The focus of much of the poker world for most of the summer was on Las Vegas and the World Series of Poker, and for good reason. During the WSOP, Las Vegas is where nearly every serious poker player wants to be.

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But there are many other places in the United States that make great poker destinations, especially now that the WSOP is over. Here is my personal list of the eight greatest U.S. destinations for a poker-playing vacation.

Best Poker Room Hustler Casino. I'm just leaving the Hustler now and then I'll meet you at the teacher-parent conference'), is a cut above all other Los Angeles–area poker rooms. In total, the city is equipped with over 800 poker tables. The biggest room belongs to the Venetian, which after recent renovation, now has 59 tables. The Bellagio (39), Orleans (35), Caesars Palace (30), Wynn (26), and Aria (24) round out the top five. The most common games spread in almost every card room is $1-$3. Best poker room los angeles deposit bonus many online casinos offer free spins to new players. Most of the time the best poker room los angeles free spins are offered on a specific slot machine, usually a new or promoted slot machine. Popular slot machines for free spins are Starburst, Gonzo’s Quest, Warlords, Mega Fortune Dreams, Scruffy.

1. Southern California

Legal poker has existed in California since the 1930s, allowing California to become the state with the most poker tables in the U.S.

Southern California features the largest poker palaces in the world, including the immense 200-plus table Commerce Casino, the 110-table Gardens Casino (formerly the Hawaiian Gardens, the 90-table Hollywood Park, the 80-table Bicycle Club, and the 50-table Hustler.

This adds up to unsurpassed poker action, including huge tournaments and nosebleed-stakes cash games. Truly, Southern California is the poker capital of the world.

There's also a whole lot to do other than play poker in Southern California, as it is home to beautiful beaches, Hollywood, and the incredible cities of Los Angeles and San Diego, as well as the beautiful resort town of Palm Springs.

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2. Greater Philadelphia (including Atlantic City)

Back before so many states legalized poker, Atlantic City, New Jersey had the only legal poker on the East Coast south of Connecticut. The action there was fierce, with 10 poker rooms lined up in a row right there in that great beach town.

Such is no longer the case. Not only has poker legally expanded to Delaware, West Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania, but in the process, poker in Atlantic City has diminished. Even so, despite the fact that there are only five poker rooms left in Atlantic City — and only the Borgata, with 85 tables, is considered a major poker room — there are now nine other poker rooms within a 90-minute drive of downtown Philadelphia.

Among them are the Sugar House located in the heart of Philadelphia with 28 tables, and just outside the city limits Parx (61 tables) and Harrahs (31 tables). There are three more Pennsylvania rooms to the west and north of Philadelphia, and another three poker rooms to the south in Delaware.

That adds up to 207 tables at 14 different poker rooms within an hour-and-a-half of downtown Philadelphia. Couple this large variety of excellent poker rooms with the history, culture, and rich urban life of this major city, then mix in the still-beautiful beaches of the Jersey and Delaware shores, and you get one of the premier poker destinations in the United States.

3. Southeastern Connecticut

The towns of Ledyard and Uncasville, Connecticut are home to two huge resort casinos and among the finest and largest poker rooms in the world — Foxwoods and Mohegan Sun.

As the second-largest poker room in the world, Foxwoods on its own is a worthwhile poker destination. It's also one of only two casinos in the world with regular seven-card stud games at all stakes. Together with its younger sibling the Mohegan Sun, the area boasts nearly 150 cash game tables and some of the largest poker tournaments outside of Las Vegas, including regular stops of the major poker tours.

Boston is less than two hours away, and there's a beautiful sea coast 20 minutes south in Mystic, Connecticut. Providence's T.F. Green Airport is the nearest major airport, about 40 minutes from Foxwoods, and frequent shuttle buses run to both casinos from both New York City's and Boston's Chinatowns.

Both casinos also offer regular Vegas-style top shelf entertainment and many top flight restaurants. They also are regularly overflowing with a sea of gambling tourists who arrive in steady streams from New York and New England. What's not to like?

4. Florida — Southeast Coast

Miami, Ft. Lauderdale, Hollywood, Palm Beach, and the surrounding area are home to 12 poker rooms, among them Seminole Hard Rock Hollywood, Hialeah Park, and the Palm Beach Kennel Club (just to name three). At last count those 12 rooms collectively boast 376 tables, making it the largest concentration of poker action outside of California and Nevada. The area is also home to dozens of daily tournaments and frequent stops on the national poker tours, ensuring cash and tournament action for every bankroll.

