Poker Clubs New York
Poker has a long and storied history in the State of New York. Now, as lawmakers consider opening up a legal and regulated online poker market in New York, it’s worth taking a look at just how intertwined the game is with Empire State culture.
Download these online poker apps in NY and bet in NJ
New Yorkers have a new option if they want to play live casino poker. Resorts World Catskills, located in Monticello, N.Y. — just a couple of hours north of New York City — opened in early. Poker is a great American tradition dating back hundreds of years. Families have been playing at the kitchen table for pennies, nickels & dimes. It has been a tradition on holidays, weekends, family get-togethers and friendly gatherings. Playing Poker in New York is totally legal and within the law of the great state of New York.
- Thus I became a waitress in one of New York’s many underground (and illegal poker clubs (it is not illegal to play in these clubs, but it is against the law to run one or work there). I figured it couldn’t be any “rapier” than the strip club—a place where I thought I’d be safe since I was one of the only ones actually wearing clothes.
- NEW YORK - Poker club in Kiev, description, cash games and live tournaments schedule. Find your poker game at PokerDiscover.
- New York Poker Club, New York, New York. Welcome to New York Poker Club App: Pokerrr2 Club code: oocbr We have weekly $.50/1.00 PLO and ROE games! Referral bonuses, Free roll.
Stu Ungar and the Ghoulies
In New York City, the popularity of the modern game of poker was born in the Ghoulash Joints, or Ghoulies, of the 1960s and 1970s. These Eastern European run back room and underground card games were the place where one of the greatest poker players in the history of the game got his start.
In fact, for three-time World Series of PokerMain Event ChampionStu Ungar, the Ghoulies were the family business.
Ungar was born and raised in Manhattan.His father Isidore Ungar ran a bar and social club called Foxes Corner that was essentially a Ghoulash Joint where illegal gambling was prevalent. Ungar learned the game of Gin Rummy there. When his father died in 1967, he dropped out of school to play professionally. It wasn’t long before he developed a reputation as one of the best players in the city. In fact, Ungar was practically unbeatable at the game.
Gin may have been Ungar’s game of choice, but most Ghoulies also spread poker as well.
From NYC to Las Vegas
Ten years after the death of his father, Ungar moved out to Las Vegas and his reputation followed him. In fact, he couldn’t get a game of Gin in Las Vegas because of it. Ungar soon turned to poker. By 1980, he’d become one of the best poker player on the planet, winning the 1980 WSOP Main Event. A year later he won his second bracelet in the $10,000 Deuce to Seven Draw event. He ultimately went on to repeat as WSOP Main Event Champion, capturing his third. Ungar won a fourth WSOP bracelet in the 1983 $5,000 Seven Card Stud event.
In the meantime, back in New York City, Ungar’s growing reputation helped drive poker’s popularity at the Ghoulash Joints where he got his start. In fact, New York City’s underground poker scene flourished in the 1980s and 1990s. It ultimately became the setting for cult hit film Rounders.
Back in Las Vegas, New York’s most famous card player struggled with drug addiction and gambling leaks for more than a decade. In 1997, Ungar cleaned up long enough to come back and win a third WSOP Main Event title. This cemented his status as one of the greatest poker players of all time. However, a little over a year later, he died at the age of 45 almost penniless in a motel at the end of the Las Vegas Strip.
From the Trop to the Taj and the Mayfair to the Chesterfield
Collusion ran rampant in the New York City Goulash Joint poker games of the 1970s. These places were filled with more than just chips, cards and Eastern European delicacies. They regularly housed gangsters, hustlers and a real criminal element. So it came as little surprise that a lot of the action moved South to Atlantic City, New Jersey once legal and regulated poker games became a reality there.
But that didn’t happen until The New Jersey State Legislature made live poker legal in the summer of 1993. This is when the Trump Taj Mahal opened a 50-table room and became the center of the poker Universe on the East Coast. The Taj was regularly filled with players from across New York State until some competition emerged in neighboring states. In 1995, Foxwoods opened a 35-table poker room in the middle of Massachusetts forest. Mohegan Sun soon followed suit. By 1998 a 40-table poker room at the Tropicana in Atlantic City opened up. This made the fight to draw New York City poker players to Atlantic City a two-horse race between the Trop and the Taj.
