Peru Poker Trip

In the summer of 2012, we took a two-week vacation in Peru. We have friends who are Peruvian, and they invited us to come back with them. We did all of the touristy things while we were there -- went all over Lima, and then on to Cusco (the Incan capital), but the (literal) high point was Machu Picchu. I blogged about it thoroughly as "Notes" on my Facebook page and posted dozens of pics ("Mucho Machu"), so you can go read it there if you want. And if you're not my Facebook friend, why not? I've been told I sometimes post some funny things.

Lima has a handful of casinos around the city, and a few of them have poker rooms. I of course could not resist checking them out, and so even though I was somewhat hampered by the language barrier I made sure to sit down in a game or two and see what it was like.

First of all, you can forget finding a game that starts any sooner than midnight. The Peruvian currency is called the sol (plural soles, pronounced using two syllables). Each sol was worth, at the time, around 35-40 cents, so we're not talking high stakes.

The players are terrible; there is a good reason why Peru has never produced a championship player. The game plays much more slowly than in Vegas, sometimes as long as five minutes per hand. If you want to check, you say “Paso”. I found this is a bit confusing, because in England if you say “I pass” that means “I fold”. So I was afraid to actually say “paso”; I just tapped the table to check.  “All in” is how you push all-in, although it’s pronounced more like “all een.” “Llamo” is call, which makes sense. A Flush is “Colór”; a Full House is “Full”, pronounced “fool”; and they call Four of a Kind “Pokér”.

There were almost no female poker players to be found. Then again, the conversation around the poker table is of the locker room variety. Very useful for learning Spanish slang, if nothing else.

One of the more notable things about the game there had to do with the rake. In the states, the poker rake is 5% up to a cap of $4-$5 (sometimes more, sometimes less). This, by the way, is probably the single biggest reason why low-limit games are so difficult to beat. The competition at higher limits might be tougher, and you may not win as many big blinds, but the amount of dollars might end up being more because the juice hits a ceiling. In Peru, however, there is no cap on the rake! So even if the pot gets to a thousand soles or more (and it sometimes did), the dealer will pull in a rake of nearly a hundred soles before he pushes the pot.

All in all, I think I'd rather play in Vegas. But the game was very good and definitely lucrative, and I would go again if I had the opportunity. And by the way, one of the Latin America Poker Tour stops takes place in the casino I visited, the "Atlantic City" casino.