There are a lot of casinos in Prague, the capital of the Czech Republic. The name Prague comes from the old Slavic word praga, which means a ford, in referrence to the geography of the city on the Vltava River.

The native name of the city, Praha is also related to the modern Czech word práh meaning threshold and a legend relates the city name to the Duchess Libuše, a mythical ancestor of the inhabitants.

But not a lot of poker. When Angela and I saw a banner which read Texas Hold’em just off of Wenceslass square, we went into Casino Banco to explore. There were not any games at that moment, their Czech national team was playing in the World Hockey Finals, but the manager promised us there would be a winner take all freeroll the next day for 2000 crowns ($80).

When we got to Casino Banco for the freeroll the crowd was still a bit thin. Apparently the World Hockey Finals weren’t quite over. After a delay of a half hour, the freeroll went off with nine players, all tourists with little interest in hockey. Angela played tight, and won the first post of the freeroll, I played loose and won the whole thing. The other players were mostly poor to average. There were two young guns one of which kept spewing percentages till he was out of chips. The other took second.

After the freeroll I played 100/200 crowns ($4/$8) No-Limit Holdem for a couple hours. The game was short handed, never having more than five players. The other players were the standard low limit types. One guy regularly raised pre flop, then folded to my three-bets. After the game broke, he snuck up to me wearing a big grin and commented “Those guys were all really bad!”

Sometimes even the fish get lucky. Anyway it was nice to play poker in this remote location and Prague is a very nice city to visit.