But even before then, a new and more sophisticated type of underground poker club emerged as a threat to the Ghoulash Joints inside the city.
The Mayfair Club
New York City’s Mayfair Club began as a bridge and backgammon club in the 1940s. Sometime in the early 1980s they traded checkers for chips and began playing poker. Games at the Mayfair ran thanks to wealthy financiers with a penchant for going on tilt and a group of increasingly savvy players taking a more scientific and cerebral approach to poker. Some of these players went on to become the most successful in the history of the game. Even to this day.
In fact, coming out of the Mayfair Club were players including Erik Seidel, who famously finished runner-up in the 1988 WSOP Main Event to Johnny Chan. Seidel went on to win eight WSOP bracelets and earn more than $31 million in tournament cashes, battling for the top spot on poker’s all-time leading money winners list to this day.
The list of Mayfair players who found global poker success also includes 1995 WSOP Main Event winner Dan Harrington and two-time WSOP bracelet winner, two-time World Poker Tour title holder and former Full Tilt Poker founder Howard Lederer.
The Mayfair Club started out in the basement of a Gramercy Park high rise and ultimately moved to a larger space on East 25th Street. Security at Mayfair, and other clubs of that ilk in the city, including the Diamond Club, was certainly a step up from the Ghoulies. Mayfair Club employees wore medallions allowing them to call the police with the touch of a button should a problem arise. Few did and New York City’s underground poker clubs ran with impunity from the law for the better part of 20 years.
Shining the spotlight on the underground
Sometime in the early 1990s, writers Brian Koppelman and David Levien discovered the scene and ultimately went on to immortalize it in the 1998 film Rounders. The Chesterfield Club in the film was modeled after the Mayfair Club and several characters were based on players from there.
The spotlight the film shined on the New York City scene may have been good for the growth of poker overall, but not the clubs.
Ultimately, underground card rooms like the Mayfair Club became victims to Mayor Rudy Giuliani‘s law and order campaign and a broken windows approach to law enforcement. In 2000, New York police raided the Mayfair Club and shut it down.
But, while high-profile spots like the Mayfair Club were shuttered, others popped up in it’s place. In fact, the New York city underground poker scene continued to flourish as poker’s popularity soon reached new heights around the world.
NYC underground unfazed by poker’s boom
With underground card rooms like the Mayfair Club shut down, some New York City players flocked to Atlantic City casinos and the huge poker rooms at the Trop and Taj. Others simply went across the street.
Manhattan-based underground card rooms like Union Square‘s Playstation and the Upper West Side‘s Players’ Club picked up the slack in the wake of Mayfair’s demise.
Players were well aware of the law. Running a poker game was illegal in New York, but playing in one wasn’t. So even when these new clubs got busted, the players walked away unscathed. Those running the games looked at a bust as the cost of doing business, and if players were forced to walk away with money left on the table, they often covered that as well.
New York City’s underground scene only grew when a Tennessee accountant named Chris Moneymaker won the 2003 WSOP Main Event.Rounders video rentals went through the roof, the WPT implemented the use of hole-card cameras bringing TV poker into the homes of millions of Americans and the game’s popularity boomed like never before.
Celebrities like New YorkYankees great Alex Rodriguez and Sopranos actor Robert Iler even turned up at raided games.
The clubs might have been forced to stay quiet for a few weeks, but they would always reopen before long.
A new threat to the underground emerges
Law enforcement may not have been a big threat to the burgeoning underground poker scene in New York City. However, the lawless environment police raids helped create certainly was.
Knowing the local precincts were no longer on the payroll, and the underground poker clubs were now on the run from the law, a criminal element stepped in and took advantage. Police raids were one thing, but New York City’s underground card rooms now had to fear stick up men more than ever before.
The number of robberies at underground poker clubs rose until November 2007, when a 5th Avenue and 28th Street club was held up and a 55-year-old math teacher from New Jersey was accidentally shot and killed.
Players suddenly stayed away in large numbers. The clubs themselves decided being smaller and a lot less public was the best way to avoid getting robbed. The New York City underground poker scene still exists to this day, but it’s noticeably smaller and quieter than it once was.
