The subject line is pretty self explanatory but I'll keep writing anyway!

I've got a free evening in San Jose on Tuesday and thought I'd play some cards. Looking for a $2-5 NL game preferably. Any suggestions?

Sil

There are two card rooms in San Jo. Bay 101 and Garden City. Google is your friend.

neither bay 101 or garden city offer nl hold em since its illegal in santa clara county. if you want a nl game you will have to travel to lucky chances in colma (right by san francisco). i wouldnt really reccomend lucky chances nl games they have a very bad structure. the blinds are 1-1-2 and the minimum bring in bet is 4. the max buy in to this game is 100 so you can see you dont have much room to play early on. the game is basically a all in fest.

No-limit hold'em is not illegal in Santa Clara County. The Wagon Wheel in Mountain View used to offer NLHE without any legal trouble at all. (The city of Mountain View discontinued the Wagon Wheel's license to spread poker for other reasons). Likewise, the old Cameo Club in Palo Alto spread no-limit games when it was open.

The city of San Jose happens to have a maximum betting limit, that's all.

Lucky Chances , in Colma, spreads a number of NLHE games. The smallest ones are the $1-$1-$2 blind, $4-to-go games KizzleWashington describes, with a $40 minimum buyin and $100 maximum. The house charges a $6 time charge every half hour on the dealer push.

They also spread a $2-$3-$5 blind, $10 to go NLHE game. Minimum buy-in is $200 and maximum is $500. $7/half hour time charge. There's a lot more play in this game than in the smaller one, as the stacks tend to be five times as big, while the blinds are only 2.5x as big.

Then there's the $10-$10-$20 blind, $40-to-go game that goes down some nights, I'm not remembering precisely when. $1000 minimum buy-in, no maximum. Unlike the baby games, players can post a kill (straddle) of $40 in any position except on the button; this makes the action $40 to go, and the killer gets last action before the flop.

The $100 game was easy to beat the last time I played in it. The $500 game is somewhat tougher, but I can beat it pretty reliably. The big game is a quantum leap in skill level of the regular players. I've played in it and won, and played in it and broken even, but it is too big for me to play except for taking a shot.

Another NLHE game reachable from Silicon Valley is the $1-$2-$2, $5-to-go game at the Palace in Hayward. $100 minimum, no maximum, and I don't recall the time charge.

Lucky Chances doesn't spread this game any more. In its place is a game with the more conventional structure of $20 and $40 blinds, $40 to go, no kill. I don't recall at the moment what is the minimum buy-in for the game, but it's somewhere in the neighborhood of $1K or $2K. (Apart from considering other players' stacks, I wouldn't want to buy in for less than $3K, and would prefer to have $5K in front of me.) I don't know what the time charge for the game is.

I don't understand what the motivation is for spreading a big game with a fundamentally different structure from the old-fashioned 3-blind structure that is peculiar to Northern California NLHE.