We checked ten more Nevada casinos for poker. One had a room — and it is in Minden

The gap between what a Nevada casino's table-game list looks like and what it actually offers a poker player is wider than almost anywhere else in the world, and this week's sweep shows why. We read ten property pages — each one the operator's own, not an aggregator — and asked a single question of each: is there a pot contested between players here, or only a game dealt against the house?

Nine of the ten had no player-versus-player poker. Five of those nine nonetheless list something with poker in its name. Silverton carries three such games: Three Card Poker, Ultimate Texas Hold'em Progressive and Heads Up Hold'em, all dealt against the dealer. The Cannery in North Las Vegas lists Wild 5 Poker, a Pai Gow progressive and Ultimate Texas Hold 'em. The Plaza, at the head of Fremont Street, offers Three Card and a game it calls Xtreme Hold'em. Jerry's Nugget — a casino whose vintage playing cards are collected worldwide, which is exactly why players assume it has a card room — lists Heads Up Hold'em among its live tables. Golden Nugget Laughlin lists Three Card Poker. Not one of those names is poker in the sense a visiting player means.

Four more had no poker wording at all beyond video poker machines: Sahara Las Vegas, whose eleven named table games include no poker of any kind; Treasure Island, which summarises its whole floor in one line about live table games, slots and stadium gaming; Ellis Island on Koval Lane, where the live tables are blackjack, roulette and craps; and M Resort in Henderson, whose current operator's casino page mentions poker only as a machine game. The Aquarius in Laughlin names no table games whatsoever, which we record as no advertised poker rather than as a hint of it.

Laughlin is the finding with the sharpest edge. Both properties we checked there — the Aquarius, the town's largest hotel, and Golden Nugget Laughlin — publish no poker room. The Golden Nugget name does run a real room, but it is the Fremont Street one in Las Vegas, three hundred miles north.

The room we did find is in a place no tourist itinerary mentions. The Carson Valley Inn, on Highway 395 in Minden, south of Carson City and about 45 minutes from Reno, runs three non-smoking tables with a published cash-game schedule that climbs from $1/$2 no-limit Hold'em and $2/$10 spread limit to a $4/$8 Omaha hi/lo game with half kills on Thursday afternoons and a Dealer's Choice game on Saturday. Tournaments run four days a week: $30 Shootouts at noon on Tuesday and Thursday, $30 evening events the same two days with two add-ons at $20 each, a Sunday noon event on the same structure, and a Friday 6pm Deep Stack whose buy-in the property does not publish beside the others. For a room this size that is a dense calendar, and it fills the map between the Reno trio and the Tahoe properties.

The practical lesson for anyone planning a Nevada trip around poker: a casino's table-games page is not a poker listing, and a game with Hold'em in its title is usually a game against the dealer. Read the property's own page, look for a table count and a rake, and phone ahead for anything outside the big Las Vegas rooms.