Germany has 15 state casinos advertising poker. Only about half deal it

Germany's live poker is run almost entirely by state casinos, and their websites make it unusually hard to tell where you can actually sit in a game. We read fifteen of them this week — all nine Spielbanken Bayern and five of the six Merkur casinos in North Rhine-Westphalia — and the answer is worth writing down.

**The trap is the word "Poker".** Most German casinos list it, but in a majority of cases what they mean is a house-banked table game: Bavarian Texas Hold'em in the south, Heads-Up Hold'em in the west. In both, every player is dealt a hand against the dealer. There is no pot, no other players to beat, and a fixed house edge. It is closer to blackjack than to poker.

**Where the real games are, in the west.** Of the six Merkur casinos in North Rhine-Westphalia, three deal poker between players. Aachen is the biggest: cash games every day from 19:00 across up to seven tables, plus tournaments with check-in 45 minutes beforehand — comfortably the largest card room in the region. Hohensyburg above Dortmund runs €5/€10 Monday to Thursday from 18:00 to midnight with a €500 minimum buy-in, the biggest published game in either network. Bad Oeynhausen has the friendliest: Texas Hold'em from €1/€3 with a €100 buy-in, one table midweek and two at weekends. Duisburg and Monheim deal Heads-Up Hold'em and nothing else.

Hohensyburg deserves a note of its own. Its website carries a poker link in the navigation that resolves to the homepage, and the word poker does not appear on that homepage at all. The real schedule is buried on the "Unser Haus" page. Germany's most famous casino has a live €5/€10 game that its own site effectively hides.

**The south is a network, not a room.** All nine Bavarian state casinos spread poker, and they share a championship — the Spielbanken Bayern Pokermeisterschaft, whose eleventh final runs at Feuchtwangen from 23 to 25 October with €100,000 guaranteed. Each house runs at least two ranking events a month, every entry adds €10 to the final's jackpot, stacks are at least 100 big blinds and the operator pays out 90%.

Feuchtwangen is the busiest room: four tournaments a week, from a €60 Sunday up to a €330 monthly Big Bounty, plus cash on Friday and Saturday at €2/€4 and €5/€10. Bad Wiessee on the Tegernsee is the closest real game to Munich, €5/€10 on Friday, Saturday and Sunday evenings. Bad Kissingen is the only house in either network with a scheduled Omaha cash game, at €5/€5. Bad Reichenhall runs the only midweek tournament, Wednesdays at 19:00, and is twenty minutes from Salzburg. At the other end, Lindau offers poker at weekends on request only, and Bad Kötzting deals cash after the tournament just when demand appears.

**One structural thing to understand before you go.** German casinos rarely take a percentage rake. They charge a Taxe: a flat, tiered amount taken once per hand — usually nothing up to a €50 pot, then €4 or €5, €10 above €200, €20 above €500. It is proportionally heaviest on medium pots, which changes which stakes are worth playing.

All times, stakes and charges come from the casinos' own game pages, read on 15 September 2026. Spielbanken Bayern notes that all its details are published without guarantee.