After a few days in Hamburg I took the bus to Amsterdam. I had never been to Holland/The Netherlands before. It was the first new country on my Eurotrip, so I was really excited!
As usual, one of my main focus was to play live poker cash games (NLH), but also to check out the city in general.
Where to play poker in Amsterdam
The official casino in The Netherlands is “Holland Casino” and they have many locations around the country.
I went to “Amsterdam centre” at Max Euweplein 62 which I guess is the biggest and best.
My experience in live poker is of course still very poor, but my feeling about the place was really good.
Stakes, rake etc. at Holland Casino Amsterdam
| Blinds | Min buy-in | Max buy-in | Rebuy min | Rebuy max | Rake | Cap (max rake) |
| NLH 2-2 | €50 | €150 | €50 | €150 | 10% | €10 |
| NLH 2-4 | €150 | €1000 | €75 | €1000 | 5% | €20 |
| NLH 5-5 | €250 | €2500 | €125 | €2500 | 5% | €25 |
| PLO 2-4 | €100 | No max | €100 | No max | 5% | €20 |
| PLO 5-5 | €250 | No max | €125 | No max | 5% | €25 |
| PLO 10-10 | €500 | No max | €250 | No max | 5% | €25 |
Opening hours
The poker cash games have the following opening hours:
- Mon-Fri: 20:00-03:00
- Sat-Sun: 13:15-03:00
Actually when I arrived to Amsterdam things weren’t that great. I had some problems finding my way to the hostel. I managed to get on the metro but when I get off it started to rain really much, and I had to walk a bit. When I arrived at the hostel it was really bad and dirty in many ways. I thought it would be fun to stay at hostels to meet new people and keeping the costs low, and it sure is from time to time, but from now on I decided to only book hotels or apartments through Airbnb.
One (probably the only) good thing about the hostel was the location. I could walk to the casino in 5 minutes! I played 2 days, friday evening until late and on saturday I played 11 hours straight. I started around 2 pm and finished at 1 am.
The games were really soft with many weak players and many were drunk or high. But I guess thats pretty common in the weekends. On friday night around 2 am two players almost started a fight. None of them were rejected which were lucky because they were really bad and kept loosing money.
Sightseeing in Amsterdam
Because of my poor accomodation (for example I couldn’t lock up my valuables so I had to bring my laptop, camera etc. all the time) and playing poker I didn’t do so much sightseeing. But I strolled around the streets and also did a boat tour on the canals.
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