While playing at the CNE last Saturday (great 20-40 Omaha games), I was told that Woodbine will soon have a full-scale poker room with live dealers. Does anyone have any knowledge of this? dates?

Someone told me this the last time I played at woodbine, which was almost 10 months ago now. It's been an ongoing rumour for awhile now but no one has any real information.

Is that at the racecourse near the airport? Just moved to Toronto and the card rooms are miles away!


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Yeah the racecourse near the airport currently has poker but its on the e-tables. Welcome to Toronto!

Thanks ! Great city, we are really enjoying it. Will check out Woodbine and hopefully get down to Niagara and up to the Great Blue Heron at some point.


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I Interesting because on average once NL starts at a casino it kills limit, except for a few token tables at rake trap levels.

i tried to get a table running for 1-2 NL but no interest on a saturday last week. Hopefully it's different this saturday lol

Just wondering if Woodbine poker rm is running again? What's the best rm for action these days? Casino Niagara? Fallsview? Rama? Woodbine?

Do any of you have a suggestion for an area of Toronto for a US online player to move to? I'm thinking medium-low cost of living with activities within a 10 minute walk + not a slum? Also if anyone is in my shoes and has made the move I would love to chat, pms welcome.

Are you thinking of renting a room? Or more? I love T.O. but "medium-low cost of living with activities within a 10 minute walk" is not one of its defining characteristics. On the other hand, it's pretty easy to move around in, so the 10 minute walk may not be an inflexible requirement.

This website will give you some idea of costs: https://www.expatistan.com/cost-of-living/toronto

thanks my dude. any recommendation on somewhere cheaper then that is still nice to live?

Heading to Niagara this weekend to play... but it's been ~6 months since I've last been and sounds like there have been a bunch of changes. I checked Bravo today but it doesn't tell much of the story...

1) Has the location of the FV room changed? Does it still have a regular 2/5 game?

2) Is the new CN room up & running yet? Last trip, they were in the dingy temp location. If the new room has opened...what's it like?

Thx in advance.

I still don't know quite what you're looking for. And other relevant details. Inferring (from "my dude") that you are young and single, I'd suggest you see if you can find something that's on or close to Queen St. East (but west of Woodbine and the Beaches, which gets quite pricey) or Queen St. West (far enough west to get past the trendy parts; the street car will get you where you want to go fairly promptly and connect to the subway for more of the city). If it's clubbing you want for activity, then see this:
http://wikitravel.org/en/Toronto/Clubland
But even with the discounted dollar, don't expect cheap. And personally, I wouldn't count on the dollar advantage holding, given the current state of things.

If you don't mind small cities the Niagara Region as a few where rent can be close to half of Toronto and you can drive into Toronto in a little over an hour without traffic.

Toronto has no cheap housing, rooms cost the same as bachelor apartments in many cities and bachelor apartments cost what 1 bedroom apartments cost in moderate cities. Toronto even has a bottle neck affect in the high end condo market for rentals where people have been bidding over the asking rental price to live in a fancy downtown condo. Reasonably priced is relative to an expensive city, if you compare Toronto to Vancouver, San Francisco it's reasonable but not to Montreal.

Would like some help from you locals to this area. I am the new ambassador for an small but growing online poker site, and they wish to send me on some tours of the world to engage with local players and generate new customers. Right now, the owner would like to try and get more Canadian players on the site. We have been very successful so far with generating new players through poker clubs. Not the kind of public poker rooms that are usually discussed in this thread, but private clubs where groups of friends get together to play tournaments and cash games. The kind of clubs that often run competitions to send 1 or more of their members to the WSOP.

If you are in such a club, please reach out to me here by PM, by messaging me on my website (www.FossilManPoker.com/contact.html), by hitting me up on twitter (@FossilMan), or by posting in this thread (least preferred method). We would love to learn more about your club, and see if we can arrange for me to visit and play with your group for a day. We might also be able to arrange some of my FossilMan Poker Training as part of the visit.

Even if not in this area, if you are in or know about a club that might be interested, I'd appreciate it if you would provide me with the info.

