Casinos or Poker Rooms

How far is the closet Casino or Poker Room to Dumaguete ? I am more interested in Poker as I do not gamble other then poker. Is there any rooms like they have in California like the BIKE or Commerce Casino & Hotel in Los Angeles. Some place to play poker

 

Try Honeycomb. There are a few bars I know of at Honeycomb. There is one main resto which faces the BLVD. If you follow around the side which faces another street which runs into the BLVD, you'll see a small parking area and an entrance to another part of the building. If there's a lot of motorcycles and people going in and out that door, then give it a try. They get started after 6 PM and generally go for as long as they have enough players. If there are no motorcycles, then don't bother (try again at a later time or a different day).

NOTE: Going around the side, you'll first see sort of a corridor which goes further into an inner area with a glass door I believe. You don't want to go in there. There are different games in there and I almost never see foreigners in there. Keep walking past the corridor to get to the door I mentioned. It's in the open and easy to spot (no sign that I recall).

The legal status of any games here is uncertain, so I won't mention any other games. Some of them are by invite only. Honeycomb is more open about their game and doesn't require an invite. If you see foreigners in Honeycomb, then you can ask them about other games and they can give you directions.

 

There are also poker games at Gigi's, Octagon, and Katz's.

 

I have not played at Honeycomb before, mainly because of what I have been told by several reliable people that have/do play there (so take my comments as a grain of salt)..

At least half a dozen people have told me that they rake the game something fierce, somewhere between 30-40% uncapped! I have also been warned that colluding between local players is very real there...

With that said, I have played at Octagon and GGs, but those games dont run everyday. Octagon runs a hi/low Omaha game sometimes as well. Stakes are usually equivalent to 0.25/0.50, every blue moon you might get 0.50/$1 game spread... At least this has been my experience over a limited sample size (~20). Hope this helps Gambit

 

One of those is by invite only (if you walk in and ask then you'll probably get a seat). One of them is tournament only and I'm guessing the other is also tournament. One of the these also regularly changes games. None of these places have advertised their games that I know of (they advertise everything else, but not their games) so I don't post anything public about them.

None of these games are legal with Pagcor, which is the gaming license authority of the Philippines. The requirements are such that it probably wouldn't be worth running a game outside of one of the major metro areas such as Manila, Cebu or Davao. I imagine that's why they don't advertise. I suppose they also don't need to advertise because they generally don't have a problem filling the seats.

Their rake is high compared to online games, but not compared to a "bricks and mortar" casino or home game. Offhand, I don't know what the rake is, but it's certainly not 30-40%. If the rake were that high, the games wouldn't last long because the chips would leave the table much faster than buy-ins would add to the table. I want to say that the rake ends up being around 10% and that there is a cap, but I haven't been there in a while, so I don't remember.

They also have perks such as bonus payments for certain hands, free meals at certain times and a 500 peso bonus if you play for 8 hours.

I hear this a lot from people who don't play there (I suppose that's obvious since they are worried about collusion) and people who don't often play cash games. If you don't know what to look for when picking a table, then you're probably at a level where you are most likely going to lose your money anyway.

 

My post on poker games was referencing sites that only had fun poker games, not gambling-type games.

 

Both Octagon and Katz play only tournament games. There are a couple of dozen regular players who have been playing together for several years. Good bunch of people. Only a couple jerks, but the group usually puts them in their place.

 

Watch for PAGCOR really soon!