Poker in Andalusia & Algarve - winter could be worse

Another contribution on the go for PokerFirma.com and I have added an English text version below. Photos and info links can be found in the German article.

ENGLISH TEXT VERSION BELOW

It’s been good to return to Seville. This glorious city used to be one of my recurrent stops over the past years. The pandemic dramatically changed many things for me including where and how I travel given the fact that many smaller Poker promoters changed their ways to operate. The pandemic or rather how it’s been handled almost broke some of us or at least some of our projects and unfortunately, Seville has not so often been on my Poker trip map anymore lately. Maybe I’ll get more of it again in the future. Hopefully… The city itself did not care much about the virus. You can tell that a wave of financial crisis and a bunch of insolvencies have been ravaging the land judging by the amount of closed shops or restaurants but the magnificent city center is still there and hasn’t changed much. It’s still gorgeous.

After putting my snowboard back in its place in Luxembourg following the great CAPT Seefeld stop and I instantly made my way from snowy Benelux to Seville over Barcelona to attend the first CNP stop of the year, a nice success with over 650 entries in the main event and I could even book a final table in my records for the PLO event of the series after soft bubbling and stone-cold bubbling two Omaha tournaments in the Alps.

Seville has one of the most amazing city centres in Europe. It’s basically a giant open air museum and one can tell that many efforts are being made to keep everything in great condition. The heart of the city is a huge pedestrian zone full of churches, palaces, royal gardens and terrasses in the sun that can make it hard to consider spending more than the necessary time in the Poker room.

That said, Casino Admiral Seville is a nice place to be in. The casino is conveniently located just outside the city centrer and offers good modern facilities to play cards and other classic casino games. Not much is going on here in terms of Poker outside the event weeks but when they are hosting a series, they use an event room located away from the casino floor rumble giving the event a genuine Poker festival atmosphere.

All my Seville photos are online in my archive for some digital tourism.

The CNP circuit mostly communicate via Twitter and the tour is remarkably documented by seasoned Poker photographer, Gema Cristobal, also active and traveling as one of the head 888poker photographers around the world. All her shots are available on the CNP Flickr account. For those who Donn’t use Twitter, CNP also posts updates on Facebook or Instagram and news are easy to look up on the official website. The next stop will be in another marvellous Andalusian city, Granada.

After Seville, I took a few days away from the casino action. Since the beginning of the year, I’ve been traveling, shooting and playing a lot in Slovakia, Luxembourg, Romania, England, Austria, Spain and Portugal without taking much time for myself apart from putting in a bunch of very satisfying snowboarding sessions. Since I was in the south of the Iberian peninsula, I took advantage of the relative proximity to visit the Algarve, the extreme southern tip of Portugal and elected Faro as a home for a few days. It’s a 2.5-hour bus ride away but there has been no visit at the nearby Vilamoura casino this time. Instead, some nice slow time in Faro.

March is a great time to stop by here since it feels like summer if you are used to DACH weather conditions: +25°C and full sun. Past April or May, our Northern European skins burn here with temperatures easily rising above the 40 and 45 °C marks. The Vilamoura casino has not been very active when it comes to Poker since the post-COVID reopening but the Solverde group, which is in charge of the place, are putting on an event in April if someone considers attending a live Poker event in the region. Until then, here are some photo impressions of Faro, where you will most likely land. Although Faro lies by the ocean, there is no direct access to its beaches from the city center. One has to do a detour of more than 5km to get there. There is a shortcut by boat. The reason is a vast humid zone that constitutes the Formosa river estuary in a labyrinth of wetlands mixing canals, islands, marshland and sandy beaches at its extremely towards the ocean. The estuary extends more than 50 km along the Algarve coast between the beaches of Garrao and Manta Rota. This is the primary reason why, although the small city of Faro has one of the best connected airports of the Portuguese nation and offers charming peaceful narrow streets around the central castle, Vilamoura, where the land touches the beaches directly, remains more popular for secondary residencies or tourist accommodation and has far more developed infrastructure. This is also where the relevant casino of the region was built. During high season, the region gets packed and one will most likely do better in German or English than in Portuguese since enormous waves of tourists and expats flood the coast with Faro as their main entry point summer after summer. My favourite time to visit is October to April, a period with bearable temperatures and almost no tourists. The Brits and Germans one comes across during these months are usually long term expats and retirees.

From Faro, my plans should take me to Luxembourg again for some quick business before hopping back to Bratislava where a ton of Poker action is awaiting during these weeks and I will visit Salzburg during the upcoming CAPT in late March before a stop in the hotspot of Belgian live Poker. I used to be the house Poker photographer until 2018 and I have not been back since they renovated the whole casino and built a brand new hotel. I’ll be back in Namur for their Classics in early April.

Anyone is welcome to get in touch via my blog. My contact details are online in its CONTACT & INFO section and there are more Poker events to be found under POKER TRIPS.

Also, we keep building great tools for traveling Poker players with PokerFirma. Those who are looking to organise their next Poker journey should get a look at our freshly launched Pokerturniere.live and casinocityguide.eu pages.

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Damiano Nigro