Black Friday
New York City Poker Clubs
However, New York based authorities went after more than just the local underground poker scene in New York City.
While it is well known it was the US Department of Justice that unsealed indictments against the three largest online poker operators on April 15, 2011, effectively shutting down the billion dollar online poker industry in America, it was actually the New York arm of the DOJ that was behind it all.
The online poker community has come to know the date as Black Friday, and Preet Bharara, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, was the one who put together the case against PokerStars, Full Tilt and Cereus (Absolute/Ultimate Bet) that caused it all.
In fact, Bharara even used New York law to do it.
Felony indictments were handed down for violations of the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006 and the sites were also charged with violating the Illegal Gambling Business Act of 1955. However, Bharara also charged the online poker operators with a New York Class A misdemeanor for running a game of chance where bets are placed within New York state.
None of the online poker sites involved were based in New York, but the prosecution of these sites, and ultimately the demise of online poker in America, all took place inside the Empire State.
The poker tournament boom continues
Poker’s boom in the early 2000’s created more than just an uptick in interest in New York City underground cash games and online poker. The interest in live tournament poker grew across the country, reaching the Empire State as well.
At the time, New York did not have legal commercial casinos like those in Nevada and New Jersey. But it did have Native American Casinos.
The Turning Stone Casino Resort in Verona, New York became New York State’s first and only land-based casino when it opened in 1993. The property still features a live poker room with more than 30 tables to this day.
In 2002, Turning Stone hosted the first ever East Coast Poker Championships. The $300+$$30 No Limit Hold’em Championship drew 51 players creating a $15,300 prize pool. In 2006, at the height of the poker boom, the buy-in for the East Coast Poker Championships Main Event at Turning Stone was bumped up to $1,000+$60. That year it drew 181 entries creating a $175,570 prize pool.
To this day, Turning Stone still hosts a number of popular tournament series, including the East Coast Poker Championship and the Empire State Hold’em Championships. In fact, the 2016 Empire State Hold’em Championships $1,010+$130 Main Event drew 285 players last summer, creating a $287,850 prize pool.
A contender emerges
A contender to Turning Stone’s title as New York’s premier poker destination emerged when the Seneca Niagara Resort & Casino opened it’s doors in Downtown Niagara Falls back in 2002.
To this day The Niagara Falls Poker Room at the Seneca Niagara Resort & Casino features 23 poker tables and the property has been hosting major tournament series since 2006. In fact, Niagara Falls Poker Room now hosts three major tournament series each year in the Spring, Summer and Fall. Seneca tournaments peaked in 2016 when the $910+$90 Seneca Fall Poker Classic Main Event drew 300 entries creating a $264,810 prize pool.
New blood in New York
The poker scene across New York continues to grow with the addition of a number of new commercial casinos properties across the state.
New York voters supported a referendum in 2013 authorizing the issue of a three new commercial gaming licenses in the state. A year later, licenses were granted to Rivers Casino & Resort Schenectady, the del Lago Resort & Casino in Waterloo, NY and the Montreign Resort and Casino in the Catskill Mountains.
The Tioga Downs Racino successfully campaigned to re-open the bidding process and was ultimately granted a fourth commercial gaming license later that year. The New Tioga Downs Casino was the first to open up in December 2016 and the property’s Winner’s Circle Lounge was re-purposed as the casino’s new 12-table Poker Room.
The del Lago Resort & Casino was next, opening its doors on February 1, 2017 with a 12-table live poker room. Rivers Casino and Resort Schenectady opened up a week later with a 15-table poker room.
The $1 billion Montreign Resort and Casino is scheduled to open in Monticello, New York in the Spring of 2018 and it would be a shock to see it do so without a poker room.
There was a time in New York City, not so long ago, when men and some women, myself included, played in underground poker games all over the city. “Underground” makes it sound glamorous, like all the women wore ball gowns and red lipstick while the men smoked cigars and threw their Rolexes on the table when they were low on cash. (Despite what you see in movies, no halfway-legitimate game would ever let you gamble more than the money you have on the table at the start of a hand.)
Actually, it wasn’t like that at all. We’d duck into the most nondescript buildings. Instead of ball gowns, I wore hooded sweatshirts and headphones in my ears, and walked into mini casinos. They had cameras at the doors, sometimes burly security guards. Some places issued I.D. cards. In retrospect, it was security theater. The measures were meaningless, practically funny. They didn’t stop the cops and they didn’t stop the robbers.
