Poker venues in Ireland — where the games actually run

Irish live poker does not run out of a circuit of card rooms. Almost all of it runs in hotel function space and event halls, booked festival by festival, with the tables set up for the week and taken down afterwards. This page lists the rooms we have verified against their own published material: the nine venues on the Irish Poker Tour's current calendar, Dublin's two private members' clubs, and the Royal Dublin Society, where the Irish Poker Open plays.

The hotels that carry the tour

Four of the Irish Poker Tour's sixteen listed festivals run at the Green Isle Hotel at Newlands Cross in Clondalkin — the Dublin Winter Festival, the IPT Final at New Year, the Dublin Spring Festival and The Monster. That makes a Dublin 22 conference hotel the single busiest poker address in the country, and it has no permanent card room at all.

The biggest money is in Kerry. The Gleneagle Arena on Killarney's Muckross Road takes the Killarney Festival each October with a festival guarantee above EUR 750,000, the largest figure on the tour's season.

Two venues get two festivals a year each: the Castletroy Park Hotel on the Dublin Road in Limerick, and the Radisson Blu on Paddy Harte Road in Letterkenny, which is also the nearest tour stop to Derry and Belfast. The Galmont Hotel in Galway, the Talbot in Clonmel, the Killeshin in Portlaoise and the Athlone Springs round out the hotel list.

The card rooms

Only a handful of genuine card rooms appear anywhere in Irish poker. The Eglinton Casino in Galway is the one on the tour calendar, hosting the Galway Winter Festival each December. The Sporting Emporium on Dublin's Anne's Lane and the Macau Sporting Club in Cork are private members' clubs that run their own games.

If you are searching for the Eglinton online, note that an unconnected online gambling brand trades under a very similar name and domain.

What to check before you travel

Because these are event bookings rather than standing poker rooms, nothing here is open for poker on an ordinary weekday. Two practical warnings from reading the tour's own pages: its "upcoming events" index was still listing three festivals that had already been played, and at least one festival's first flight starts the evening before its advertised opening date. Take dates from the individual festival page, not the index, and ring the venue if you are booking a room around an event.

Legal note: this is general information, not legal or financial advice.