Add in the scenic beauty of the Atlantic Coast, major league sports teams, and the great music and night life of Miami — plus all of the other gambling options at the horse racing, dog racing, and jai alai frontons that house many of these poker rooms (meaning lots of gamblers to enrich good poker games — and you have an overwhelmingly appealing destination for a poker trip.

5. Florida's West Coast

Over on the West Coast of Florida there are six poker rooms with 208 tables, including rooms in Ft. Myers, Naples, Tampa, Sarasota, and St. Petersburg. These include the large Derby Lane and Hard Rock Tampa rooms.

Read all of the superlatives in the section about Southeast Florida, scale back the action 20-30 percent or so, add a measure of calmness, and a few wonderful mid-sized cities, and you have this incredible poker scene.

There are cash games going at multiple venues around the clock and at least a couple of tournaments every day. The major poker tours stop there as well, giving visitors a lot of variety to go along with the beautiful weather, terrific seafood, gambling venues, professional sports, and lovely beaches.

And if you feel that you're shortchanging the spouse and kids with your great poker games, you can even take a day or two off from poker and drive the family to nearby Orlando and Disney World.

6. Gulf Coast of Louisiana and Mississippi

New Orleans has always been a huge tourist destination with Mardi Gras, Cajun cuisine, the Gulf Coast, and jazz. In addition, in New Orleans and within a 90-minute drive, there are eight poker rooms.

In New Orleans there's Boomtown for low limit hold'em, and (most significantly) there's the bustling 20-table Harrah's that has most of the big hold'em and pot-limit Omaha action in the area.

An hour-and-a-half west is Baton Rouge, Louisiana's capital, home to the beautiful L'Auberge Casino. Around 75-90 minutes to the east, just over the border in Bay St. Louis and Biloxi, Mississippi, there are five more casinos, the largest being the Beau Rivage, with the IP Casino, Scarlet Pearl, Golden Nugget, and Hollywood Casino rounding out the list.

With all of those rooms there are plenty of limit and no-limit cash games and tournaments to appeal to the poker tourist, not to mention all of the other great things to do in the area.

7. Northern California

The Greater San Francisco metropolitan area, extending southward to San Jose and up to the Santa Rosa and Napa Valley to the northeast — doesn't have nearly as many poker tables or poker rooms as in the southern part of the state. But it's a magnificent collection of rooms nevertheless, as Lucky Chances, Bay 101, The Oaks, Artichoke Joes, The Palace, Graton, Livermore, Napa Valley, Parkwest, Pete's 881, San Pablo, M8trix, and the California Grand each have something going for them.

They are also surrounded by a first class tourist destinations too numerous to mention. You don't have the huge action nor as many large tournaments as you do in Los Angeles, but hey, you've got the Golden Gate Bridge, The Muir Woods, the San Francisco Giants, the Golden State Warriors, and perhaps the greatest Chinatown in the world outside of China.

8. Baltimore-Washington DC

For a long time, Baltimore and the District of Columbia were legal poker deserts. Aside from the 'charity' poker games in Prince Georges County, Maryland (that were eventually closed for being corrupt), there was no legal poker within 200 miles of the Capitol District, meaning the nearest action was in Atlantic City — a three-hour drive away.

But five years ago there began a torrent of legal poker that now has three rockin' poker rooms: Maryland Live! and the Horseshoe in Baltimore, plus the MGM located right outside of DC.

Those three rooms have over 100 tables among them. When you add in all of the other obvious tourist attractions of the nation's capitol and the great inner harbor city of Baltimore, the area becomes yet another great poker destination in the United States.

There are many other places in the United States that have poker, though the locations listed above comprise my top eight.

Ashley Adams has been playing poker for 50 years and writing about it since 2000. He is the author of hundreds of articles and two books, Winning 7-Card Stud (Kensington 2003) and Winning No-Limit Hold'em (Lighthouse 2012). He is also the host of poker radio show House of Cards. See www.houseofcardsradio.com for broadcast times, stations, and podcasts.

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It has been said that poker is the hardest way to make an easy living. The one thing we can say for sure is that its a lot harder to make a living at it in a state with limited options for plying your trade.

