Metro Card Club in Manila, Philippines

I am currently on holiday in the Philippines. I have had the chance to visit the Metro Card Club, which is the top venue for poker in Manila. It is a dedicated card room: no other casino games there. There are about 30 tables in a large clean aircon room, no smoking inside. The place has already a few tables running at 10AM, even week days, and the action only picks up from thereon. They have daily tournaments as well as bigger one off events. The pricing, rake and drinks, is more than reasonable. The dealers and floormen (all girls) are very professional. In the 3 hours I played there I have not witnessed a single mistake, and the dealers are always very switched on when it comes to counting chips, sorting out multiway all ins and side pots and correcting players' mistakes.

I did the daily guaranteed 30,000 Pesos (500 Pesos buy-in) tourney. ($1=47-48 Pesos). The company was pleasant. I was the only foreigner playing the tourney and all the locals were very friendly (even when I was stacking them), as is the case the vast majority of the time in the Philippines. The standard of play is mostly what you can find online at the low stakes tourneys, with people playing Ax, K9+ and any 2 suited preflop, and, post flop, not giving up their middle pairs or their draws even facing bad pot odds. A few of the players were more TAGG though, which brings me to the next "issue".

The blind structure of the tourney is very fast, with the big blind doing 25/50/100/200/400/600/800 every 20 minutes (starting stacks of 3000). So the variance is quite high. In 2h30, the initial field of 56 players had shrunk to 14. If you play ABC TAGG poker, which seems to be ideal given the average standard of play, but are not running good and don't manage to quickly build a huge stack, you will quickly have to start taking coin flips if you don't want to blind out. A couple of bad hands nearing the bubble will get you in a lot of trouble. That is what happened to me. Despite running quite good in the early stages and building a well above average stack, I had a couple of bad beats when the BB was at 600 and 800, and that was the end of me. In the end, I exited 14th, on my 66 against QJ all in coin flip. Had I won that one, I am reasonably confident I could have reached the final table and be ITM. The average M of the remaining players when I got out was 10.

All in all, the experience was most pleasant, and I can only highly recommend this card club.

For more info: http://www.metrocardclub.com