their mistakes. The stories about the people that play there are legendary ranging from people getting regularly mugged in their parking lot to a story of someone deciding to take about $100,000 in bad beat jackpot winnings in cash and getting followed home, run off the road and robbed later that night. Also, the room itself is dark and grungy feeling compared to the bright and vibrant rest of the casino. Recently their promotions have gotten better but I couldn't tell you what they are because their communication with their player base is all over the place.

Gulfstream Park - A lot of the time playing there you are completely aware that it is a major horse racing property that happens to have a casino, poker room, and enormous outdoor shopping and eating entity tagged along. Other times, it's a pretty good experience. The action and game mix vary due to the smaller size of the room. Their only real issue is a feeling of a lack of experience at times and a slightly smaller room than some of the other places that prevents them from running tournaments that are worthwhile IMO. The action comes and goes and there are a lot of regulars but at the same time, they do give away some decent money in promotions and there is less competition to win there than you see at Hard Rock or the Isle.

Mardi Gras - People who play poker purely for promotions often play here, making the play and game mix at this room feel less like poker and the games feel nitty at times. The management has some very strange rules that the players who play here usually don't know are strange because they don't know any better. If you are an experienced player, plan on being pissed off about something asinine that the dealer or supervisor says every so often. All in all, the room's promotions are pretty solid. They fade back and forth between giving away a lot of money one month to not that much the next i guess depending on what they can afford. It makes it tough to get a handle on what their promos really are as a result. Don't bother with the tournaments here. They do some weird stuff with them and almost never run anything substantial except for the occasional florida millions which is a multi casino tournament (you can bother with that one).

Calder - This room rivals Mardi Gras in terms of the promotions, but it is in a worse neighborhood, run a whole lot better, more comfortable and has solid tournaments when they actually decide to run them. They are known for their $100 buy-in tournaments on Saturdays with $10,000 GTD prize pools. They have two solid tournaments every day but the buy ins are almost always very small ($40 or $60). They are also known for being the promotion pioneers. They're the ones who pushed the envelope with more and bigger high hands back in January of this year and they inadvertently forced all of the rooms to go to the $2 jackpot drop to keep up. The have pretty good action in their no limit games, but they rarely get anything bigger than a $2-$5NL (though the $2-$5 often plays like a $5-$10 since it has a $1,000 max buy in). Be aware if you play here that they will kick you out for getting out of line and they back up their dealers which is backwards in a lot of ways.

Flagler - The action here is pretty good for cash games, but learn your spanish before heading over there! They have a small poker room (18 tables) and they fill it up regularly with cash games and almost never run tournaments. It's a solid room for action and it's run unusually. They make up some of their own rules, but they will always have business because they are far away from other rooms with a heavy population of poker players. They get regular $10/$25NLHE games.

Other rooms that I don't really go to that much are:

Seminole Coconut Creek (meh)
Seminole Miccosukee (smokey smokey smokey)
Palm Beach Kennel Club (I hear this room is pretty good but a bit too far north for me)
Seminole Classic (meh)
Dania Jai-Alai (good for the occasional tournament, but almost no cash game base)
Naples has a room at a dog track that isn't bad and has nearly no competition near it.
Daytona has a large room without much competition. I think it's mostly cash games with like 55 tables there. There are more outside of south florida that I don't know anything about.

All in all, you really have to try a bunch of rooms and see what you prefer. I still haven't found a room that i'm completely comfortable with. For me it's between the Hard Rock, The Isle and Calder all for different reasons, but mostly I don't play a lot of poker in Florida because none of them compare to the rooms in other states that I have gotten used to.

Hope that helped!

Couple of questions:

How can casinos justify a $2 jackpot take, especially if there's no bad beat? Are any games actually beatable with that kind of ripoff?

Does Daytona Beach have a $2 take? If so, my days of playing there are over.

This post was great, and thanks for the rundown. Is Hardrock in Hollywood really that bad with people getting robbed right in the friggin' parking lot?!

is there any action for 5/10 or 10/20 limit HE games?

anyone want to give a rundown for South Florida spots in terms of best/worst places with their collective rakes/badbeats and any other swindles from the playing pots?

If you put in a lot of volume, hard rock is the best place to play you make much of the money you lose in jackpot drop rake back via the giftcard promo (750$ for 160 hours played + the 1$ an hour if you play 2/5 an up for a total of 910$ a month back).

Great post, want to add my 2 cents from grinding south fla poker for 2 months not too long ago.

Gulfstream - best chance at getting a sick, very good PLO game (also very likely at the HR on the weekends). I found that that the 5/10PLO game (500 min buy-in, no max) ran 4-7 nights a week. If I ran good at the 5/10NL and/or the 10/25NL (or 5/10/20 depending on room) then I would treat myself to three min buy-ins at this game and try to run up a stack. Good fun and +EV because the table is SO loose pre. Variance is sick obv.

Dania Jai Lai - cash games are sparse, only 1/2NL usually - one, maybe two tables - but it had the worst players I have ever seen in my life (bold statement from someone who played live poker for 40 hours / week for 2+ years). Absolute worst players ever. Sample size two visits. If they had even a 2/5 game I would never leave.

That room is so damn unpleasant ... I started August with the intention of playing there all month to earn a gift card or two. I played there Aug. 1, Aug. 2 and Aug. 3, hated it so much I couldn't bring myself to go back. Without question, the ghetto of South Florida poker.