That means if you want to play poker for a living you’re probably going to want to do it in a state with a lot of casinos or legal cardrooms. Playing in underground games every day may sound like a thrilling lifestyle. However, it’s a tough one to maintain when your bankroll is constantly under threat from local law enforcement and opportunistic thieves.

Essentially, what we’re saying is the best states to try to make a living playing poker are the ones with the most action. Legal, regulated and above board action.

Want to know where they are? Check out US Poker’s list of the five best states to make a living playing poker below:

Nevada

There’s no better place for a poker pro to call home than the state of Nevada. Probably because if you fall down just about anywhere inside the state, you’re a favorite to hit a poker room on the way to the ground.

In fact, there are more than 60 poker rooms operating across the state, which is probably six times more than the amount required to make a state a decent place to make a living playing poker.

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Of course, the biggest and best action goes off on the Las Vegas Strip, where there are 18 different poker rooms hosting big-time cash game action and daily tournament schedules all within a few miles of one another.

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Big-time tournament action comes in the form of the annualWorld Series of Poker held in Las Vegas for six weeks every June and July. Thousands of poker players from all over the world descend upon Las Vegas for the events of the WSOP. However, it’s more than just the tournaments they come for. Cash game revenues at rooms across the state jump big time throughout the WSOP.

It’s a poker pro’s dream for six weeks. In fact, there’s so much poker money in Las Vegas during this time, whether they are playing cash games or tournaments, the WSOP can make or break a Nevada-based pro’s year.

The rest of the year brings a steady stream of big-time tournaments including regular World Poker Tour stops. Plus, as the gambling capital of the country, there’s always a good number of tourists filling the cash game tables from Las Vegas to Reno and Lake Tahoe.

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There’s also legal and regulated online poker. Although the action is mostly limited to the WSOP site during the WSOP.

Regardless, Nevada is far and away the best state to make a living playing poker. The only issue might be that so many pros have moved there, the competition can be pretty stiff at times.

California

There are more than 90 licensed cardrooms that offer poker in California. They also offer player-banked versions of certain casino card games like blackjack.

Additionally, there are somewhere around 60 Tribal casinos in the state, many of which host poker rooms.

Between the cardrooms and Tribal casino poker rooms, there’s probably more action in California than there is in any other state across the country. The only thing that makes it a step below Nevada is most of that action is spread out across the state, instead of in one small area like Las Vegas.

Commerce and the Bike

However, the Los Angeles area does host two of the largest poker rooms in the world in the Bicycle Casino and Commerce Casino. The amount of cash game action in either of these cardrooms is enough for the average pro to make a sustainable living.

Plus, the World Poker Tour makes annual stops at both properties, if tournaments are where you’re looking to make big bank.

Getting lawmakers, cardrooms, Tribal casinos and potential online poker operators to agree on what legal and regulated online poker should look like in California has proved difficult. In fact, after a decade discussing it, the state seems no closer to passing online poker legislation than when those discussions started.

However, there’s a lot of big-time live tournament and cash game action up and down the coast all year long. And that’s enough to make California one the best states to make a living playing poker.

Florida

It wasn’t that long ago that poker in Florida was limited to home games at seniors centers and not much else. The game spread to dog tracks and Jai alai frontons in 1997. However, a $10 maximum on all pots rendered the game unrecognizable by today’s standards. The laws changed a couple times in the early 2000s, but the betting limits, limits on the number of bets and a $100 maximum buy-in still didn’t make any sense.

Poker soon spread to the state’s first tribal casinos. However, except for a brief period of time where the tribes allowed multiple rebuys to skirt around the maximum buy-in laws, the poker scene in the Sunshine State remained small.

Most of the caps were removed in 2009 and Florida suddenly became a destination for poker.

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A big-time tournament scene emerged, particularly down south at the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino in Hollywood, which put up some major guarantees to attract players. There were overlays at first, but the Hard Rock in Hollywood now boasts some of the most well-attended tournament series in the country. The World Poker Tour and The World Series of Poker Circuit have even made it a regular stop.

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The cash game scene has also thrived, from Jacksonville to Fort Lauderdale.

Atlantic City and Las Vegas may have the market cornered on check-raising tourists. However, there’s no better place to get called down by a wealthy retiree who just had to see it than Florida.

Add it up and for pro players who want to play lucrative cash games year round and major tournaments on a regular basis, Florida has become one of the best states to make a living playing poker.

