UK poker rooms: the 39 British venues that actually deal poker

A British casino listing "poker" is not always offering the game a poker player means. Alongside genuine player-versus-player cash games and tournaments, casinos also deal house-banked variants - three-card poker, hold'em played against the dealer - which share the name and nothing else. Every room on this page is published because a schedule, a room page or a tournament calendar showed player-versus-player play.

The Grosvenor network

Grosvenor accounts for the great majority of British poker rooms on file, which is why its tour schedule effectively sets the national calendar. The rooms reach from Aberdeen and Dundee through Glasgow Merchant City, Edinburgh Maybury, Newcastle, Stockton-on-Tees, Hull, Huddersfield, Sheffield, Leeds Westgate, Bolton, Blackpool, Salford, Didsbury and Manchester Bury New Road, into the Midlands at Birmingham Broad Street and Hill Street, Walsall, Coventry, Leicester and Nottingham, across to Liverpool and Cardiff, and down the south coast to Brighton, Bournemouth, Southampton, Portsmouth Gunwharf Quays, Plymouth, Reading South, Luton and Thanet. In London the network's poker address is The Victoria - the Vic - with Bayswater alongside it.

The practical consequence of one operator holding that many rooms is that the same tournament brands appear nationwide. A player in Newcastle and a player in Portsmouth can enter the same G200 in the same week.

Metropolitan's rooms

Metropolitan runs four poker rooms on file: the Empire Casino in London's Leicester Square, whose daily schedule is among the deepest in the country and includes regular Omaha; Alea Glasgow, which carries a weekly tournament for every day of the week at buy-ins the rest of the market does not reach down to; Alea Nottingham; and Manchester235.

Genting Stratford

Genting's Stratford room in east London is the home of the British Poker Series and runs a full weekly schedule beneath it, from a ten-pound Redtooth Monday up to the Friday evening event. For a London player it is the most accessible regular tournament programme outside Leicester Square.

The Hippodrome, London

The Hippodrome in Leicester Square hosts PokerStars LIVE and sits at the other end of the buy-in range, with a four-figure monthly flagship and its own satellite feeding it.

Dusk Till Dawn, Nottingham

Dusk Till Dawn is the exception to everything above: not a casino with a poker room, but a card room with 45 tables, the largest on file in Britain. It is where the WSOP Circuit's British stop is played and where the UK Poker Championships run.

What we do not publish

Where a casino's own pages do not establish player-versus-player poker, no venue record is created. A verified negative - a room that has stopped dealing poker, or that offers only a dealer-banked variant - is more useful to a visiting player than an optimistic listing, and we would rather publish the first than guess at the second.