There was Genoa, the small one downtown. It was the oldest poker club in the city, with only three tables and an old Italian man cooking up the best pasta with red sauce you’ve ever had for five bucks. The busy one, Straddle, in Midtown East, which had inexplicably never been raided so everyone whispered they had someone big on the take (they would eventually, like all the clubs, be raided and shut down). There were dozens of others. Upper East, Midtown West, all over Brooklyn and Queens.
I was entry-level in PR at the time, starting over in my late 20s in a new career after an expensive graduate school experience. The other people at the tables did all kinds of things.There was a guy who said he was mayor of a small town in northern New Jersey (I had no reason not to believe him, but anything that is said at a poker table should be taken with a large grain of salt), filmmakers, bankers, housewives, Juilliard students and many, many lawyers. I played poker with famous actors, musicians, judges. No, I never saw A-Rod.
The players didn’t worry about cops. We knew it wasn’t going to lead to arrest. There was some weird quirk in the law in New York where apparently it’s illegal to facilitate gambling but it’s not illegal to actually gamble. Or so we heard from, again, the many, many lawyers who played in the games. I’m not a lawyer so I can’t confirm the law but I was present during a raid once and it went down exactly as they said it would: the cops burst into what was my favorite game in the city—the All-In Club in Midtown West. They kept the players at the tables and ran all of our I.D.s. Anyone with a warrant, which turned out to be only one guy in a room of many, was arrested. The rest were free to go. We lost all the money we had on the table, which sucked, especially for the people who had been playing all day and built considerable stacks, but at least it wasn’t jail. Someone I know left with a pocketful of the branded chips so that if that poker club ever reopens in New York City, he’ll be ready to cash them in. This was in 2007 and he still has a stack. The staff wasn’t so lucky. All the dealers and front desk staff were arrested. They let the woman who made sandwiches go, as well as her teenage daughter.
We did, however, worry about robbers. I had a friend who was a dealer at Genoa, the old downtown place. It had been robbed and he said the scariest part was that the guy pointing the gun at him was scared and shaking so hard that my friend feared he would accidentally shoot him. This turned out to be prescient. In November 2007, Frank DeSena, a schoolteacher from New Jersey, was at the City Limits club in Gramercy when robbers busted in. They ordered everyone onto the floor and one of the nervous gunmen dropped the shotgun he was carrying. The gun went off, killing DeSena.
The boom time of the clubs pretty much ended there. I never went again and many others I know didn’t either. No longer able to ignore they were there, the police began raiding and closing clubs. When Genoa closed, it really felt over.
But my poker life went on. I played in a few home games and was still playing often enough online. I heard that some new places had opened but after that killing I had no interest in ever going again. I never wanted to be doing something cool and dangerous. I played poker because I loved it and because I was pretty good at it and the only reason I chose the clubs was proximity. I couldn’t exactly dip into Atlantic City after work, though that wasn’t unheard of every now and again. My day job in my new career was entry-level, so my after-hours poker-playing paid my bills. I kept an Excel spreadsheet with all of my wins and losses and would record them even if they were “-$3” or “+$6”. I knew one of the biggest traps for people who play a lot was to feel like you’re always winning even if you weren’t.
I played with a lot of people who considered themselves great players but went home losers much more often than winners. I didn’t want to be the kind of player who swagged with my amazing skills; I just wanted to make the money.
The skill level in the clubs was extremely varied. I saw some incredible players there, much better than I had ever seen in Vegas or Atlantic City. I stayed as far away from them as I could. I knew the targets; we all did.
As successful as I was at live poker, I was not a winning player overall online. I did O.K., and I did well during a time in my life where I was playing to eat, but Internet poker wasn’t my thing. I needed to look at the other players at my table, and them at me, to play well. Being one of the few women playing the game was always an advantage for me in live play.
Men have a preconceived notion about how women play—weakly—and I fed into it. I often wore my hair in two braided pigtails. Would someone this innocent lie to you about her hand?
