Houston’s holding a strong poker hand
I’m sitting at a table in a large, well-lit room in northwest Houston, looking into the eyes of a man with a footlong salt-and-pepper beard. People call him Brisket Man.
I bet, he calls. I show him three Jacks. He flips over his cards, revealing a straight. Smiling, he leans into the table to rake my chips into his already enormous stack.
“Why didn’t you bet the turn?” he asks. “You let me catch up.”
“I was scared,” I say.
“If you’re scared,” Brisket Man replies, “you’re playing the wrong game.”
We’re playing Texas Hold ’Em, which, despite its name, has historically been outlawed in this state. But it’s no secret that Houston, along with Texas, has in the past two years seen a poker boom, with an unprecedented increase in “social clubs,” also known as card houses or poker clubs.
Though casinos are illegal in Texas, these establishments bypass laws by operating within the legal gray area of a “social club.” A social club, technically speaking, is like a country club, which charges membership fees and hourly fees to rent a seat to players but doesn’t physically take money off the poker table. Thus, the establishment technically doesn’t profit from the gambling.
Local players and club owners say the city is in a golden age for the game. I was playing at a $170 buy-in tournament at Paramount Social Club, a relatively new entry into Houston’s rapidly growing poker industry and one of more than 10 full-fledged poker clubs that have opened in the past few years. The tournament sported hundreds of entrants, and featured vlogger and poker Youtube personality Jaman Burton.
As players announced raises, folds and all-ins, I considered the fact that there are tournaments like this every week in Houston now. I ask Burton, who has played in countless venues across the country, if he preferred Texas’ card houses (which charge hourly fees) over casinos, which charge a rake, meaning the house takes a percentage of every hand.
“Oh, the clubs, no doubt,” he says, referring to places such as Paramount, before looking at his cards then tossing them into the muck.
A few months prior, Andrew Neeme and Brad Owen — arguably the two bestknown poker YouTubers in the U.S. — stopped by Paramount as well.
That Paramount, far from Houston’s biggest card house, has attracted national names in poker suggests Houston has quickly become one of the top cities in which to play the game.
“The demand is huge here,” says Paramount’s coowner Ken Kaulen. “Poker is having a resurgent boom in general, all over the country.”
Prime Social is Houston’s most visible club, but new venues including Paramount are cropping up in every corner of Houston. SoHo Poker Club. Rounders. Mint.
Lions Poker Palace. Freerolls. Champions. The Hangar
Poker House. And so on. A new room called 52 Social just opened on Richmond.
This boom started in 2018, when Post Oak Social Club and Prime Social opened. Before 2018, Houston’s poker aficionados had two options: Drive to Lake Charles to play at a casino or find an underground game. That local poker clubs existed with professional dealers, waitresses and security was a game-changer. Post Oak and Prime surged in popularity. More clubs opened. Seeing this rise reminded me of any other craze — frozen yogurt, food trucks, yoga — that pops up in a city.
It wasn’t necessarily that more people started playing poker or that people were flocking to Houston. Prior to the boom, local players hosted home games, flew to Vegas or drove to the closest casino on the Texas-Louisiana border. Those seeking highstakes action had to be invited to a private game. So the clubs didn’t necessarily create new demand — like marijuana dispensaries, the poker room filled a pre-existing need and moved the business out of the underground.
Last spring, Post Oak and Prime were raided by authorities during what the poker community now calls May Day. Clubs, wary of being shut down, closed temporarily. But then the Harris County District Attorney’s Office dropped the case, and Prime reopened in September.
When I visited Prime late last fall, on a cold Sunday night, the card house was booming. The room was alive with the sounds of chips clacking together, of people betting and folding and raising.
“It’s highly lucrative,” said John Nguyen, an administrator at Prime. Nguyen said the all-hours club has more than 10,000 members and is seen as one of the pioneers of the Houston poker boom.
“We gave people hope,” Nguyen said. “They saw that it’s possible. It’s legal. We became the rubric.”
Though Prime charges the most to play, players I’ve spoken to say the fees are worth it for the amount of money that gets thrown around the table. In other words, the club’s reputation is that players there love to gamble for a lot of money, betting large amounts before even seeing a flop, the first three community cards in Texas Hold ’Em. I’ve lost or won hundreds of dollars in just a few hours there. At $16 an hour, the hourly fee adds up, though the best (and luckiest) players might be able to win hundreds, if not thousands, more.
Paramount is more budgetfriendly, with smaller-stacked opponents and a lower hourly rate of $10 — but still great action. Kaulen, the club’s co-owner, says that though Prime is filled with high rollers, Paramount can be a gateway for players who’ve mostly played in kitchens and dining rooms. Kaulen worked in the poker business for 15 years in the western suburbs of Chicago, then decided to open the club after seeing Houston’s boom.
“We have 15 to 20 new members in the door every week. Our membership is over a thousand,” he said, adding that there’s no denying the growth of the industry in Texas, “with Houston first, then Austin and San Antonio. It’s huge. It’s insane. It’s incredible what this social-club model does.”
Brisket Man wasn’t the only person to take my chips.
A few hours into the tournament, I go all-in before the flop with a relatively small stack of chips and pocket eights — a decent but far from safe hand — and get called by someone with pocket nines. He wins. I walk away chuckling, and go to the cash table to try to win back my money. I sit down and see dejected faces. Yep, this is where everyone who loses the tournament turns for a chance at redemption. I’m still wondering if, hours ago, checking the turn — the name for the fourth community card — against Brisket Man was a mistake. But even though I busted out from the tournament, I’m still having a great time engaging in a complex, strategic game of probability, psychology and social awareness.
From playing poker, I’ve learned to balance caution with risk in other parts of my life, as well as develop a good attitude in the face of failure. I’ve made friends — and sometimes even made money. The Paramount game was by far the highest-stakes tournament I’d ever played, and I could tell the players were sharp and experienced. I took the loss as a learning moment. And, for better or worse, I knew that whenever I had the itch later, no matter where I was in Houston, I could walk into a poker room and play.