Poker in Budapest

I just got back from a weekend trip to Budapest. It is a nice city especially if you are a meat and potatos kind of guy like me! Our hotel was in the center of town just across the bridge from the Gellert.

I played poker Friday evening at the Miami Poker Club. There are several casinos and poker clubs in Budapest, but the Miami club was the only one that I knew was running a tourney on Friday. I took a taxi to the address only to find that the poker room was in the middle of a very large shopping center! It must be great for the husbands trying to waste time while their wives are shopping – lol! Anyway, the club was quite nice and seemed fairly new. They had about 50 good poker tables. Proffessional dealers at them all, but pretty cheap chipsets with metal inserts. They are open pretty much all day.

They run a micro cash game until 8 pm. The blinds are 50/50 HUF which is about 25 cents and the minimum buyin was 5000 HUF. Afer 8, the blinds went up to 100/200 with a minimum buyin of 10000 HUF. The tourney was a 90 man tourney with a 10000 + 2000 HUF buyin. Most hands in all games had 4 or 5 players limp calling out of position preflop and at least one genius calling all the way to the river regardless of the board or betsizes. I’ve never seen so many loose-passive players in my life! It made for easy pickings if you were patient. I didn’t bluff a single hand all evening. I played any pp, sc, Axs and AK and either value bet post flop or folded. Nobody seemed to notice or care that I folded 90 % of my hands. Every time I made a big raise preflop I got lots of action. I only lost a single hand that went to a showdown. The hand I lost was KK. I flopped a set on a AK4 rainbow board and check-raised all in. The caller had 10J and caught a Q on the river – LOL!

I ended up spending 32000 HUF in buyins and won nearly 100K HUF by the time I was done for a nice profit. Food, drinks and poker are cheap in Budapest. This might make an good place for a weekend trip for us some time...

I also tried out a new card gaurd from www.dealerbuttons.co.uk . I got my GR logo engraved on the back and will post some pics when I get time.

PS: I think we need to have a private game on Pokerstars this Sunday. I’ll set it up later today and post the password. As MrSmith suggested, I will also e-mail everyone this time.

Roland