opening an underground card room
 

I posted this in Money Making & Business, but didn't get any answers.

I've searched around the site for about a half hour, but I couldn't really find this question, other then some kid from San Diego getting laughed at for wanting to start up a casino in his living room. The opurtunity to start up a card room has presented itself to me, and I want some advice for making a go of it. Has this question been asked before? Can anybody point me towards the right topic(s) to get some answers? If not, can anybody give me some tips and advice?

Appreciate any help

Re: opening an underground card room
 

I used to manage one of these. Opening an underground room isn't much differnt than openign a legal room. Make sur eyou have a plan to get people out of jail if it gets raided. Ours was a small operation. We just had a couple of tables and and a couople fo pit games.

Re: opening an underground card room
 

I am pretty sure this is a banned subject, check the sticky at the top. We don't post about anything illegal and most areas of the country private cardrooms are illegal.

Re: opening an underground card room
 

I remember seeing this thread a while back. There is a lot of good advice there. You should check it out.

Re: opening an underground card room
 

One thing that is different than a regular cardroom is of course that you need to keep the room low key.

In most places the policce don't want to bother busting up poker games, but many times operators don't give them any choice. Things like noise complaints/parking issues get complaints from people who live in the area and the police have no choice but to take action. Keep things away from residential areas, don't tolerate players getting out of control loud and noisy.

Do not pretend like your business is legal. This causes problems, first your customers don't act with the proper discretion if you give them some bogus excuse to believe that the game is legal. Second if you convince enough people that it is legal other people start running games openly and that gets police attention.

Watch the money lending. Every underground room I played in had to lend money or stake players at some point to keep games going. Don't let it get out of hand and be prepared to write off some losses.

Keep out other illegal activity which may attract police attention, don't tolerate open drug use or drug sales, don't serve alcohol.

Re: opening an underground card room
 

[ QUOTE ]
Watch the money lending. Every underground room I played in had to lend money or stake players at some point to keep games going. Don't let it get out of hand and be prepared to write off some losses.

[/ QUOTE ]

Money lending is the key to a good underground game. We often lent moeny to peopel we knew weren't going to pay us back, it was like paying a prop. What you have to be prepared to do is if someone owes money and quits coming you have to get them back in the game. Normally what we did if someone was one th books and quit comming around we would call them up and tell htem not to worry about that jsut to come back. If they still didn't come around we would call them again and offer an incentive to return ("don't worry about that $1k you owe us, come down and I'll put you in the game for $100 and see how you do"). The key to this is being on top of how much you are loaning out versus how much the game is dropping. If the game drops $150 an hour it is a good move to "loan" $100 an hour to keep it from breaking up.

Re: opening an underground card room
 

wouldn't it make more sense to just stake people that you knew instead? Or is the goal to try and get those people to come back and spend their own money to play? There's gotta be better ways to find players for your game.

Also, if there are other card rooms in town, how does it usually work? Do they get territorial, or what?

Re: opening an underground card room
 

[ QUOTE ]
wouldn't it make more sense to just stake people that you knew instead? Or is the goal to try and get those people to come back and spend their own money to play? There's gotta be better ways to find players for your game.

Also, if there are other card rooms in town, how does it usually work? Do they get territorial, or what?

[/ QUOTE ]

They will spend their own money. Genreally you want to keep the main attractions at your games. If you have players that will routinely lose $1k at a 3-6 game it isn't a big deal to loan them another $1k and only get paid back half of it or so. One of the real skills in maintaining underground games is managing the credit correctly because you don't want to gove away so much that you go broke, but you want to keep the fish in action as much as possible. There were other games around, we generally had a more competivie rake structure, better dealers, and made credit avialable to keep players coming to our place.

Re: opening an underground card room
 

Once you find the location, hire good people to dig up the ground so you dont have any problems later on.

-J

Re: opening an underground card room
 

so if there is no competition in the town i'm going to, or i don't know about it atleast, what do you think I could get away with rake wise? 1/20 unlimited? or $10 cap?