Interesting post from someone in a Houston-area Facebook group I'm in:
Holy shit there’s some serious follow-me-off-the-cliff stuff going on.
One-by-one now everyone is switching to a daily fee......because that totally changes everything. 🙄
And for fuck’s sake...putting some Chess, Scrabble, and Connect fucking Four board games in the corner of your establishment DOESN’T CHANGE SHIT.
I can see it now...the undercover officer reports back to his superiors, “we got ‘em sir! Let’s bust ‘em!”
Lieutenant, “wait...stop everything...is that a Parcheesi board in the corner?!”
Cop, “dammit! We we’ve been outmaneuvered!”
GTFO of here with this grasping-at-straws bullshit!
I’m disappointed with the level of criminal in this town. It’s fucking embarrassing.
Trying to make poker legal with some Uno cards and complimentary WiFi...it’s just sad really.
I gotta agree with this guy.
If the remaining Texas card rooms are changing "seat fees" to "daily fees" and think that really changes anything, they're kidding themselves.
And placing non-gambling games in the corner of the room, so as to not make it look like a poker room? Also LOL.
This is really one of those quacks-like-a-duck situation.
If it looks like a poker room, if poker is played there like in a poker room, if people pay for the privilege to play poker like in a poker room, and if the primary source of income is due to it being a poker room, then it's a poker room.
It's possible they can squeak by if Texas law is overly broad to where they can legally pass it off as "a private club where poker just happens to be the main game played", but make no mistake about it, they've definitely been breaking the spirit of the law.
It's possible they can use an "implicit permission" defense, claiming that law enforcement knew the full extent of their operation for a long time, yet never attempted to interfere with it or tell the it was illegal. So they can claim that they continued operating, with the belief that law enforcement believed it to be legal.
This could be a criminal extension to rental law, where even if your apartment forbids dogs, if the landlord is aware for a period of time (usually 90-180 days) that you have a dog, and says nothing about it, then he's implicitly giving you permission to have the dog there.
Maybe I'll ask Eric Bensamochan about this. Should have asked him on Wednesday's show.
Personally I think Texas should just legalize poker, shut these bullshit unlicensed rooms down, and allow new rooms to open through a state licensing and regulatory process.