Just wondering opinions on this. I have not been everywhere in the world (who has?) but in my opinion, the following city is the best city in the world to play poker:

Before I give my answer lets look at some criteria...

First is overall living in the city, a catch all to include things to do, food, entertainment and cost of living expenses. For example, LA may be a great place to live, with lots of great poker rooms, but as a pro, you would need to be concenred with the high cost of living.

Second, is access to quality casinos. Are there a lot of nearby card rooms? Are there choices? A wide variety of action? Do the card rooms offer free food, drinks and other incentives?

Third, probbaly most important, is the quality of the typical player. Of course this can change frequently, but is there something about your city to attract poorer players?

I have played in the following cities: Las vegas, LA, St Louis, Atlantic City, Toronto, Edmonton, Vancouver, Amsterdam, Barcelona, London England, Detroit, Buffalo, Montreal, Stockholm.

May I have a drum roll please?

I think the winner is Montreal.

Montreal has some of the loosest, wildest poker action. This was the last city I played in that had a true maniac (I'm talking all in preflop with any two cards multiple times in a row). Montreal attracts this kind of thing due to it's sleazy side (Sex clubs, prostitution, drugs) loose, European treatment of things (18 year old drinking age..3 am last call). Overall the city is not too expensive to live in, the food and culture is great. They have Casino Montreal and Playground poker rooms.

And your suggestions?

Macao.

This depends how you approach playing professionally. If you're happy making your living at the 2/5 level then game availability and softness is less of a concern and cost of living is more of a concern. Personally I think 5/10NL and equivalent stake in other games is the minimum viable level for poker being your primary income (it should never be your entire income long term unless you're stupid). At 5/10 and 10/20 levels game availability and softness become more of a concern and cost of living less. Being a "pro" in a city with two poker rooms is suboptimal in my opinion. If one casino or poker room closes for an unforeseen reason you now have one room to play at, with no competition. That's a huge liability. Your main priority as a pro is to mitigate risk. The main form of that is variance, but risks to your game availability are equally problematic.

What you really want as a live pro is a city with:

1. many well established poker rooms
2. a large population, and
3. lot of rich people.

Those are key. After that ideally you want

4. A good gambling culture
5. A cash based local economy

Those are bonuses. The key is that you will find it difficult to reliably make a 6-figure salary playing poker without a large local cohort of deep pocketed people who gamble regularly at the poker table. These people lose obscene amounts of money on an annual basis. Good action in combination with deep pockets is the magic formula. That tends not to exist in touristy cities with a highly transient recreational player pool such as Las Vegas. Can you be a cash pro there? Or course. Are the games better than other top US metro areas? Nope. (excluding nosebleed stakes, that's different)

Based on this I think the North American ranking would look something like:

1. LA (any other answer is incorrect)
2. Miami, SF, Toronto (if they finally open poker rooms nearby in the next few years),
3. Las Vegas

NYC would be there but playing underground for a primary income isn't for me. But that's up to you. I'm sure NYC pros disagree.

A number of other North American cities are viable for cash pros but you are unlikely to have consistent, reliable, multi-room soft action at the 5/10 and equivalent and above level.

I know the games at Maryland live are supposed to be off the wall but it's one casino. If you really want longevity in this intercoursed up trade you should risk manage with respect to game availability.

All of this must be mixed with where you actually want to live too! I'm Canadian so I can't just move to the states, otherwise I would have been in LA years ago.

Niagara Falls(90min from Toronto) has had 25/50 & 50/100 going pretty much 2-3 days a week for 6 months now.

Maybe Toronto could be high up depending on what happens to the Woodbine Casino in Toronto, i'm hoping this is the case as I live in Toronto. But this is probably 1-2 years away.

I've done a bunch of travelling this year, and I would put DC/MD high up on the list as MGM National Harbor and Maryland Live are within an hour of each other, have 5/10 & 10/25 run pretty much daily and 45~ tables during peak times.

While I totally agree with the rest of your post, fundamentally, most of the people who are asking about these things are pretty happy with mid-5 figure winnings.

Their (negative) responses to your post will be best interpreted through the lens of the real question being, "Where can I put in the fewest hours playing mediocre poker and not have to make any major sacrifices to my middle class lifestyle expectations?"

