The Cardroom: Tabloid focuses on Northern California poker rooms

If you've gone gambling lately, you've probably seen it. If you plan to go soon, you probably will see it. The Cardroom, a free bimonthly newspaper, is gaining readership across the Bay Area.

The tabloid-format newspaper is distributed in cardrooms and casinos all over Northern California. Editor Randall Rapp and Paul Giambroni, the paper's advertising and circulation director, make up Bullseye Publishing of Fresno, and print more than 36,000 copies every other month.

Content runs the gamut from casino reviews to features. One story in the recent issue focused on end-of-year promotions at River Rock Casino in Geyserville (Sonoma County); another highlighted PokerPro, new automated tables that have all but eliminated human dealers at Black Oak Casino in Tuolumne.

An overwhelming number of the articles focus on poker, and every issue contains an extensive calendar of tournaments around the Bay Area. There's a regular column called Poker Ambassador that provides a play-by-play recap of a recent poker-room road trip, and a regular advice column on how to play certain hands.

"If it has to do with poker and Northern California, we're interested," Rapp wrote in a recent e-mail. "If a big-time pro from Las Vegas plays in a big-time tournament in Los Angeles, we don't care."

The publication premiered with 12,000 copies of the September/October 2006 issue and has grown exponentially since then. Today, the paper is distributed in cardrooms from Salinas to Sacramento. Bullseye affiliates distribute the paper to stand-alone newspaper racks, too.

For Rapp, who is one of six regular writers, running the Cardroom also offers an opportunity to do something he loves: play poker. Rapp says he's visited dozens of cardrooms and casinos in the past 16 months, and each one has been unique.

"I've been at big cardrooms that were so friendly, it was like playing at your kitchen table, and at small cardrooms where everyone playing had such bad attitudes that I was ready to leave right away," he says. Rapp expects circulation to climb in 2008 and noted that a recent appearance on the Web-based Poker Room Radio attracted a lot of interest and demand.

News Added: 13 December, 2007

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