About this guide
About Valeria Ruiz
Valeria Ruiz signs Up Close, the independent guide to the nine casinos of Metro Vancouver. She is a drawn character, a line illustration and not a photograph of a real person, and the site says so openly.
Photos, marks and arrival notes
Up Close shows each venue from the outside. Valeria Ruiz picks the photo, a free-licence picture from Wikimedia Commons used under CC BY, CC BY-SA or the Commons Attribution licence. Each one carries a credit line with its author, its licence and "via Wikimedia Commons". Where no freely licensed photo exists, a drawing of Valeria takes its place.
She then places the marks by hand on the building in the frame. Each mark states a fact: parking, the nearest stop or station, a hotel on site, the level of a service inside. A mark does not show the exact position of a door unless the venue publishes it.
Valeria also writes the arrival notes, for a plain reason. People reach a casino they have never seen and need to know where to park or where to get off.
How the facts are checked
Valeria Ruiz checks each venue's address, hours, parking and transit facts on the venue's own pages and official sources. Each check is dated. The facts on the site were checked on October 7, 2026. Where official pages give different figures, the figure is left out: Grand Villa's pages show two poker table counts, and Hastings' pages two slot counts.
Distances to bus stops and SkyTrain stations are straight lines, not walking routes. They run from the venue's OpenStreetMap position to TransLink's stop coordinates in its GTFS data, a feed valid September 7, 2026 to January 3, 2027. Parq is the exception: its distances to its two stations are the ones Parq publishes.