Well I did a thing... New Texas panhandle poker club opens tomorrow.

I remember the first time I heard there was legal poker in Texas, I knew that day I would end up there at some point. I've worked just about every position in the poker room off and on for the last 20 years. About 3 years ago I started slowly buying up things to open my own small club. In 2023 I pumped the brakes when legislation was introduced to try and close the "private place" loophole making it say "private residence". This legislation ended up failing.

I spent considerable time trying to find a small town with little competition that could support a small room. I didn't have the resources to open another Dallas, Austin area room with tons of competition. The town of Pampa kept popping up. An hour north of Amarillo, hotels full of oil, gas, and wind industry workers. New google data center and nuclear power plant coming in etc.


If you live in the middle of no where Texas and want to come have a good time come see me, I'll take care of your membership.

https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61578385173587

Congrats.

For those who don't know, FNDonkey went to a few DD/PFA meetups in the past. He was a very nice guy, and is very familiar with poker scene in Texas and Oklahoma.

I'll totally stop by if I happen to be anywhere close (though that might not happen for a long time!)

As he mentioned, Pampa is in northern TX, 55 miles northeast of Amarillo, and about 200 miles west of OKC.

Are you worried about security there? Robberies happen all the time at the Houston rooms, but I know that's a long way from Pampa, which is probably much less likely to get hit.

I'm in a pretty quiet town, nothing like Houston. Houstons literally the wild west for poker. Maybe I'm somewhat naive but I don't see us having much problems. I'm literally on the main street that runs through town out in the Open. Theres a few clubs in Amarillo in shopping centers that are in much worse areas, I know one of them has been robbed at least once.

As far as Houston goes I almost bought an existing room there. They kept dropping the price until I was interested, then I found out they were in a long term 30k a month lease. The building owner was the only one making any money on that deal. They started at 400k for the business, I told them I wasn't interested. At one point they dropped the price to 150k. I told them that with the cost of their rent I couldn't afford for them to give me the business. I did however buy the contents of a room in Waco which gave me a leg up once I finally settled on a location. I live about an hour north of Oklahoma City currently and can drive straight west and get here in 4 hours, all 2 lane highway.

Decided to give you a free plug.

GL

https://x.com/ToddWitteles/status/1963502837834694836

You're a good dude Todd. We opened last night. A little slow but to be expected. 1 cash table for about 8 hours and 2 tournament tables. We will see how Friday night goes. Nothing competes with high school football in small town Texas.

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Originally Posted by FNdonkey

You're a good dude Todd. We opened last night. A little slow but to be expected. 1 cash table for about 8 hours and 2 tournament tables. We will see how Friday night goes. Nothing competes with high school football in small town Texas.

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I can believe that.

In 2007 I went through a small town in New Hampshire in October, with my then-girlfriend. We saw some kind of big party/event going on, so we stopped and got out to join it. It was a huge meetup for the entire town to have a party/rally before the Friday night high school football game! We joined it and pretended we were part of it. I wonder if people looked at us and wondered, "Who the fuck are these people?"

They even had free food there.

It was fun, and people there interacted with us as if they knew us. We moved on before the actual game.