The three most common venues for poker are casinos, home games, and online. However, there’s a fourth venue that presents its own special set of challenges, but gets little attention in the usual poker media outlets — bar poker, also known as tavern poker.
I moved a few years ago from the center of the poker universe, Las Vegas, to Asheville, North Carolina, which is a poker desert. We do have Harrah’s Cherokee casino about an hour away with its small poker room. But other than that, professionally run live poker requires an all-day drive to places like Maryland, West Virginia, or Mississippi.