This topic has previously been discussed.

https://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/5...anned-1740835/

I'd like to know if new ownership is interested in reassessing the current stance so that individual card rooms can have their own threads in the Venues and Communities forum.

I was just about to come in here and post this as well. I'm moving to TX next month and looking forward to playing in the card rooms there. I think it's doing a disservice to the community here to hide all the Texas rooms into one thread stuffed into the Home Games section.

A poker room with 20 or 60 or 80 tables is NOT a home game. And unlike casinos with poker rooms that don't give two craps about the players, it seems many of the rooms in Texas are run by poker enthusiasts who actually understand what poker players want, have reasonable pricing structures, etc.

As an example, The Lodge has a $10/hr time charge. Contrast that with playing at the Tampa Hard Rock. They get you at $5 rake plus $2 jackpot drop or $16/hr in time raked games.

I would love to see the venues in TX be permitted to have their own threads in the Venues subsection of the forum. It would help the community here a ton for those interested in learning more about the various rooms instead of having to try and search through one lone thread in Home Games that is supposed to cover the millions of rooms spread throughout Texas.

I don't have anything to do with this subforum, but you might get more attention from the mods that do in this thread:

https://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/2...sting-1532632/

Is this decision being handed down by individual moderators or is this coming from the site administration as far as where we are allowed to discuss TX poker rooms?

I really don't know, that all happened before my time. I assume it's because there are still questions about the legality of poker in Tx as well as the fact that Tx rooms are completely unregulated.

Illegal? The rooms that aren't taking a rake from pots will have no trouble with Ranger Bigfoot Wallace. Sure, some rooms are getting creative and tiptoeing around TX gambling laws.

Unregulated? Yes. There is no agency mandated by state law to oversee the activities of cardrooms. It's just the "free market" keeping these establishments honest. Cardrooms that don't act right don't get any traffic.

As long as there is a need for 'specific' traffic, then it would make sense to have an individual thread.

The title of 'Membership-Basted Poker in Texas' could be parred down to the overall discussion of the rooms in general, not so much specific rooms. That is where legal/illegal thoughts and any governmental movement could be combined.

Then let each area .. Austin, Houston, Dallas have their own place to go for actual 'poker' news.

When Horseshoe Indy opened up (even before they opened up) a new thread was created even thou there's an Indianapolis Poker thread already. Neither has really any traffic ..

The one main question that reoccurs is .. "I want to play in Texas, where should I go?" .. Not if doing the splits or leaving things combined helps that member more. GL

I was under the impression that the policy ultimately came from Mason in consultation with his lawyer. I was wondering if new ownership would reconsider.

Someone tried to start a thread for The Lodge, which was locked according to current policy.

https://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/1...ck-tx-1810753/

I strongly vote in favor of permitting the creation of threads about TX poker rooms and regions within TX in the Venues and Communities Forum. As for the potential legal concerns, I don't see how there is any real risk to 2+2 for permitting this. There is no difference between the poker rooms in TX and those in OH and OR, other than the legal precedent for legality being more well established. And Shark Tank in OH, for example, has it's own thread in V&C. I just don't see how having discussion about the Lodge within the V&C forum, rather than limiting it to the Home Games forum, adds any legal risk to 2+2.

I'm happy to try to provide further discussion of legal risks if anybody has questions. Just for full FYI purposes, IANAL any more, and my specialty when I was a lawyer was patent law, not criminal law or anything else on point with respect to poker legality.

Cheers, Greg Raymer (FossilMan)

An alternative would be to have a separate subforum for membership clubs.

I posted about this many times and there were some overzealous mods under the old regime that for whatever reason just didn't want to allow for any threads on these rooms outside of "Home Poker". These places have been open and operating for more than 5 years now and have some of the best games in the country. This is supposed to a poker forum so this stance has always been ridiculous. So as you can tell, I vote in favor of creating separate threads on the Texas rooms/poker scene wherever they will get more eyeballs/traffic.

That's not actually true though. A room near Tyler in Smith County was shut down this year for taking membership/seat fees (no rake). 5 years ago rooms in Plano, McKinney, Dallas, and Addison were forced to shut down (or never opened in the first place) despite not taking a rake. Due to fear of being shut down no rooms have opened in Collin County (Plano, McKinney).

That's not even mentioning the fact that TCH Dallas recently had it's Certificate of Occupancy pulled by the city after Dallas had a change of heart about whether these rooms were legal or not. TCH did have that decision reversed by an oversight board though. Still, other legal rooms that wanted to open near the rich neighborhoods have not been permitted to open in Dallas.

that someone was me lol

But how does any of that create a legal risk to 2+2 for permitting us to discuss it in the Venues & Community section of the forum with threads specific to either each room or at least to regions in TX?

There are a LOT of options and it would be helpful for members of this community to be able to discuss more specific or localized options rather than a gazillion rooms being lumped into one giant home game thread.

And if there were legal issues, violence issues, cheating issues, rooms scamming people and running off with money or whatever, it would help to have discussions in their respective thread rather than in a thread that incorporates EVERY poker room in the entire state, of which there are many.

Myself and Lattimer are the two mods of both Casino and Cardroom Poker (CCP) and Venues & Communities (V&C). V&C used to be a subforum of CCP, now it is its own top level forum, but either way the two share the same set of rules.

My comments below are my own. Lattimer can chime in if he wants to.

A bit of history: unregulated rooms were not a permissible topic in CCP/V&C before I became a mod there. I can't speak to the reasoning then. Since I've been a mod, that restriction has remained. I can only explain why that is from my own perspective, which I'll do below.

