It appears that a multi-year battle between the city officials and a poker room operator is coming to an end after an appellate judge ordered Dallas to reinstate the room’s permits to operate.
The judge ruled city officials were wrong when they yanked Texas Card House’s occupancy permits in December of 2021 — 14 months after approving it. The permit was pulled by the city’s Building Inspection Division after a council-member became alarmed about poker rooms after several violent robberies took place.
The owners of Texas Card House appealed the decision to the Dallas Board of Adjustment, and won. That was in May of 2022. But in November of that year, a trial court judge sided with the Dallas on appeal, which prompted Texas Card House owners to again challenge the decision in court.
Despite reservations by several of its members, Dallas’ council authorized to spend up to $620,000 to fund the case, even though the city was essentially fighting its own Board of Adjustment, who, by a vote of 5-0, ruled that the permit was issued legally.
Ah, sweet, expensive bureaucracy. On Tuesday, a judge closed the book on the matter.
“We conclude the trial court thereby erred in failing to afford the required deference to the [Board of Adjustment’s] decision,” Justice Bonnie Lee Goldstein said in her opinion. “The court must not substitute its discretion for the [Board of Adjustment’s].”
Chad West, a council member who spoke in favor of Texas Card House since the beginning of this saga, told local radio station KERA that the case still sticks in his crawl.
“I have been pushing staff to find a legal path forward for these businesses,” West told the news station. “It looks like the courts decided to do the job for us.”
He went on to tell the station that “card rooms employ hundreds of Dallas residents, generate sales tax revenue that can be used to pay for public safety and parks and provide ‘a safe place for people to play cards.’”
Texas Card House has six locations: Austin, Dallas, Las Colinas, Houston, Rio Grande Valley, and Spring. Texas Card House Dallas remained opened while the appeals wound their way through the courts.
CEO of Texas Card House, Ryan Crow, could not be reached for comment.
A second poker room, Shuffle 214, also had its occupancy permits pulled in December of 2021, and it worked alongside Texas Card House to appeal the rash — and illegal — decision. Like Texas Card House Dallas, Shuffle 214 never closed during the legal process. According to an employee when reached by phone, the situation seems to be “all smoothed over.”
Some observers and participants of this case predicted that it would eventually reach the Texas Supreme Court, who would then be forced to rule on the legality of live poker and its healthy poker room industry (if it decided to hear the case), which currently operates within a legal grey area.
Poker rooms in Texas operate as social clubs where rake is not collected and players pay a membership fee as short as for 24-hours, and then pay a seat fee per hour, which puts them within the law.
Since 2017, dozens and dozens of poker rooms, some owned by famous poker players like Phil Hellmuth and Doug Polk, have sprung up in strip malls all across the giant state despite a nagging uncertainty that it could all be taken away by either its politicians or the courts.
It appears that Dallas will let this sleeping dog lie and won’t appeal the ruling to the Texas Supreme Court, leaving the question of the total legality of its poker rooms up to interpretation by local officials.
