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Our trip through South Florida was a whirlwind. It included a three night stay in Miami, followed by two nights in Key West, and finished with four nights in Hollywood Beach. The Miami and Hollywood Beach days included a lot of poker. In fact, we played at seven different poker rooms in seven days. We cover our experience of the Miami area lifestyle (as well as our Key West diversion) elsewhere. Here we want to share our experience with South Florida poker rooms. You can also find individual reviews of each of the seven rooms we played – Seminole Hard Rock Hollywood, Seminole Coconut Creek, The Big Easy, Pompano Park, Magic City, Gulfstream Park, and Dania Beach – in our Room Review category.

We recently ranked the Top 5 poker rooms in New England (our home turf). However, with such limited experience of the South Florida rooms (a single visit for all but Seminole Coconut Creek), we do not feel qualified to create such a ranking. Rather, we thought we would share key elements of the South Florida poker scene overall, including a few standout aspects of various rooms.

Dealers in South Florida Poker Rooms are Very Strong

Most dealers were fast, professional, and friendly. Perhaps the healthy and consistent activity (see Cash Game section below) makes dealing in South Florida a desirable job. Whatever the reason, the dealer quality was strong. Not quite Turning Stone strong, but always solid to excellent.

Players are Generally Friendly

The player mix varied from room to room, with Seminole Coconut Creek skewing older and The Big Easy offering great diversity in age, gender, and ethnicity. Players at most rooms were generally friendly. Seminole Coconut Creek stood out most in this regard, and this was one of the reasons we played there twice. Coconut Creek’s Crazy Pineapple tournament was fun partly due to the openness and patience of the players. Understandably, dealers occasionally forgot to collect discards before starting to deal the turn. These moments were met with laughter and good cheer rather than irritation. Gulfstream had the most serious players among all the venues we played, and therefore felt the least welcoming.

The number of women playing poker varied from a low at Magic City (Heather was one of 3 women in the entire room, tournament or cash) to a high at The Big Easy where there were a healthy number of women. Gulfstream Park also had only a handful of women playing either the tournament or at the cash tables.

Tournament Structures are Insane

If you love rebuys and innumerable, complicated add-ons, you’ll love playing poker in South Florida. Some rooms, like Magic City, feature tournaments with very short stacks and quick blind levels, encouraging fast action and repeated rebuys. Gulfstream Park offers unlimited rebuys to the end of registration and 3 different add-on options. The Big Easy’s “free” tournament offered 500 chips followed by a variety of add-on options from the get-go. Blind levels were 15 to 20 minutes in most tournaments, so the combination of rebuys/add-ons and short levels made for a lot of crazy play. The gambling end of the poker playing spectrum will love this; others, like ourselves, not so much.

Dania Beach offered the craziest structure we have ever seen. The original buy-in was $60 for 10,000 chips, and whenever you fell below 5,000 chips you could add on $20 for 5,000 more. Many players availed themselves of this option repeatedly during the early stages. At break, there was an add-on of 50,000 chips for $80. Yes, an add-on 5x the starting stack! The tournament had nine players alive at break. Then eleven new players bought in for $140 and 60,000 chips apiece. Suffice it to say, the tenor of play completely changed. This was Dania Beach’s Monday tournament, and the exact structure of other tournaments vary. However, the 50K add-on is generally a part of most of their structures.

Tournament Rakes are More Insane than the Structures

If you navigate the gauntlet of South Florida tournament structures and manage to cash, you might be disappointed by the pot at the end of the rainbow. You’ll often hear poker professionals harp on the importance of knowing the rake. “Anything over 15% is impossible to profit!” some will shout. However, those of us playing local tournaments with entries below $200 know that the rakes will be higher, and we live with that. Poker is more pastime than profit opportunity when small tournaments are your base.

However, a pastime should not bankrupt you. Many of the South Florida poker rooms had rakes far beyond what we have seen before. Gulfstream’s tournament rake was 37%! Coconut Creek punched in in the low 30% range. Pompano Park seemed to offer a rake around 25% which we would usually balk at, but it felt like a welcome respite in the South Florida poker landscape. We breathed a sigh of relief when we returned to New England with typical rakes in the low 20s.

Due to the complicated rebuy and add-on structures, some South Florida tournament rakes were hard to calculate. Also, frankly, we stopped wanting to know exactly what was being pulled from the prize pool. Our fiscally conservative sides would have called an end to poker tournaments on this poker vacation had we looked too closely. How so many South Florida poker regulars can afford to play tournaments with such brutal rakes is beyond us. It seems like you would need to be a top 1% player to break even. To be fair, some rooms featured monthly point system awards and included tournament players in room-wide high hands. So that must help.

Poker Is Valued Differently Across South Florida Venues

Unsurprisingly, South Florida poker rooms are valued very differently by their venues. At the two Seminole casinos, Hard Rock Hollywood and Coconut Creek, the poker room is considered an important part of a larger, profitable gambling complex. At the other extreme, Gulfstream Park’s bell cow is their beautiful racetrack. The casino clearly falls behind both live and simulcast racing in importance. And the poker room – dark, dingy, and tucked in the back – falls at the bottom of the heap of Gulfstream’s offerings.

