Mapping Britain's card rooms: who actually still deals poker

Britain's live poker map is smaller than the marketing suggests, and the only way to know which rooms are real is to read each operator's own pages. We did that this week and the results split three ways.

**Rooms that check out.** The Metropolitan Casinos group turns out to run four poker operations, and we have published all of them. The Empire Poker Room in Leicester Square deals cash games around the clock — Hold'em at £1/£2, £1/£3 and £2/£5 plus Omaha at £1/£1 and £1/£2, raked at 5% capped at £10 — with a tournament every single day and evening events on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. Alea Glasgow's Poker Lounge runs seven weekly tournaments from £35, feeding a Race to Vegas leaderboard that the room says sends twelve players to the 2027 WSOP Main Event. Alea Nottingham is a cash-game room rather than a tournament room, £40 to £300, with a stack match after an hour. Manchester235 advertises a poker lounge and regular tournaments but publishes no stakes or schedule, so we have said exactly that rather than filling the gap with guesswork.

**Two London names that do not.** Les Ambassadeurs in Mayfair lists sixteen tables of roulette, blackjack and three-card poker — the house game, not a card room. That is the same answer we reached on the wider Genting estate last week, where only the Stratford site, the former Aspers at Westfield, runs a proper poker room. Three-card poker on a casino's games list is not poker in the sense a player means it, and we would rather publish the negative than send someone across London for a game that is not there.

**What changed at the Hippodrome.** Our Hippodrome entry had been running on a thin secondary source. It is now verified against the casino's own pages, and the detail is worth having: the PokerStars LIVE floor occupies the entire third floor, the stake ladder runs from £1/£2 all the way to £100/£200 with no maximum buy-in at the top, rake is 5% capped at £11, and games above £5/£10 pay time charges instead of rake — from £15 per half hour up to £35. Tournaments happen downstairs in Lola's Underground Casino, built around a £1,100 Monthly Lightning on the first Tuesday of each month.

One scheduling detail is worth knowing if you play in London: the Empire's Sunday tournament does not run on the first Sunday of the month, because that slot belongs to the Cash Race final — a freeroll for the top 50 of the previous month's cash-game leaderboard, with a WSOP Main Event package for the winner.

All figures come from the operators' own pages, read on 15 September 2026, and can change without notice.