Legal Poker Rooms In Dallas

By Reid Jowers

Reporting Texas

Texas Card House General Manager James Combs is seen on March 2, 2019. Texas Card House is a private club and requires a daily, monthly or yearly membership. Brittany Mendez/Reporting Texas

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On a Monday afternoon in March, Will, a 24-year-old software engineer in Austin, was relaxing during a break from a poker game at the Texas Card House in North Austin, where brightly lit rooms and affable service are a contrast to the image some people might have of a gambling establishment.

Will (his last name has been omitted to protect his privacy) started playing poker five years ago when friends introduced him to the game. He loved it.

“I like that it’s a beatable game. You focus and practice to get good. It’s a matter of skill rather than luck like blackjack or other games,” Will said.

The Texas Constitution prohibits most forms of gambling. The few exceptions include private gambling at home, betting on sanctioned horse and dog races, the state lottery and gambling at one of the three Indian casinos in the state. During the last several years, some gamblers have started using a loophole in state law to play cards for money at so-called card clubs, such as Texas Card House.

In 2015, Austin-born Texas hold’em poker player Sam von Kennel noticed a legal technicality that would allow him to open a gambling establishment. According to state law, gambling houses can operate as long as they don’t take a percentage of the pot. Von Kennel had an idea. Instead of taking a cut of the pot, he would charge membership dues and hourly or half-hourly fees for players to participate in a game. Based on his idea, von Kennel opened Post Oak in Houston, the first private social card club in Texas. Since then, about 30 other membership-only card clubs have sprung up around the state, he says.

On a typical weekend, Texas Card House hosts as many as 100 members at a time — a mostly male crowd that is diverse in ethnicity and age. Some poker games, the ones popular among regulars, have a buy-in of $300 and a potential payout of a few thousand dollars. Lower-stakes games have buy-ins as small as $40.

States that allow gambling still make a killing off casinos compared to the card houses in Texas. For example, Louisiana and Oklahoma annually average $2.4 billion and $4.4 billion, respectively, according to state revenue reports.

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A tournament takes place at Texas Card House in Austin on March 2, 2019. Brittany Mendez/Reporting Texas

Although Texas poker rooms operate in a legal gray area, there is precedent for them elsewhere. California card houses that operate the same way are legally recognized by the state. Colorado, Florida, Minnesota, Montana and Washington also have card houses, but no other states do, according to the American Gaming Association’s 2018 State of the States report.

Not everyone agrees that membership-based gambling house are legal.

One of the naysayers is Rob Kohler, a consultant and lobbyist for the Texas Baptist Christian Life Commission.

“It would require a constitutional amendment to make commercial gambling legal in Texas,” Kohler said. “Private home gambling is legal, but these poker rooms are not that. They are merely hiding as a private establishment, but in reality they are commercial.”

Rodger Weems, chairman of Texans Against Gambling, argued in a 2018 Baptist Standard article that card houses run afoul of the law. According to Texans Against Gambling’s website, its mission is to “Improve the lives of people by freeing them from the lower standard of living, exploitation, and fraud that commercial gambling spreads.”

Justin Northcutt, co-owner of the Texas Card House, says Kohler and Weems are playing a bad hand.

“We work very closely with state and local officials and law enforcement to make sure they know how we do business,” Northcutt said. The business pays sales taxes, payroll taxes and its share of property taxes, he said. Northcutt declined to say how much it pays.

“It’s not a dark, hidden, dangerous underground place,” he said.

The appeal of membership-based card houses isn’t gambling, but the skill and challenge of poker, he added.

Poker dealer Delia Atwood collects poker chips at her table during a tournament for the Social Card Clubs of Texas, a non-profit formed in 2018 for social clubs and card playing enthusiasts, at the Texas Card House in Austin on March 2, 2019. Brittany Mendez/Reporting Texas

Mike Robinson, a Wesleyan University psychology professor, has been studying gambling addiction for a decade and a half through experiments on rodents.

“We haven’t gotten the rodents to play poker, but the idea is the same,” Robinson said. Success in gambling — winning or almost winning a hand in a poker game, for example — activates the brain’s reward system, and addicts keep gambling in an attempt to reactivate those pathways.

