Posted by Johnnymac 8:36 AM
Wow – looks like I’m 10 days late with my report for my Minnesota trip.

I did indeed make it to Canterbury Park when I was in Minneapolis last weekend (Mar 19-21). I was pretty busy hanging out with friends and participating in other wedding activities but I did get in a little bit of poker for a couple of hours late on my first night in town (Friday).

The simple answer is that if we had a legal cardroom like that in Houston I would probably be there every weekend, but compared to Vegas or Atlantic City this place isn’t worth a special trip. I’m not going to say anything here about the details of the place itself – you can read all about the limits and rules and huge (huge!) crowds elsewhere. One weird thing that I did notice is that all of the chips in any particular game are all identical. There’s no coloring up or mixing denominations – a $300 buy-in gets you three hundred $1 chips. I thought this was slightly unusual and quite inconvenient, especially if you were to be a big winner.

As far as my own experiences go, I arrived around midnight and put my name on the list to play every game in the house from 3/6 to 8/16 and then wandered back to the cage to cash a personal check because I only had $20 in my pocket. When I found out that they wanted to charge me 6% (!!!) to cash that check I headed for the exit as quickly as I could. On my way out of the parking lot I decided to stop at a convenience store across the street to get a drink and happened to notic an ATM machine from my personal bank, so I took a little money out (at no cost this time) and drove back across the street and quickly got into a 4-8 game. I played for an hour with no spectacular or memorable occurrences to speak of and left after an hour with a $6 loss for my efforts.

Bottom line – if you ever happen to find yourself in the Twin Cities with nothing to do at least there’s somewhere you can go play poker.

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