New Jersey

The casino business in Atlantic City has had its share of ups and downs over the years. However, the seaside resort town has long maintained its status as the home of poker on the East Coast. Casinos became legal in the late 1970s, but poker didn’t get the thumbs up from lawmakers until the summer of 1993.

The Trump Taj Mahal launched a 50-table poker room that year that immediately became the center of the poker universe. There were other rooms, but no one really emerged as real competition until the Tropicana opened up a 40-table poker room in 1998. It was a pretty fierce rivalry between the two.

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In fact, it was all about either the Taj or the Trop for poker players in AC until 2003, whenBorgata Hotel Casino & Spa opened up in the city’s marina district.

The Borgata opened with a modern 34-table poker room that immediately became market leaders. A big boom in poker’s popularity soon followed. Suddenly, Borgata established itself as the East Coast’s premier poker destination.

The property started hosting events on the burgeoning World Poker Tour right from the outset. Its WPT events are still breaking tour entry records on a regular basis.

In 2006, poker’s popularity peaked and Borgata underwent a $200 million expansion. The poker room was expanded to 85 tables and revenues kept on rising, even as the growth of the game slowed.

The Taj has since closed and poker at the Trop moved to a much smaller space. However, there are other poker rooms around Atlantic City with action, and certainly plenty of it at Borgata to this day.

When it comes to major tournaments, the WPT is still huge at Borgata and the property runs seasonal festivals that draw big numbers with or without the WPT’s name on the marquee. Plus, Harrah’s Atlantic City has emerged as a regular stop on the WSOP Circuit.

The state also opened up a legal and regulated online poker market in 2013, with major operators like PokerStars, partypoker and 888poker opening shop to offer real-money games. It’s still a rather small market. However, New Jersey did sign on to share player pools with other states in 2017, so it should grow from here.

Put it all together and New Jersey is clearly one of the best states to make a living playing poker.

Pennsylvania

Pennsylvania is one of the more recent entries into the casino gambling game. Slot machines were legalized in 2004. Table games, including poker, were legalized in 2010.

Then, in just the first three years of full casino operations, Pennsylvania surpassed New Jersey as the country’s second most profitable gaming market.

There are now 12 casinos in the state and 10 of them have poker rooms. In fact, poker has become quickly become a big part of what several casinos are doing to bring people in.

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Parx Casino

Parx Casino has long been the poker room revenue leader in the state. It had an 80-table poker room that hosted a ton of cash-game action, daily tournaments, and the popular Big Stax tournament series five times annually.

Now it has moved poker into a sleek and modern 48-table room inside the main building. Nothing about the amount of action at Parx should change, and to be honest, there’s probably enough of it at Parx alone to make PA one of the best states to make a living playing poker.

However, there’s more.

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Sands Bethlehem’s 30-table poker room also hosts a big cash game scene and the somewhat regular DeepStack Extravaganza tournament series. Harrah’s Philadelphia has a room affiliated with the World Series of Poker, which means WSOP Main Event satellites.

Plus, The Poker Night in America Poker Room at SugarHouse Casino in Philadelphia has all kinds of action and is affiliated with the “Poker Night in America” TV show, regularly hosting televised events.

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The 30-table room at Rivers in Pittsburgh shares the same affiliation. Plus, the Pittsburgh-area’s Meadows Casino started hosting a Heartland Poker Tour stop in 2017.

Additionally, there’s a ton of great cash game promotions at the other smaller rooms across the state. Put that together with all the big time tournament action, plus the fact the state just green lit online poker, and there’s little doubt Pennsylvania is the kind of place a pro can make a living now and for years to come.

Honorable mention

Honorable mention has to go to a state like New York. The New York poker scene used to be all about underground cash games in New York City and underage tournaments at Tribal casinos upstate. However, the state has seen four new commercial casinos open up over the past year and they all have poker action.

Connecticut deserves some love on this list as well. The rooms at Foxwoods and Mohegan Sun have enough cash game action to sustain the average pro and they host some big tournaments as well.

Finally, a shout out goes to the District of Columbia. Folks from the capital region used to have drive three hours or take the train to Atlantic City to play poker. Now, there’s an emerging poker scene including more than 100 tables at Maryland Live!, Horseshoe Baltimore, and the MGMjust outside of DC.