Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube. Probing Toronto’s poker underground By Jack LakeyThe Fixer Sat., May 7, 2011timer3 min. Read Poker is such an easy game, until it becomes the only way to put food on the table. Police announce a bust of a lavish underground casino and spa hiding behind the gates of a palatial mansion northeast of Toronto that’s believed to be linked to organized crime.
It’s been over a decade since the OLG shut down all the roaming charity casinos operating within ontario.These charity casinos served a vital role by supplying a demand to the gaming public for low-limit black jack and texas hold-em poker. They paid taxes and paid money to local charities.In fact many of today’s poker pro’s started in one form or another by playing at these very same casinos.The poker offered was 2/5$,5/10$,and 10/20$ texas hold-em poker,with the black jack being a low limit 1-4$ maximum bet table,there were no slot machines (thank god).There were several companies who operated these charity casinos which generally operated 3-4 day’s a week at different venues throughout the city of Toronto and other nearby cities as well.
A strange thing happened directly after their closing. The Brantford Charity Casino located in where else ,Brantford ( the middle of nowhere) was granted the sole poker room in all of ontario (excluding the Port Perry indian band run room). Who in their right mind would ever have seen Brantford as the most lucrative and viable location for ontarios only legal poker room at the time is a question which canno’t be fully understood except by the OLG of course,because they surely know what gambling is all about..Why not a city such as Toronto? One which has over five million people living within a 30 mile radius? At this same time Brantford was given their poker licence,no other major casono in ontario had yet installed their own poker room’s of any kind. None of the big three including Niagara fall’s,Orillia or Windsor casino’s had any hold-em poker whatsoever to offer their player’s. Again this shows the OLG’s savy when it comes to gaming .This would be a first in the history of casino’s worldwide for a casino to open it’s door’s without a full fledged poker room from the start but that’s exactly what happened in all three scenarios.
There is still no legal poker room in Toronto,and underground club’s operate daily raking in literally hundreds of thousands of dollars per week.The introduction of an OLG run room would put these illegal rooms out of business almost overnight,as player’s will always want to play at a legal venue before participating in anything illegal, for the most part.I guess lottery schemes such as everyones favourite rock paper scissors will prevail as long as fools that have no idea what they are supposed to be doing dominate the OLG’s board of directors,what a shame for poker players and the city of Toronto!
Apparently the government was just to addicted to all the easy money being generated from the thousands of slot machines to be worried about player’s want’s and needs. Espesially not in ontario where casinos were a new thing and the novelty of spending and losing ten’s of thousands of dollars hadn’t worn off on the public yet.Certainly nobody within the OLG wanted to intoduce a game which potentially required intelligence to play , where player’s could make educated choices ,folding 8 hands out of ten dealt for free.Also spending far more time at the tables with their money intact.No, we couldn’t have that now could we? No sir,we just couldn’t. The session fee’s derived were just to low to allow that,even though they did run at a healthy profit they were far to labor intensive and required to much space on the gaming floor.Well here we are twelve years later and Toronto still has nothing that resembles legal poker anywhere.Though there are hundreds of illegal underground clubs operating within the city.Clubs which make in excess of 250,000-500,000$ a year just to deal cards never giving a cent back in taxes to the city of Toronto.This lost reevenue would have added up to well over 200-300 million dollars over these twelve years,but who’s counting? The jobs created by a local poker room would be in the hundreds if operated on a proper scale as well,but we don’t need good paying jobs,certainly not in our city.That money is a drop in the bucket and besides Toronto already get’s their paltry 15 million a year from the woodbine slot barn,though the site rakes in hundreds of millions yearly.
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