Poker Clubs In New York
With limited options for live play, I started playing online more often. I got married, to a poker player, and got pregnant shortly after our wedding. As motivation dwindled to leave the house, online play became a regular part of our evenings. The night before I gave birth to my daughter, I won a large online tournament. During her newborn year, as motivation to go out may have gone up but opportunities went down, we played online constantly.
Then suddenly, that was over too. While the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act (UIGEA) of 2006 crippled online play, it was actually April 15, 2011, a day dubbed “Black Friday” among online poker players, that online poker in the U.S. ended. The Department of Justice seized the domain names of three major poker sites and essentially ended real money play in America.
Our laws against poker are some of the most backward around. It’s been four years since “Black Friday” and three states have brought back online poker: Delaware, New Jersey and Nevada. If there are two states that don’t need online poker, as they have an abundance of casinos, they would be New Jersey and Nevada. Only people in those states may play on the sites. It’s all ridiculous.
Poker Club New York
In the last year there has been an online gambling boom of a different type. Fairly suddenly, sites like DraftKings and FanDuel have sprouted to let people pick a fantasy sports team and gamble real money against their opponents. This kind of gambling is exempt from UIGEA (though as we go to print, Democratic Congressman Frank Pallone Jr. of New Jersey is calling for a congressional hearing into the legality of the sites) because fantasy sports knowledge is considered “skill.” I don’t doubt that it does require skill to keep track of hundred of players and utilize them on your “team” at just the right time. The implication there, though, is that poker is not a game of skill when it so clearly is.
Poker Clubs New York
My favorite poker club, All-In, the one in the raid I mentioned above, had a sign up that read “No Rounders quotes.” The poker movie lends itself to quoting it around a table and it could get old fast. There’s a line in it, though, that really sticks out: “Why do you think the same five guys make it to the final table of the World Series of Poker every year? What are they, the luckiest guys in Las Vegas?” As poker has grown, it isn’t the same five guys anymore (and the prize isn’t an adorable million dollars as it was in 1998 when the film was released), but every year it’s the same faces who do well at the World Series; every year it’s the same poker heroes on TV.
Poker has a long and storied history, in New York and across the country. It’s well-known that President Obama, when he was a senator in Illinois, had a popular poker game attended by other prominent politicians, but the fact is his game was likely illegal. Illinois prohibits all forms of gambling outside of sanctioned casinos, including home games where any real money is involved. Similarly, President George W. Bush is said to have played a lot of poker, and been quite good at it, while at Harvard for his MBA. At least poker home games are allowed under Massachusetts state law.
We see poker skills as strengths in presidents; in theory it means they will be better at money management, have negotiating and bluffing skills, and ability to see the angles that a non-poker player may not. And yet we also regard poker as something illicit, grouped with games of chance like three-card monte, instead of games of skill like chess. As in Massachusetts, home games are legal in New York so long as no one is making money on the game (such as charging an entry fee or taking part of each pot as commission called a “rake”) but if you facilitate a game and get paid for your trouble, so that you’re not playing with the same half-dozen dudes every Friday night of your life, you’re breaking the law.
In 2011, after years of debate, New York City finally got a casino. Sort of. It’s in Queens and it’s all automated games, almost entirely slot machines. In other words, the people who deem poker to not be enough of a game of skill to legalize it have decided that a room full of machines, where people lose their money by pressing a button or pulling a lever in a monkey-like manner, is worth legalizing. In their infinite wisdom, even the table games such as blackjack or roulette are automated so as not to add any additional jobs to the area. If it all seems extremely convoluted, it is. After all, the state lotto, where you pick numbers at random and hope they hit, as well as horse-racing, where you bet on which horsey will cross the finish line first, are always exempt from gambling laws.
It doesn’t have to be this way. New Yorkers deserve to be treated as adults. Poker rooms can flourish in our city and with them a new culture of playing. No more will we have to play in unmarked office buildings, afraid of raids or robbers. Poker can be out in the open, where it belongs. It can bring jobs for card dealers, food service providers, room managers, etc. It can be somewhere stripper-squeamish guys have their bachelor parties. It can have day games for senior citizens. We don’t have to become a gambling mecca; we can identify that not all gaming is the same and legalize this particular game of skill. It can be even be tuxes, gowns and red lipstick if people want it to be. But the Rolexes stay off the table.