A second bit of history: pre-new-owners, the mods of each forum were basically given the latitude to run their forums the way they wanted to, subject to some guardrails that applied across all the forums. Mat made it a point to always defer to the mods of a forum about how that forum was run, with very rare exception. This topic has come up a few times, and I've always given my reasons, and offered to step aside if he wanted things done another way no questions asked, and he never accepted that offer. Since the new ownership, nothing much has changed with the above, the forum mods still have latitude to run their forums as they wish, within some guidelines. I cannot recall if the TX issue has come up in any substantial way since then, until now, but the same offer applies, at least as far as I'm concerned.

Explaining the reasons: I'm basically just going to quote from a message I sent back in 2021 the last time this came up, to Mat, Greg, Garick, and Lattimer.

I will note that no one ever responded to me at the time, and as far as I know this was the last message anyone exchanged about it, at least with me.

In the past year, I've gone a little lighter moderating comments that reference TX rooms in the main CCP forum - as long as the focus of the post is on live poker generally, and not specifically about a TX room, I've tried to let it go. The restriction on having V&C threads about TX rooms has remained though.

In some ways, poker in TX has seemed to normalize a bit. But as Dream Crusher mentions, for every step forward there is at least one step back. As recently as 5 months ago a room in TX was raided and shut down by local authorities. So I'd be hard pressed to agree that poker in TX is out of the gray area and is now completely legal. https://www.kltv.com/2022/03/11/top-...by-das-office/

--

So anyway, I am open to the discussion. I am open to TPTB deciding they want a thread for each TX room. My offer above still stands.

I don't think it does. TwoPlusTwo has allowed agents and brokers to advertise their phone app poker clubs and those are far shadier than card rooms in Texas. These card rooms are operating completely out in the open and are not avoiding any sort of government oversight whatsoever...in fact, this business model was first conceived by Sam Von Kennel who worked for the Chairman of the Licensing and Administrative committee that oversees gaming in the state of Texas.

This seems more like it's just an outdated rule.

Thanks for chiming in, appreciate the open discussion. I think Dream Crusher makes a great point below when comparing the TX rooms to the app-based poker that exists where folks are able to circumvent laws in various jurisdictions.

Either way, I wouldn't look at it like 2+2 is promoting anything, just allowing for open discussion on things the members here are interested in. As Greg Raymer pointed out, he doesn't see any legal concern for this to the site either. Although it seems like it's more a personal concern of yours rather than 2+2 owners being worried


Some great points, think it's time for

I'll do my best to chime in thoughtfully by the end of the weekend. I work for a startup company now and I travel a lot, so I'm very mentally focused elsewhere... fortunately the CCP/VC fora require little moderation attention and so that's fine (though the irony that I was the one that locked the thread that started this isn't lost on me, lol). I just wanted to let you know that I'm not ignoring this request for change.

No, I don't believe so. I just had a look at the last mod forum conversation about this, and my take was that Mat would've been fine with change if the CCP mods had been on board. As dinesh has since said, Mat typically allowed moderators to run forums as they saw fit.

I think this is rather unfair for a couple of reasons. First of all, overzealousness seems a little much - the CCP mods simply see this differently. And it wasn't simply for "whatever reason" - they had very clear reasons they stated numerous times.

That said, it looks like dinesh has come to this thread to explain his thinking, and Lattimer will soon do the same. I think the best way forward would be to engage in some productive conversation and see where things go from there. If a solution can be found that the mods would be agreeable to, then I doubt we'll have a problem going ahead with it. If one can't be found, then we can solicit Max's thoughts about other potential solutions.

Let's give this a little time. Rome wasn't burnt to the ground in a day while Nero fiddled, or something like that.

So I guess from a member of the communities perspective we'd like to either see at a bare minimum:

1. Regional Threads Permitted For Texas Poker Clubs In Venues & Communities


But preferably

2. Dedicated Threads Permitted Per Texas Poker Club in Venues & Communities


There are some heavy hitting rooms in Austin, Dallas and Houston that having dedicated threads for would be beneficial for the members of this community given the action and events at those locales.

I live in the Dallas area and Texas Card House advertises here on radio stations and roadside billboards. I'm sure it's probably the same in Austin and Houston. I know that doesn't make it legal, but it certainly adds an air of legitimacy to it. Whatever these rooms are, they are well beyond being "home" games.

As much as I think that dinesh is a great mod and asset to the community, I had no idea that the reason these rooms were relegated to the basement was because of one man's fear for his job. That seems a little extreme.

I for one hope that we can revise this policy. Although, based on the amount of posting in the existing Texas thread we may just end up with a bunch of new, dead, threads were we to change it. Maybe not though, maybe people just don't know how to use the search function and never find the existing Texas thread to post in.

I do think there's a legit concern about a multitude of "dead threads" given the number of smaller rooms. But I do believe the larger rooms for the three major cities at least will see a good amount of traffic and discussion given how much they have going on.

You could do dedicated threads for the bigger rooms and a "catch all" thread for the smaller rooms. Although not sure that's necessarily "fair" to the smaller guys, but may make sense given anticipated discussions based on room sizes?

If we decide to allow the TX threads, I'd be totally fine with each room having its own thread. And with there being one or more TX community threads.

Even if they are low volume threads, so what? We have plenty of those for other, legal rooms too.

Of course, it is worth noting that if we go this route, there is a non-trivial chance that it will be someone else's decision anyway, so maybe who cares what I think about it, haha.

It looks like Garick had some really good points in the CCP Moderation thread on this topic back in 2017, although he never really got a response, at least publicly, from TPTB.

A few weeks ago..I actually made a thread asking where the threads are about all the Texas rooms