Florida has long been one of the primary poker regions in the country. Unsurprisingly, poker in Florida has come back strong, with most rooms reopened and a thriving cash game landscape. Further, unlike some regions where tournament poker has been slow to revive, Florida has many rooms offering daily tournaments. So what a great time to take a Florida poker road trip!
The exact order in which you visit Florida poker rooms will depend on your current location. The two main directions would be to arrive from the West through the panhandle or from the north down the coast. Let’s imagine that you’ve entered from the north. If you have. hopefully, you’ve stopped in Charleston, SC for some non-poker fun and great food. If you are coming from a different direction, revise at will.
Poker Pilgrims is happy to continue our Average Number of Cash Poker Tables tracking. We recently completed collecting data on the average number of poker tables by day across the state of Florida. Our page with the Florida results is now live. Florida Cash Poker average number of tables can be accessed via the drop-down menus at the top of the homepage (under Poker Room Information). Note that there are a series of filters at the top of the page that will allow you to filter table counts by venue, day, or game ($1/$2, $2/$5, PLO, or Other).
Florida Cash Games
As of Spring 2022, there are 22 poker rooms in Florida that report numbers of cash poker tables to either Bravo Poker or Poker Atlas. Among these, Seminole Hard Rock Tampa Bay, Derby Lane, and BestBet Jacksonville offer the most consistently active cash games in the state. If you are looking to play some PLO, Daytona Beach or Seminole Hard Rock Hollywood are your best bets. Meanwhile, if you want to play higher stakes or other poker variants, BestBet Jacksonville on a Saturday is the best place to be.
Note, as always, these numbers are drawn from Poker Atlas and Bravo Poker Live. We are unable to include poker rooms that do not report to one of these sites. However, there are a number of other small poker rooms in Florida that offer the opportunity for cash play. These include Dania Beach, Ocala-Gainesville, Ebro, Palm Beach Kennel Club, and a few others. Most of these poker rooms will have a table or two of $1/$2 running several evenings and weekends, but not much more.
Our Plan
The average number of cash tables page will be updated regularly. Over time we will add average cash numbers for other US regions with high concentrations of poker rooms. These will include areas such as Las Vegas, Southern California, and the mid-Atlantic seaboard. We are currently working on Las Vegas, which we will have live by May.
Sites such as Poker Atlas and Bravo Poker Live offer users the ability to see the current numbers of cash players at a venue at any given time. However, we have not found a resource that allows you to plan your next poker visit in advance. Currently, if I would like to learn how many $1-$2 no-limit tables Maryland Live! gets on a Thursday evening, there is nowhere to go to find that information. Poker Pilgrims hopes to fill that gap. Whether you are figuring out where to play poker next weekend, or where to plan your next poker vacation, our average number of cash poker tables page will hopefully be of help.
Ultimately, our vision is to track the number of average cash poker tables across the country. In areas where a poker player has options, this information, along with room reviews, can help you make a discerning choice. Be patient with us as we work to populate these tables. In the meantime, feel free to visit our New England and Florida pages.
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We recently shared the details of our cross-country poker road trip from Boston to Las Vegas. On that journey, we mainly followed Route 80 across the northern part of the United States, visiting multiple poker rooms along the way. For our return to Boston in November, we chose a more southern route, largely following Route 40 back to the East Coast. After a poker-packed month in Las Vegas, we also decided to focus on the sights, rather than more poker for our return home. We will visit any poker rooms that we missed along the way on a future trip. The current post describes our adventures traveling across the South.
As with our previous road trip, we had a very carefully thought-out plan…which we then completely reconfigured. We learned during our September poker road trip to Las Vegas that moving quickly across the country with long drives every day can be tiring. So on our way home we decided to take it slower. Many of our days featured short drives, and we chose to stay two nights in a couple of our destinations to get some more time to explore.
One of our bucket list items has always been to spend a month in Las Vegas during the World Series of Poker. The problem was that we could not imagine spending a month in 100-degree heat during June and July when the WSOP has been traditionally held. That kind of extended heat exposure is just not our thing. Then, in one of the many twists of these bizarre times, the 2021 WSOP was moved to the fall. Suddenly, everything fell into place. Our two youngest children had just entered college, our primary jobs are portable, and we had saved up enough for the trip. So, last October, Vegas it was! We chose to drive to Vegas, in order to have our car. You can read about our poker road trip from Boston to Las Vegas.
Where to Stay
The array of hotel options at various price points in Las Vegas is obviously endless. However, if you’re spending a month in Las Vegas and are at all worried about cost, you’re going to want to look for a condo rental via AirBnB, Vrbo, or other rental site. The two primary advantages of renting are: 1) the cost per night will be much lower for the quality you can get, and 2) having a kitchen will save you a lot of money. An extra bonus is the lack of Resort Fees, that are very difficult to escape in Vegas hotels these days. In our Airbnb on West Flamingo Ave, we ate most breakfasts and lunches at home. We also cooked 2-3 dinners a week, plus leftovers.
As we rapidly approach our year-long poker pilgrimage, Paul and I have begun to spend more time traveling and visiting poker rooms around the country. Our first serious poker road trip featured ten days in Southern Florida back in 2018. In 2020, we spent another ten days in Tampa Bay. And about a week after we returned, the world shut down. Last fall, we were finally able to get back on the road for our most adventurous road trip yet. We planned out a month-long visit to the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas. On our journey out in September, we would take the northern route, following route 80 across much of the country. On our return in November, we would dive South via route 40 and visit some national parks along the way. The current post describes our adventures traveling the northern route. In a couple of weeks we will share the details of our trip home.
