There you are at Paris Horseshoe Summer Camp (aka the WSOP). You're having the time of your life, and think, 'I'd love to do this full time.' Well, you're not alone. I'm in a couple poker-centric Discord servers. Recently, the 'Off-topic' channel of one of them had the following question:
Looking to relocate within the U.S. Any recommendations out there for good low stakes, $1/3 – $5/10? It needs to be a place where it doesn't snow, or if it does, it doesn't last more than a day.
Those of you eating a $10 hotdog and thinking about doing this full-time, pay attention...
I'm going to pick a handful of metrics, and then we'll start evaluating various locations. The poster said that their spouse works remotely, so they can live/work anywhere. Here are my metrics:
- Limited snow
- Lots of poker available
- Cost of living manageable
Limited snow
Given that the poster spent an entire sentence of a three-sentence paragraph on the snow issue, it obviously matters to them. I had Claude draw me a map of snow coverage across the US.
We'll treat anything in the orange and light blue regions as viable. Of course, there are some states in the light blue that have ski resorts. If you're trying to avoid snow, don't be in the same zip code with a ski resort.
Lots of poker
Once again, a map will help. Here's a cool interactive map that shows many/most of the casinos in the US.
Unfortunately, it doesn't show some poker powerhouses that aren't casinos per se. This includes all the California DoJ-regulated cardrooms (e.g. Bay 101, Commerce) and the Texas poker social clubs (e.g. Lodge in Round Rock, TCH in Las Colinas). But it's still a great starting point, and pointed me to some areas I hadn't considered.
Manageable cost of living
There's an excellent way to get rich while playing $2/5 no-limit hold'em: have a passive income generator working for you 24/7.
In our friend's case, the remote-working spouse sort of counts. Either way, the cost of rent and groceries matters a lot.
As a baseline, I'm going to call the cost of living in Las Vegas '1.0' and show the cost of living in other locations relative to that. Here we go:
The list
San Francisco Bay Area
Starting with my home court... yeah, let's not. The climate is gorgeous and snow so rare that it's a special treat.
The Bay Area has tons of great poker options, ranging from $1/3 ($1/2 has mostly vanished) up to some $20 and occasionally $40 or $80 straddle games.
Unfortunately, the cost of living ('CoL') is just absurd. According to NerdWallet, San Jose (the capitol of Silicon Valley) has a cost of living 93% higher than Las Vegas. So we give it a CoL score of 1.9 – that's prohibitive. San Francisco, which actually has no poker rooms, has a score of 1.7.
Los Angeles
Same problem. LA is the California dream in some respects. Amazing weather, great beaches. There is some snow, but you have to drive a couple of hours to it. And you can't throw a scriptwriter without hitting a regulated poker room.
But LA gets a CoL score of 1.7, just like San Francisco. You'd have to be crushing $10/20 or similar stakes to truly make it in the LA area.
California is awesome, but the price tag is simply too high.
Las Vegas
This is the easy one, of course. It has, by definition, a CoL of 1.0. For comparison, a typical Midwest city, St. Louis has a CoL score of 0.9 relative to Las Vegas.
There is poker everywhere and there's no danger of it snowing, ever. For some people, Las Vegas is the dream. I personally would never live in Las Vegas. But if you hate cold weather and want a lot of poker nearby, it's difficult to argue with the 891xx zip codes.
Phoenix/Tucson/Albuquerque
Without being reductive, let's call this the Southwest Triangle. This might be the sleeper in the bunch.
There's rarely snow in any of those places, though you can get quickly get to higher elevations where there's a lot of snow.
Phoenix has a 1.1 CoL, as does Tucson. Albuquerque has a 1.0 CoL, and I'd snap choose Albuquerque over Las Vegas to live.
Because of the number of Native American tribes in that area, there are dozens of casinos, many of which have poker.
Oklahoma
Again, the Native American casinos make Oklahoma a casino-rich environment, many of which have poker.
You have to be careful, because often that means a 3-4 table poker room that gets a $3 BB game going on the weekend. But Tulsa has a big Hard Rock casino, and there are two massive casinos within shouting distance of the Texas border (this is not a coincidence) that have large poker rooms.
