Free poker and bingo in Davao City

Free poker in Davao City, with no card room and no entry fee: in Anubis City you take a seat at a Texas Hold’em table with real people, right in your phone or computer browser. The chips are debens — free game coins with no cash value — and the same city has 75-ball bingo, roulette, blackjack and slots.

Davao is Mindanao’s biggest city, and plenty of people here speak Bisaya at home and English at work. The game’s menus come in English, Russian or Ukrainian — no Bisaya yet — but the table chat takes whatever you type, so a group of Davao friends can talk the way they talk at home. If you grew up on pusoy dos, a straight still loses to a flush and a full house still beats both; what Hold’em adds is betting rounds and two hidden cards. The rules take about ten minutes.

Davao keeps Philippine time, UTC+8, like Manila and Cebu, so the three cities spend their evenings at the same tables while racing each other for City of the Week. The score is the experience of a city’s ten best players over seven days, which means Davao can beat Quezon City or Manila with a determined top ten rather than a bigger crowd. Many families here have someone working abroad. A private table with a link lets a mother in Davao and a son in Dubai play the same hand — 9 p.m. in Davao is 5 p.m. in Dubai.