Bay Area(ish) Casinos

[swope]

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I'd recommend the 1/2 $300 max buy-in game at Artichoke Joes's anyway. AJ's is actually a litte more upscale compared to the other big casinos.

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a friend of mine is there right now. he says there are 6 empty seats for the NL table. a fellow at his table played it last night and had this to say about it;

"almost everyone buys in for the absolute minimum, then pushes and gets busted by one of the big stacks. i played for 3 hours, saw two flops, and grossed 50$."

btw its not really a 1/2 game. everyone plays with 5$ chips basically and its 1-3-3, 5 to go. id call it a 3/5 game, personally.

why one would cap a 3/5 game at a 300$ buyin is mysterious but there it is.

regardless; AJ *is* a very nice place to play cards, the food is really quite good,there is tons of parking, and its easy to get to.

[Small Fry]

Surprised nobody suggested Reno

[pig4bill]

Because Reno is even worse than the Bay area?

[fatshark]

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Surprised nobody suggested Reno

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Last time I was in Reno, a tumblweed rolled across Virginia St. and did some minor damage to my NSX. It is a ghosttown! But I hear it is easy to win some cool prizes at Circus Circus.

[postoakpoker]

Thanks for the tips guys, we might just head down to Lucky Chances and do vegas when we'll be able to stay longer and have more money to spend (well, I'm going to vegas the week after he leaves, but he'll be back at school; sucks for him).

Also going to look into Cache Creek, but their site doesn't say anything about what games/limits/buyin caps there are. I guess I'll call the poker room unless anybody has any experience with their new room (supposedly something like 28 tables).

Went to tahoe last summer and played at the peppermill in reno; tahoe was gorgeous

[swope]

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Surprised nobody suggested Reno

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http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/showfl...part=1&vc=1

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i played cache creek once. its a very nice casino for the area. They had a few tables of low fixed limit 2/4 or 3/6 and some 2/4 NL 100-200 buy in that was donktastic. i was there on a thursday afternoon.. there were 2 tables of NL on probably four of the limit which i wasn't paying much attention to. a very nice poker room with some good gimmicks (aces cracked, etc). but the casino itself is very nice

[I-Love-Poker]

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i played cache creek once. its a very nice casino for the area. They had a few tables of low fixed limit 2/4 or 3/6 and some 2/4 NL 100-200 buy in that was donktastic. i was there on a thursday afternoon.. there were 2 tables of NL on probably four of the limit which i wasn't paying much attention to. a very nice poker room with some good gimmicks (aces cracked, etc). but the casino itself is very nice

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really?

[TakenItEasy]

If you don't mind a bit of a drive try Napa Valley Casino. It's tiny but friendly. They have a $1/$3 NL no cap. The best thing is that they charge time $6/half hour. Works out much cheaper than most Bay Area rakes. They also have a hotel discount worked out across the street.

Another small casino is American Canyon Casino. I think it's $2/$2/$3 with a $4 rake $300 cap? Been awhile so not sure of the details.

Lucky Chances is probably your best bet. The $1/$1/$2 is pretty close to what you want. More of a casino atmosphere. I think the cap was $200. An oddity with Lucky Chances is that they make you limp for double the big blind. As a result you can think of the blinds as half size, probably zero after the rake, so raising in EP doesn't make much sense. This seems to encourage a lot of limped pots. They also have a $2/$3/$5 $500 cap I think.

Bay101 and Garden City have spread limit where the betting is also capped

Garden City:
$1/$1/$2 $2-$100 $100 cap
$1/$3/$5 $5-$200 $200 cap

Bay101:
$2/$3/$5 $5-$100 $100 cap
$5/$5/$10 $10-$200 $1,000 cap

The spread limit plays a lot like NL unless it's a raised multiway pot. Then it plays more like a large limit game after the flop. Implied odds may be limited below what you normally expect in NL so Daniel Negreanu would probably hate it. Hard to justify playing the T7o against a tight EP raiser.

Sorry if I got some of the details wrong. It's been a while since I played at some of the lower limits.

[swope]

i heard a funny description of the bay 101 spread limit 5$ to go game; apparently a lot of high limit types will basically bum rush it and cap every bet, effectively turning it into something like a 50/100 limit game.