Smart thing to do to avoid the rake and e-tables on the cruise is to buy a pack of cards and buy chips in casino and organize your own game in the play room area. All ships have rooms where you can play games.

Too much effort.

Oasis of the Seas.
early April 2016. Amazing ship. I didn't I would like it since it is so massive, but had a great time.

As for the poker, what a crapshow. Two electronic tables, both Lightning Poker, not pokerpro which is a pretty good product. Each table is 9 handed, a touchscreen terminal for each player. In what would be the 3 or 7 seat there is the terminal for people to buy in and pick their seats. People would feed their money into the machine then pick their seats. Except, of course, it doesnt work properly. If you wanted to buy in for $200 you would have to sign in, set up your name and a p.i.n., deposit $100. If you wanted to deposit the other $100, you would have to sign/cash out, get a ticket printed for the $100, do the whole P.I.N. process all over again, print out the other ticket, sign out, then sign back in again with the two tickets.
The work around for that nightmare process was to tell the new players to go to a slot machine, deposit $200, get a ticket from the slot machine, then sign in using the ticket from the slot machine as your depost. It was much quicker, especially if they were using all twenties etc...
The pain in the ass part was trying to explain the process to the new players which the players usually had to do. Sometimes there would be an attendant there, but they were pretty useless.
The rake was I believe 10%, $15 cap.
As for the play, there were some decent players and bad players in the cash games. The good part was they had a one table SNG nightly at 10pm for $100. They kept $15 of that $100 for rake, playing 2 places (70% 30%).
The table they ran this on actually had one terminal broken, so it was always 8 handed at most. Why they never moved the sng or the main game to the table that actually had all 9 terminals working I'll never know. The first night I won the sng, second night I chopped first, took 2nd place the 3rd and 4th night, bubbled 5th night then got there late the other nights so was shut out. Needless to say, if you were good on SNGs, this is pretty easy money since the play is comically bad. The cash games were much harder because if you sit there and play all night the rake will kill you.
Also, against my better judgement I played the tourney to try to win a free cruise on their annual poker cruise. For these tournies they actually used real dealers, using the baccarat or BJ tables in what seemed like the high roller area. With the rake charged and the horrible structure on that thing you're much better off just putting $100 on a roulette number, and if you hit you can buy you're way on with some cash left over.
All in all, great time on the cruise. Great ship, but I wasted too much time playing cash games. The games with the real dealers that Royal Caribbean has on most of their other ships are much better.

Cruise Line: NCL
Ship's Name: Gem
Date of Cruise: May/June 2016
Cruise: 6 night Canada
Number of tables: 1 - $2/5
Live or e-table: Live
Rake: 10% to $25

Played a few orbits. Dealers had no clue how to deal or even play poker.
Easy tourist fish, but rake is too high and the dealers suck.

Does anyone have any Info on European cruises?

I've found a couple from Copenhagen only through Card Player Cruises. Do the same games run on these as on the US ones? It mentions $4/8+ Limit games which I'd be all over but I'd be surprised if these ran outside the US.

Anything else I should look at?

The cardplayer cruises seem to draw from the same pool of players and cruisers wherever the cruise takes place. I'd be surprised if the games that ran on the Copenhagen cruise would be any different than the U.S. cruises. In any case, they will give you an honest answer if you ask them.

Cruise Line: Princess
Ship's Name: Royal Princess
Date of Cruise: July 2016
Cruise: 7 night Med, Barcelona to Rome
Number of tables: 1 - $1-2
Live or e-table: PokerPro e-table
Rake: 15% to $8

Very reasonable rake, all things considered.

Player pool were fun, happy bunch, which is the most important thing on a social cruise. Wives would say they wanted to go home, then players would just start going all in blind until they busted out their (third or fourth) $100 buy ins.

Player pool was shallow though, I don't think we got more than 6 handed so far. Maybe will get better as cruise goes on.

Wow... only $8 rake... cheapest I've heard on a non Card Player sponsored cruise.

Carnival is capped at $6.

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SM-G900A using Tapatalk

Interested in a list of every cruise line that hosts either live cash games or computer based tables. Just got of a Regent cruise, which was wonderful, but no poker. I can verify that Celebrity has 2 electronic tables on most of their ships.

As someone who has sought out this information repeatedly for years, I can tell you that this thread is probably the closest thing to what you're looking for.

Thanks Bro. I'm still hunting. We do a couple of cruises every year, and nothing I like to do more then play hold em at night or on sea days. Just got back from 3 weeks in Europe, and haven't played a hand of poker for 4 weeks now. Having withdrawals �� And losing income ��

Most floorplans for the specific cruise ship will outline if there is a poker table in the casino or not.

Many of the web sites will say but i have yet to see a deck plan online that does.

Last August I cruised the Carnival Liberty for 5 nights out of Galveston. They had
one $1/$2 NL e-table, which was rarely used.

The last Carnival cruise I went on the year before, they had two e-tables, and
things were busy in the evenings and on cruise days. This time it was really hard
to get a game going, sadly.