Like, shockingly few people want to move up. If you said to a new pro that in 20 years they'll still be playing the same stakes they're playing now, 90% of them would take that as a compliment.

Legal access to the big online poker rooms is such a huge factor even for people who mostly want to play live, that I highly doubt the answer is anywhere in the US except for a couple chosen ones who have daily access to high stakes (semi) private games.

Another huge plus are countries where gambling winnings are tax free.

ya that's a valid point. you gotta know what you want and why you want it. 2/5 is likely the "right" level for a lot of winning players.

there's also a lot of people that simply can't move to the best poker city. if you have ties somewhere and there's great 2/5 running regularly, but not much higher, it makes a lot of sense to play 2/5 semi-pro or pro.

ya online is a whole other factor for many players (c'mon up north peeps!). personally not a factor for me as I play exclusively live.

Exactly.

People come here asking where the best games are but the first 20 posts are always about finding out that what they really want is the softest games at a particular stakes in a suburban area which votes the same way they do politically. And that's fine, just say whatever you want up front and save everyone the effort of bringing up the obvious choice of LA.

Also this paragraph is totally unrelated but SF is definitely not #2 if you're talking about NL and only maybe not #2 if you're talking about LHE. There's 5/10 and 10/25 NL but not a lot, you might have problems getting 2,000 quality hours a year. 80/160 LHE is robust though and the ladder isn't bad (3/6 4/8 6/12 8/16 15/30 20/40 all strong, 40/80 may be flimsy). COL is high overall but if you commute offpeak you can live further than most people are willing to put up with.

That is rather depressing though true to some extent. Many of the pros I know who play 2/5NL aren't thinking about the future and what they'll be doing in 20 years. If you asked, they probably have some vague idea about saving up enough money to eventually do something else like start a business. Few would answer "I hope to be grinding this same 2/5 game 20 years from now". Many do seem content with not moving up because the higher stakes games are so dried up that 5/10 players are actually moving down to 2/5.

The ones who are playing 5/10NL and up probably do hope to be able milk the game for 100k/year (TMMV) for as long as they can.

Atlantic City **** Safe and Clean

I would agree with most of all this, except that if you want to play 5/10, Miami/Ft. Lauderdale is def not #3. For 2/5 I would have no problem listing it as #3 but there are no where near enough 5/10 games to get in a full time slate of 5/10 here.

Personally I would put Maryland area above Miami area for 2/5 pros and without a doubt for 2/5 pros who want to mix in 5/10 as well.

WinStar in Oklahoma cant be ignored because IMO they have the softest games in the country but its in the literal middle of nowhere so theres that.

agree with the adjustments to the list. anything past #1 was kind of vaguely placed.

good to know consistent 5/10 action is even scarcer than i thought these days.

you really want a big population in the area and a high concentration of wealth to feed consistent action at 5/10 and above. all the greatest poker cities rank among the largest metro areas in North America and have lots of wealth. LA about 13 mil pop, Maryland Live area has Washington + Baltimore which is about 9 mil combined.

*also thanks Rapini for your little edit to my earlier post :P

As someone that spent some time in Macau... yes, the action and money is amazing but holy poop it's a poop city to live in. I think the majority of the players (myself included) lived in Hong Kong or somewhere else in Asia even if they considered Macau homebase.

Well you need a gambly culture too. Like Houston and New York have as much discretionary money floating around as LA and the SF Bay Area and Miami, but people there just aren't used to gambling. Gambling there is seedy and underground and although some people find it cool, it doesn't have mass appeal.

Of the places I've stayed at for more than a few months, assuming you play 2/5 to like 25/50 with occasional shots taking at 50/100+ (if you play bigger than that you gonna have to go real poker capitals like LA, LV, Macau)

Montreal - absolutely gorgeous city with just the right balance of modern conveniences and overcrowding. Relative lack of cardroom choices and that can get pretty stale. Pretty solid French food options.