Texas Card House revokes or bans members that show gambling addiction or bad behavior, Northcutt said, and the business is a part of the Social Card Clubs of Texas, a non-profit formed in 2018 that seeks to promote responsible card playing and create better communities.

Kohler, of the Texas Baptist Christian Life Commission, doubts the validity of these claims. He and the Christian Life Commission want to explicitly outlaw card houses, but since the Attorney General’s Office has refused to offer an opinion on the matter, the fate of these establishments is in the hands of local law enforcement.

Law enforcement across the state has been mostly tolerant, but in 2017, CJ’s Card Room in Dallas was raided by police and effectively shut down. Anti-gambling proponents such as Texas Against Gambling have called for law enforcement to continue raids.

Will said the risk of a police raid doesn’t bother him. “I don’t think most people will either,” he said. “It won’t matter because people will still find a way to play.”

Texas has been a hotbed for poker for many years, and after all, the world’s most popular form of poker is called Texas Hold’em. The game is said to have originated in the town of Robstown, Texas, in the early 1900’s, and eventually spread throughout the state (1). Although this story doesn’t really have much historical documentation to back it up, what is widely acknowledged is that Hold’em was first widely played by Texas road grinders in the early ’60s and perhaps late ’50s.

It wasn’t until the game was brought to Las Vegas in 1967 that the game become known as Texas Hold’em, as prior to that it was just called Hold’em. Although played primarily in Texas, it had also spread to surrounding states.

The stories of the Texas road gamblers, such as Doyle Brunson, Amarillo Slim and Johnny Moss, are the stuff of legend as they traveled from town to town making their living playing poker. Many of the best poker players and the early winners of the WSOP were from Texas.

There are also plenty of stories of these games being broken up by law enforcement. This would not be the case today under existing laws, at least not in the private games anyway, but in spite of Texas’ fame as the birthplace of one of poker’s great games and many of its famous players, it has always been a pretty conservative state as far as gambling goes.

Poker Laws in Texas Today

It is generally believed that all forms of gambling in Texas other than those specifically authorized, such as participating in the state lottery or betting at an approved racetrack, are contrary to state law.

Things aren’t always as clear as they may appear as far as the law is concerned though. It is certainly true that the Texas Penal Code makes gambling illegal in general. Betting for money on card games is specifically mentioned as constituting an offense (3). Anyone found guilty of gambling has committed a Class C misdemeanor, which incurs a fine of up to $500. There’s no possibility of jail time for individual bettors or players. For some of the more severe infractions related to running a gambling enterprise, there are higher fines and jail sentences prescribed.

The interesting thing is that it is a defense to a charge of gambling if the following conditions, listed in the Texas Penal Code, Title 10, Section 47.02(b), are satisfied:

“(b) It is a defense to prosecution under this section that:
(1) the actor engaged in gambling in a private place;
(2) no person received any economic benefit other than personal winnings; and
(3) except for the advantage of skill or luck, the risks of losing and the chances of winning were the same for all participants.”

We see that (1) permits betting that occurs in a private place, meaning that things like home poker games would be excluded from running afoul of this law.

To be exempt from this law, there is also the requirement listed in (2) above that no persons receive any economic benefit from the gambling other than their personal winnings. It could be argued that the intent of this is to allow people to gamble in a friendly way with their friends while still preventing persons under the jurisdiction of Texas law from benefiting by running a gambling business.

Finally, a game must give each participant the same chances of winning and losing apart from “the advantage of skill or luck” as explained in (3) above. This is likely an attempt to make cheating illegal even if the other two conditions for defending against a gambling charge are met.

Texas Card House Austin Tx

Live Poker in Texas

There is only one venue offering indisputably legal live poker in Texas, and it also happens to be the state’s only casino. In spite of Indian tribes being pretty active in operating casinos in other states, they have met with more difficulty in Texas.

At one time there were three different Indian casinos operating in the state, but state authorities were successful in shutting two of them down, and only one remains today, the Kickapoo Lucky Eagle Casino and Hotel in Eagle Pass (2). Its poker room features $3/$6 limit and $1/$2 no limit Texas Hold’em every day with higher stakes spread on weekends and upon request. There are also low-buyin tournaments a few times a week.

Membership Poker Rooms

After examining the three stipulations laid out for gambling to not be illegal, a few Texas entrepreneurs had a clever idea. Beginning in 2015, they started to open up membership-based card rooms that they claim are in full compliance with the law.