I also sailed on the Libery but in Sep. We had regular games. No prob getting a game going. I made a net $800 on a 4/5 cruise

While I am not generally a e table fan, after seeing how bad cruise ship live dealing can be as well as how much more difficult getting games going was, I have to say I prefer carnival e table decision.

Sailing Late November on RC Navigator of the Seas. Interested to know what the poker situation is on this ship, if any?

Any insight re: poker or even reviews of the ship in general would be awesome!

I've got Diamond status on RCL, but I've never been on Navigator so I can't help you out with a personal review. However, Cruise Critic has a database of almost 1,400 individual reviews of Navigator from people who have sailed her, as well as an "official" review from a staff member.

http://www.cruisecritic.com/reviews/...cfm?ShipID=264

Thank you sir. I will check it out!

Just got back yesterday from a 7 night Caribbean cruise.

Cruise Line: Celebrity
Ship's Name: Silhouette
Date of Cruise: December 2016
Cruise: 7 night Caribbean. Stops: Puerto Rico, St. Thomas, St. Maarten
Number of tables: 1 - $2-5NL. Cash game started at 9:30 pm. Daily 1 table tournaments on days at sea
Rake: 10% to $15!


The cash game would only run at nights, & usually after 10pm, since everyone was at the shows or late dinners. the 2/5 played really small compared to what I'm use to. Lots of limped pots & PF raises were usually $10-15. It was a friendly bunch of regular guys that played the whole week.

The daily tournaments had probably the worse structure I've ever played.

They held tournaments at 11:30am, 1pm, 3pm & 4:30pm the days we were at sea. it was a $60 buy in, single 10-handed table (if we got 10)

Here is the ridiculous structure. Starting stack was 2500, 10 minute rounds & starting blinds were 100/200....& they would skip the 400/800 round. Would go from 300/600 to 500/100. They would pay 1st & 2nd place. $300 & $200 respectively. I cashed in 3 out of 5 tourneys that I played in, & all 3 times we chopped for $250 each.

Gotta give one more shout out for Card Player Cruises. Just got back from a 7-nighter on Royal Caribbean Liberty of the Seas to Hounduras, Belize and Cozumel.

Simply cannot say enough good things about Card Player Cruises and cruising in general, especially Royal Caribbean. The poker room was run efficiently, enthusiastically and professionally, met a lot of nice people. 3/6LHE, 1/3 and 2/5 NL, 4/8 O8 with half kill, survivor tournaments, a win-a-cruise tournament and the $370 main event whose first prize was 8k plus.

They stock the poker room with food, most of which was actually healthy - I almost never ate lunch on the ship because there was plenty of fruits, veggies and lunchmeat in the poker room LOL.

As I always say about cruising, you basically give responsibility the finger the moment you step on the ship. You don't have to cook, clean, shop, drive, park or anything like that - entertainment and food are always a short walk away.

Anything else anyone wants to know, please ask!

DTXCF

Thank you for the information, I'm considering going on one of these cruises. How's the night life? Cute girls floating around the clubs or is it strictly poker players? Did you have a private room or get a cruisemate?

The CardPlayerCruises cruises are not exclusive to poker players. CardPlayerCruises rents the ship's conference room and reserves a block of rooms - enough for about 150 to 400 players, depending on the size of the ship. The rest of the cruise passengers (thousands) are just normal cruisers, not poker players. You can only play in the poker room if you book your cabin through CardPlayerCruises. You can partake of all the normal cruise events and venues, just like every other passenger. It's a great way to cruise - you can play as much poker as you want during sea time, or split your time between poker and ship's activities.

Note: Although the players are all people who book through cardplayercruises, play is not particularly tougher than at any poker room. There aren't usually any pros that are cruising in order to make a living. (Except maybe for their HPT cruise, which attracts some pros.) There seems to always be a mix of better and worse players, and always some novice players, too.

@PotLuckNeeded: PokerXanadu nailed it. The only thing I will add it is that you don't *have* to have a roommate, but if you *don't* get a roommate you have to pay for the whole room yourself. In my case, I was travelling solo and they paired me with another cruiser who happened to be a 71-year-old man who's been playing poker for 50 years and was very generous about tutoring me, and a super nice guy, so it worked out very well.

Have you ever been on any cruise, poker or otherwise?

I would be careful about generalizing this to all their cruises. My wife (non-poker player) and I (I was in my late 20s at the time) did a Card Player cruise out of Boston in October 2014. The 1/2 games on that cruise were a nit fest; almost no one would put money in a pot. When I talked to Linda and Jan after, they said this can happen on some of the cruises that are outside of the Caribbean; you just get an older crowd. The higher games and non-HE games had a lot of experienced/good regs and weren't really good for making money either.

Now, the cruise was wonderful, and Card Player Cruises really does a masterful job with the logistics. If they had a cruise at a destination I wanted to go to, I would do it regardless of the dynamic I laid out in the first paragraph. However, if you're doing a non-Caribbean/Bahamas type cruise with them, I would calibrate my expectations to the games being fairly tough by the standards of whatever level you will be playing.