New York - I only played bigger poker underground games right around when FullTilt Poker launched (yeah, early 2000s). They were all kind of seedy back then and were always trying to strike a balance between the risk of getting busted and upping the stakes and increasing number of tables. From what I heard, nowadays, except really private games that's essentially invitation only, games run pretty small and rake is insane although games are really soft. It's still a decent base with Catskills (few tables, mostly low stakes, soft action), Foxwoods (well, Foxwoods), Borgata (really nice but... uh... corporate?) and a few other places with decent action, though you shouldn't expect a high ratio of crazy tourists, relative to places in LV/LA and so on. There just aren't a lot of recreational players that drive 2-4 hours to play poker.

Washington DC - National Harbor and Maryland Live have gotten large enough to support a pro and they are both within daily commute distance. Also close enough to PA and AC casinos if you want a change of scenery. Best of 3 options so far easily IMO, and possibly the best option of all.

London - poker just isn't as big. Games run basically all the time at the Vic but other than that other casinoes' action is a bit hit&miss. It's a lot like AC with one casino getting most of the poker action and some spread out over the city but Borgata is definitely bigger than the Vic (the one I remember from ~5 years ago anyway). I don't see a reason to be here long term unless you really have a thing for the Brits or really like to play in European rooms/tourneys. That or you don't want to jump through hoops to play online poker.

Macau - holy batman crazy Chinese people. And jesus, the city is sleazy as ****. There is basically nothing except golf courses, casinoes, and prostitution. Totally unlivable.

LV - lots and lots of poker. Action tends to be good but crazy action games like those you'd find in LA are rarer. Low costs of living. I got sick of the place once I exhausted all the restaurants and shows in about a year.

LA - I hate the city, mostly because I hate driving. Poker games are crazy available and action is the best, on average, of all the cities I listed except Macau. It's not that close either.

Macau is dead in terms of poker currently.

At the moment Melbourne or Sydney would be my top picks.

When discussing the best city in the world to be a professional we can ignore a casino that isn't actually in a city.

It's 120 miles south of downtown Oklahoma City and 80 miles northwest of downtown Dallas, and I'm assuming that neither of these cities will crack the list of best cities in which to be a live pro.

Yeah, that's what "the literal middle of nowhere" means, right? I guess I wasnt clear enough so you had to clarify it more for me?

However, you could live in Denton, which is a nice college town and be 40 mins from Winstar and have everything you could want around you. Cost of living doesn't get much lower either. Its actually a very viable option for a poker pro.

There are relatively few pros in those games. That alone makes it a great spot for a pro.

An oil rig is a great spot to make some decent money. One of the reasons for that is nobody wants to go there to work. Winstar might be the oil rig of the poker world.

Say what you will about WinStar, but if I was a young aspiring pro with flexibility it would be high on my list

1) Live in a college town only 35-40 mins away from WinStar.
2) Plenty of young girls
3) Super low cost of living
4) No pros to battle with so your win rate will be inflated.
5) Lots of recs from Dallas with high disposable income and rednecks from Oklahoma that have never heard the terms "merged range" or "thin value".
6) 40 mins from downtown Dallas (20-30 mins from N. Dallas which has plenty of nite life and other debauchery)

But if you would rather pay 4 times as much for an apartment in S. Florida to play with a table full of nitty retirees, more power to you.

doesn't sound too bad. but if i were in that situation i'd look into vehicle dwelling. park at Walmarts in the greater los angeles area and play 6 days a week. real estate is very expensive in big cities in the US, but food and drink are much more reasonable. then you get to live in LA and travel cheaply within close driving distance.

I love Montreal as well. Frequented Casino Montreal while I was there on university exchange. Rent cost me just CAD 550/month - super value given I'm a 5 min walk away from Chinatown, and the commute to the casino can be made in just under 20 minutes.

Montreal is a great city but are we trying to find great cities that also have some poker....or a city to play poker professionally that is a good place to live?

There's only 2 poker rooms in Montreal. Ive only played in one of them but its a terrible atmosphere with cheap chairs in a dark dreary room and no table selection at all above 1/2.

What stakes do they spread?

Philadelphia deserves an honorable mention. There are some games in town, Parx is ~30 minutes away, AC is an hour away, and Maryland, DC and NYC all within a couple of hours or so. The cost of living isn't insane either