Finding Your Nearest "Brick-and-Mortar" Poker Room

One of the greatest benefits of doing a news-'n'-commentary poker blog is the chance to point out some of the real cool tools on the web. One that I've used on a few occasions is Card Player's poker-room locator.

In a nutshell, it's way-y-y more convenient to find those casinos that offer poker than any other method I've seen, and so it gets the kudos here. Using it couldn't be easier... if you're lucky enough to be in one of the 28 states currently offering some form of land-based poker. Simply surf on over, type in your current zip code (or the zip code corresponding to an area you might be visiting) and presto! --- information on each of the nearest casino poker rooms pops to your screen.

With the knowledge that the sites that are programmed into the map itself are not necessarily up to date, it's still a damn good tool. A quick glance at the totals by state (lower on the page) shows each of the 28 states currently housing poker-offering casinos, and the map admittedly works best when you live in or have a zip code within one of those states. So, for a location such as Atlanta, you can't just type in an Atlanta zip code (such as 30309) and go from there; the map would zoom back out to the start and give you no viable results.

What you can do, however, is pick any of the nearby states that do have a land-based poker game, and go from there. For instance, a click onto the link for "South Carolina" shows the two casinos available at Little River, near Myrtle Beach on the SC/NC border. Obviously, that would still be a helluva day trip from Atlanta, but that's not the point; rather, it's that the information is available for you, in a format that's easy to grab and understand. Similarly, one can click on Mississippi and explore the Tunica option, or check out any of the 27 different casinos listed in Florida, or even the Louisville thing (actually, across the Ohio River in Indiana). Poor Atlanta, indeed. It's about an equal distance to the real-life poker rooms in any direction, and that distance is some distance, indeed.

But beyond the casinos in those 28 other states, the Card Player site makes it easy to check out ideas for vacations or trips of even longer mileage. That's right: the same finder page for U.S. rooms also includes a collection of international poker-room links. You can find a legal place to play poker in no less than 75 other countries, according to the site info, and while your chances of actually visiting them all are slim, it's nice to know they're there, isn't it?

While the political climate makes it unlikely that brick-and-mortar poker rooms will soon proliferate across the Bible Belt, you gotta have dreams. In the meantime, you know the routine: home games, private clubs, the bar games and leagues, and the Internet. See you there.