There's no snow in Oklahoma to speak of, but they do have t*rn*d*s. Importantly, cost of living is low. Tulsa and Oklahoma City both have a CoL of 0.9.
Texas
[Big caveat: there is potential for seismic shift in Texas poker. Keep reading.]
If, in 2006, you had said that Texas would be a hotbed of live poker, everybody would have laughed at you and gone back to clicking buttons on PokerStars and Party Poker.
But so it has come to pass, and many people from all over the US and elsewhere have flocked to Dallas, Austin, San Antonio, and other cities to play no-limit hold'em in the state that gave the game its name.
All in all, it's pretty damn compelling. All three cities are vibrant multicultural towns with much to offer.
All have a CoL identical to that of Las Vegas. Again, my apologies to the capital-V Vegans in the readership, but I would snap-take any of them over Las Vegas as a place to live.
Snow? Snow.
Importantly, because of the social club laws, they can't charge rake. So they charge a daily or monthly membership fee, plus a per-hour seat fee.
Even though such charges are an explicit cost of playing, they are almost invariably less than the invisible (but inexorable) cost of rake being removed from the pot. One of the reasons that Texas games play so big is because there's no rake siphoning chips off the table. The effect is astonishing, and makes for some dynamite poker.
So, zero snow, great poker, vibrant diverse cosmopolitan cities – what's not to love?
Well, occasionally the authorities come charging into one club or another with guns drawn. The Lodge got raided, and shut down. But then a grand jury refused to indict the club and its owners, so all was well. Right up until recently when a Houston club got raided.
While details of the Houston raid are sketchy at press time, it seems that the Houston club had some other things going on beyond poker. Furthermore, some Houston clubs are notorious for charging rake, in clear violation of very strict Texas gambling laws.
Anyway, the point is that because Texas is unregulated, and has some very conservative and religious-right leanings, there are no guarantees that another raid won't happen. I would be leery of putting down deep roots there if access to live poker ranked high on my list of priorities.
Florida
Florida is a live-poker success story of only 16 years, when the legislature threw open the gates to unlimited poker action.
Now some of the biggest cash games and tournaments are in the Sunshine State, and there's poker pretty much everywhere. We won't even mention snow, but there are those pesky h*rr*c*n*s.
Cost of living is all over the map: Miami/Dade and Ft Lauderdale have CoL indices of 1.3, but Jacksonville, home of Best Bet, has a CoL of 0.9, and Tampa is 1.0.
Florida, like Las Vegas, often gives people a polar reaction: they love it, or hate it. I'd definitely rent for a while there before buying a house. But you will not get cold, and the poker is amazing.
Maryland/DC
I include this only because I grew up in that region. It has three big casinos with poker rooms (MGM National Harbor, Maryland Live, and Horseshoe Baltimore). And it's not too far from the Pennsylvania casinos, including the legendary Parx. But at that point, you're flirting with sn*w.
Unfortunately, the region has nearly Bay Area cost. The DC/Northern Virginia region has a CoL of 1.4, as does the Bethesda/Gaithersburg portion of Maryland. Baltimore has a CoL of 1.0 but (with due respect to my Baltimore friends) doesn't have the vibrancy of the DC, which rocks.
Choose wisely
It's wild to do a bit of a deep dive and realize that there are many regions in the U.S. that could support a snow-averse poker pro. That wasn't true even 15-20 years ago, and would have been laughable when I first started playing poker. I hope my Discord correspondent will read this article, and perhaps get a starting point for their search.
I will close with this, though: life is about much more than poker, even if you intend to be a live pro.
One of the key components of living well is waking up every day in a place (region, zip code, neighborhood) that you enjoy. My Discord friend clearly understands that because they quickly cut to the 'no snow' chase.
Poker may be a priority, it might not make the top five priorities in your list. There are dozens of places that will have a reliable $5 BB cash game on a regular basis. The difference across those games will be nothing compared to the important metrics of living where you want to live.
Choose wisely.
Featured image generated using AI.
