Three co-owners of The Lodge Card Club in suburban Austin, Texas, have announced the acquisition of the largest poker club in San Antonio and will bring the 'Lodge' name to Texas's third-largest city.
Pro poker players Doug Polk, Brad Owen, and Andrew Neeme, along with other co-owners of the Lodge, will take over San Antonio's Rounders Card Club and will remake it into The Lodge Card Club San Antonio.
The club remains open for now while cosmetic renovations are set to begin, and its debut under the 'Lodge' name will take place on July 3.
Club set to expand, likely to become Texas's largest
Rumors of the Rounders club beaing purchased by Polk and his Lodge co-owners circulated on Reddit four days ago, and Polk confirmed the group's acquisition of the San Antonio club while appearing on Hustler Casino Live's Wednesday night streamed game. Polk has also disclosed that the Lodge ownership group, which now also includes San Antonio local "Big Daddy" Chaz Gill, also acquired an empty business space adjacent to the existing Rounders Card Club.
When the expansion into the adjacent space is complete, the new Lodge San Antonio location could have as many as 80 tables, well up from its current 30. It would then be not only San Antonio's largest poker club, but it would overtake the Lodge's Round Rock (Austin) room as the largest in all of Texas.
"San Antonio, the third largest city in the state, is a perfect place for our second location," said Polk. "We ultimately decided that, rather than trying to start from scratch, it made sense to acquire the largest room, then try to make improvements." The Lodge's Austin and San Antonio locations will be only a two-hour drive apart, but the group's owners do not believe the rooms will significantly cannibalize each other's existing traffic. The Lodge issued a statement regarding the Rounders purchase and has offered some welcoming promotions ready to roll out later in July.
Acquisition follows failed Dallas-area effort
Polk's referral to the Lodge's owners switching from attempting to open a new location to acquiring an existing room follows their sharp defeat in trying to open a new room in the north Dallas suburb of Farmers Branch, Texas. That effort was soundly rejected by the suburb's city-planning officials after local residents protested in large numbers against the club, citing the standard 'evils of gambling' litany.
The Dallas-Forth Worth metroplex has been the toughest of all of Texas's large metro centers to embrace social-poker clubs, which continue to operate throughout the state in an ill-defined legal area. The Lodge group's Farmers Branch bid was described by one insider as a "longshot" effort, even though the plans called for the use of a space in a business-and-industry zone near major transportation routes and was not near residential clusters, civic centers, or churches. Nonetheless, local citizens made clear that they largely disfavored a poker club in their vicinity.