These poker rooms don’t charge any rake. Instead, they charge daily, weekly, monthly or yearly membership fees from anyone who wants to play. This membership model serves a dual purpose. Because these businesses are not open to the public at large but rather restricted to members, management can claim that the gambling is taking place in private rather than public. Also, because the membership fees aren’t derived specifically from the money on the gaming tables, there’s an argument that these facilities aren’t deriving any economic benefit from gambling. (4)

Some of these poker rooms supplement their revenues by selling food, requiring players to pay a rental fee on their seats at the tables and through various other mechanisms. Many of them offer additional amenities, like lounges, televisions and pool tables, to support their argument that they are social clubs with gambling as just an additional attraction.

Of course, there are those who feel differently. They contend that gambling is the main appeal of these card rooms, and it is the reason why anyone pays for membership in the first place. Thus, the owners are clearly gaining an economic benefit from real money gaming.

Although the attorney general’s office has been asked to render an opinion on this matter, there has been no answer as yet. Confusing matters further are the questions of whether food and beverages can be sold, whether daily membership available to anyone who walks in the door really counts as “private” gambling, whether hourly seat rental charges are OK and other similar concerns. Each of these rooms generates its income in slightly different ways, so there are plenty of elements that can be attacked as being potentially illegal.

The ability of these card clubs to operate depends heavily on how local law enforcement feels about them because, even if it would be hard to achieve a conviction in court, raids and shutdowns by the police can really interfere with the continuing operations of a location. This has actually occurred in Dallas where local officials closed down two of these card clubs in 2017.

Poker Clubs Dallas Texas

Today, Texan membership poker clubs dot the state in such cities as San Antonio and Austin. Houston has even begun licensing them at the municipal level, spurring the creation of such businesses as the Post Oak Poker Club and the Prime Social Poker Club within the city. We still await a final resolution as to the legal status of membership card rooms, but for now, live Texas poker appears to be booming.

Online Poker and The Law in Texas

As is often is the case, existing law does not really contemplate internet poker, and the thrust of the law here is directed generally at people profiting from running gambling operations in the state of Texas, which isn’t really the case with playing online.

The view though is that since people aren’t being prosecuted for playing online poker, online poker players in Texas aren’t worried about this at all, nor are offshore poker rooms that serve Americans, since none of them have a problem with allowing Texas residents to play on their site, unlike players in some states.

It’s extremely likely that people enjoying poker games played across the internet have an ipso facto defense from being subject to illegal gambling prosecution under Texas law unless they’re doing something really unusual. The three factors of taking place in private, not profiting other than as a player and not cheating appear to apply fully to online poker in Texas. The only conceivable ways that someone could get into trouble for internet poker in Texas would be if they’re playing in public, attempting to run their own poker site or cheating in some way.

In any event, the state of Texas has taken a hands-off approach here, and it is very likely that if this changes, it will require laws more specific to online poker for this to be prosecuted, which doesn’t look like it will happen any time soon. So online poker players in Texas can continue to be pretty comfortable here.

Recommended Online Poker Rooms For Texans

Ignition Poker: This is the newest and most popular player in the online poker industry. They have come in hot in 2016 after acquiring the Bovada Poker software and re-branding into both a poker site and an online casino. The site offers a 100% bonus up to $1,000 should you decide to play for real money.

This site has some of the best cash games in the world, huge MTT guarantees, great SnG selections and of course have amazing promotions to keep players interest piqued. Check out our review for Ignition and find out why it’s one of the fastest-rising rooms in the iGaming field today.

Americas Cardroom: This fairly popular poker room has a Texas connection of sorts. When Doyle Brunson’s online poker room closed down due to pressure from the authorities, their players were all moved to Americas Cardroom.

Legal Poker Rooms In Dallas Illinois

They continue to welcome Texans and all Americans with open arms, and have up to $1000 in bonus money sitting there for you to welcome you as well. So if you haven’t experienced this poker room before, just click here and you will be on your way to doing just that. Visit our ACR Review today for more info.

References:

(1) Texas Hold’em

(2) Lucky Eagle Casino

(3) Texas Penal Code Section 10, Chapter 47, Gambling

(4) Texas Online Gambling Laws

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