At The Big Easy, the poker room seems a key element of the entire casino. It was even more active and vibrant than the slot areas. Magic City gives the poker room its own space altogether. The Magic City poker room feels like its own freestanding entity in a larger complex housing various activities. Dania Beach offers an attractive midsize casino with a nicely designed poker room, but not a lot of action beyond tournament regulars. Pompano Park is another midsize casino featuring more healthy cash and tournament volume.

Cash Games are Very Active in Most South Florida Poker Rooms

We spent a few weeks tracking both the cash and tournament activity across South Florida poker rooms. Most South Florida rooms have vibrant cash games, with the exception of Dania Beach. On a typical Saturday night, there may be 10 to 30 tables (with Seminole Hard Rock Hollywood at the high end) of cash going in a given room. About half of those tables will be $1/$2 NLH. While most rooms, especially the larger ones, fall off during weeknights, cash activity remains high. At some place like The Big Easy the drop off is negligible; they may average 15-16 tables on a Saturday night, and only be down to 12-13 tables on a Tuesday evening. The nightly “free” 7pm tournament may help to keep the volume steady. We have detailed activity for each individual room in that room’s Poker Room Review.

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So there you have it: the pros and cons of the South Florida poker scene. We were surprised to find our poker experience in South Florida so different from what we see in New England. It was a great place to visit, but not quite our style for tournament play long-term.

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Many of us play poker online every day. Some of us lose money to the evil two-headed beast that is the bad player, one side paying you off, the other side hitting their prayer gut-shot after going all-in with their 64o. Some win money on a consistent basis, closely following the rules of bankroll management while four-tabling for hours on end. Again others play once in a while because it is fun. The competition is fun, the card game is fun, playing against other humans from around the globe is fun. There are always people in the world who are out to ruin everyone's fun, and it is no different online.

Conspiracy theorists could likely ramble for hours about the corruption of Internet poker rooms, and all the cheating that is allowed to happen, and the large number of bots that play online. Most of us realize that this is not the case, and in fact feel safer playing the game online than live in some instances. However, once in a while something will rear an ugly face from the tortuous depths of human indecency.

Recently a site was brought to my attention. This site claims to offer the reader a poker robot named Poker-Bot Pro; a software program that will play the game for you completely hands-free while you sit idly in your recliner watching ESPN and drinking Bud. The program is touted as a way to take emotion out of the game so that you can make hundreds and even thousands of dollars without doing anything. The site is a long read, with a lot of propagandist material that one would expect from the Home Shopping Network, a pop-up window, or spam. I asked the owner and operator of the site a few questions, and he was kind enough to give one or two answers.

PokerNews: This bot actually plays for you, rather than just suggesting correct plays?

David Glazen: Yes. There is one part that suggests correct plays and another to act on the plays by simulating mouse clicks

PN: What game(s) and limit structure is the bot particularly designed to play?

DG: The bot can only play limit games - it cannot currently play no limit.

PN: Am I correct in saying that your bot has two parts: an AI Engine and mouse-click simulator?

DG: Yes you are completely correct - the trick is how to connect one with the other.

PN: Could you explain, at least in brief, what it takes to make the program work once downloaded?

DG:Briefly you will have to modify a script that is included with the download. Install several pieces of software and then run the software and the modified script.

PN: You mentioned the help of friends from a university, what university was that?

DG:The university of Toronto

PN: Could you explain the artificial intelligence to an extent? What are some of the statistics and other facts the program processes?

(No Answer)

PN: Is it possible to use only the AI feature to suggest the best play while the user actually carries out the actions?

DG: Yes

PN: Has any site or some sort of 'poker official' contacted you with shutdown requests, or have there been other similarly negative responses in relation to your offering?

DG: None whatsoever.

PN: How long have you been using your software online?

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DG: Around a year.

PN: Could you give us a ballpark figure of how much you have made using the software?

(No Answer)

Before you withdraw all of your money from your favorite poker site, please finish this article. I want to point some things out to you. I think there are a few cards missing from the deck.

West Of Loathing Poker Room Set

First of all, let me point out that after being extremely wordy on his website, he scarcely uses complete sentences when answering my questions. That tends to put doubt in my mind as to the authenticity of his claims. A quiet website with a few visitors a day will keep him under the radar while creating a profit for him. Notice also, the questions he does not answer. He is evidently unwilling to talk about any of the statistics taken into consideration in his programming. That question was, admittedly, a bit loaded. I knew that if he answered it, he would need to be very accurate for the poker world to take him seriously. The math in limit poker is understood by many, and if he left a hole it would be easy to find. The fact that he did not answer it could either show that he is protecting his 'intellectual property', or, to the cynical, there is no actual answer to the question.

Probably the biggest factor that makes me question his credibility are the numerous instances in which 'David Glazen' has made the claim that he is going to remove the site from public view forever. When I originally came across the site, it was to be removed as of March 5th. It was then pushed back to the 11th, then the 16th, etc. The current schedule advises its disappearance will be March 24th. I suppose we will see. He claims that the program must be sold to only a few people to 'remain effective.'

What am I trying to say to you? I think this is highly questionable at best, much like I question the existence of bots at all in online poker rooms. This could be a hoax on top of a hoax, where the very existence of bots must be called into question in the first place. Until David, and indeed the industry as a whole can prove to me that bots do exist, I am going to keep on playing my normal game, and let the chips fall where they may. I don't think any of us need to worry about anything. Keep on playing the game we all love, and enjoy every second of it.

And while you're there, good luck and good odds!

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