Ireland closed its card rooms and the poker moved into hotels — €2.3 million guaranteed across nine festivals this season
Dublin's best-known card club shut in 2019 and was never replaced. Irish live poker did not shrink — it relocated to hotel ballrooms, a Kerry arena and a Ballsbridge showground, and it is now one of the densest calendars in Europe.
Ireland has almost no casinos, one significant card room in its capital, and a live poker calendar that would embarrass most countries five times its size. Those facts are connected, and the connection is not what you would guess.
What closed
The Fitzwilliam Casino & Card Club was Dublin's poker room for sixteen years. It closed in December 2019 with the loss of around 80 jobs, citing new gambling legislation. Nothing took its place. Its old web domain now redirects to a Portuguese-language betting-affiliate page, which is its own small epitaph.
What remains in Dublin is The Sporting Emporium, open daily from 20:00, running No Limit Hold'em from €1/€2 to €5/€10 and Pot Limit Omaha as deep as €10/€25 with a €15,000 maximum buy-in — the biggest published game in the country. It posts which games are actually running to a WhatsApp channel rather than its website, which tells you something about the scale of the operation. Outside Dublin, Cork's Macau Sporting Club runs a 4,500 square foot room on St Patrick's Quay.
That is close to the whole of Ireland's year-round card-room poker.
Where the poker went
Into hotels. The Irish Poker Tour has nine festivals confirmed for the 2026/27 season, and not one of them is in a casino except the Galway Winter Festival at the Eglinton:
Donegal at the Radisson in Letterkenny (25–27 September, €90,000+). Killarney at the Gleneagle Arena (13–18 October, €750,000+). Dublin at the Green Isle in Clondalkin (26–29 November, €200,000+). Galway at the Eglinton (3–6 December, €60,000+). The IPT Final back at the Green Isle over New Year (1–4 January, €300,000+). Galway again at the Galmont (6–10 January, €450,000+). The Siege of Clonmel at the Talbot in Tipperary (26–28 February, €70,000+). Limerick at the Castletroy Park (17–18 April, €60,000). The Monster at the Green Isle over the May bank holiday (29 April – 3 May, €400,000+).
More than €2.3 million in guarantees, in market towns and hotel ballrooms, in a country of five million people.
And the showground
Above all of it sits the Irish Open, which outgrew casinos so completely that it now takes over the Royal Dublin Society's exhibition campus in Ballsbridge — a 160,000 square metre showground, more than 280 poker tables, a playing area the size of a football pitch. The 2026 edition, the 46th, ran 86 events from 26 March to 6 April, guaranteed €4.5 million and paid out €15.5 million. Narcis-Gabriel Nedelcu won the Main Event for €336,790.
It is the longest-running poker tournament in the world outside Las Vegas. Qualifying for the 2027 edition opened on 7 September, with €2.5 million guaranteed for the Main Event and €1 million for the Mini.
The part worth reading twice
The Irish Poker Tour publishes what it takes off the top, which is rarer than it should be: **3 per cent of every prize pool for staff and staff expenses, plus 1 per cent for the leaderboard.** Four per cent, before anyone is paid. Payouts generally reach the top 10 per cent of the field, with the director able to move that between 8 and 12 per cent — and that percentage applies to the entire field, not to your individual starting flight, which is the sort of detail that decides whether a late re-entry is worth it.
None of that is hidden, and none of it is unusual in substance. What is unusual is seeing it written down. If you are comparing Irish festivals against tours that do not publish their withholdings, compare like with like before concluding the Irish ones are expensive.
The lesson
A country can lose its card rooms and keep its poker. Ireland's scene runs on hotel function rooms, a Kerry arena and a Dublin showground, booked a few days at a time — which turns out to be a more robust model than a permanent room with a licence that legislation can take away.