Thanks for reading this post, and looking forward to visiting your club!

Cheers, Greg Raymer (FossilMan)

Greg..

I've posted a few questions in the pokermania thread in internet poker froum and gotten a few answers from the site rep, but a few things still seem odd to me.

https://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/28/internet-poker/pokermania-poker-site-1648575/

I care because I follow alot of business happenings in the poker world and never heard of site like this. Also I have a friend that is playing higher stakes PLO there and something just doesnt smell right.

The site rep admitted in the other thread that at least one owner played on the site (but when asked that owners screen name site rep went dark in the thread)

Given that this site is not regulated by any regulatory agency I am aware of, is obviously operating illegally (taking US bets), has a stable of paid props playing AND owner(s) are playing on the site, wouldn't you agree this is ripe for another UB god mode type scandal?

Went to Niagara today with the gf who doesn't play. Was shocked that they wouldn't let her watch. She is new to poker and just trying to learn. They had 1 table going so didn't think it was an issue. As a tourist this was disappointing so we just left. EverywhereI've ever been has allowed her to watch. We had 4 more hours to kill I guess somewhere else will get my money.

Woodbine is still out of commission. Need to go to some underground place. I went to skypoker. Rake is a little higher than a casino game for sure but the game is really soft.

www.skypokerclub.ca

Plenty of underground games in Toronto, most just have insane rake. Ive played in maybe 20 games and have only found 2 that have less then $10 rake, which is basically the max that I'm willing to pay.

Hoping to see Woodbine come back soon but until then were stuck with undergrounds

I hear you. Sometimes high rake but with terrible loose players is better than low rake with small stacks and no action. It's all about playing at the most profitable games.

Has any info come out yet? You have to think that they'd start advertising if a room was opening.

As some of you may know, Great Canadian Gaming has chosen to remove poker permanently from the Great Blue Heron Casino in Port Perry, effective Monday June 26th. This is in addition to them having removed poker from Woodbine the day they took over 6 months back.

Today a friend of mine heard back from the General Manager at Woodbine, where he stated poker is not in the plans for any of GCG's Toronto area properties. I believe GCG hates poker, and they will not be spreading it at any of their casinos. Land in Port Perry costs nothing. For them to remove it from that casino is a very, very, very bad sign.

Accordingly, I've come to the conclusion that it's now time to launch a PR campaign against GCG, with the intended effect of making them adhere to their commitments to the OLG when they were granted the license for the GTA casinos, which includes, among other things, diversifying the offerings, and lowering their customer age demographic (ie more poker, less slots).

So I put a petition up here --
https://www.change.org/p/doug-ford-l...ker-in-the-gta

Any comments you make will be emailed to the following people:
Doug Ford, Premier of Ontario
Michael Ford, Councillor Ward 2, which contains Woodbine Casino
John Tory, Mayor of Toronto
and last but definitely not least...
Stephen Rigby, President OLG

Please sign it, send it to all your friends, post it on social media, etc. I want to force GCG to honour their commitments, and bring a big live poker room to Toronto!

After the petition has sufficient numbers if I don't see a satisfactory response I'll be taking the campaign to the media.

Thanks, I tried them out and had a pretty good time. Took a bit of time for it to get going but the game is really soft. Has a pretty friendly feel rather than the typical seedy gangster lair.

$2/5 game with what seemed to be reasonable rake. They had some kind of high hand bonus and a $10K Bad Beat.

how does this place escape scrutiny being so out in the open? also what is the buy-in cap / avg stacks in that game?

From what I know about police raids and why they occur, you need a formal complaint and then the police have to send in under covers to observe what is going on.

Many of these games are in areas of the city with higher priorities than busting a non violent crime where the two parties agree to the crime happening. Now if there is a game where multiple crimes are happening ie drug dealing, robberies, fencing of stolen goods. This game will get busted quickly and the bust will probably make the news.

PS I was at Woodbine the other day and the roulette is 50 min. a spin during the day? WTF, and this game had double greens too.....