| UNFAIR PARK | Shomari Williams has made a living out of playing poker. CASHING OUT P layers old and young fill seats around the tables at Texas Card House on Harry Hines Boule- vard. Wall-mounted TVs play sports channels in the back- ground as sharks and fish chatter at the ta- ble. Poker chips ruffle and click as they move from players to pots, from winners to losers. The winners are usually in good spirits, the losers sometimes deflated. They’re all ready for their next hand. The operation lacks the glitz of a Vegas 4 4 casino. Texas Card House is BYOB only. You can drop off your bottle with one of the waitresses at a snack bar near the entrance and she’ll bring you drinks as you play. But there’s no buffet or endless din of slots, just 26 or so semicircular tables with four to six players each, focused on the cards. One of them is Shomari Williams, 38, a regular in Mike Brooks Two years ago, Dallas City Council OK’d poker rooms, but that was just a bluff. BY JACOB VAUGHN Dallas’ poker scene. He places bets, folding periodically, win- ning hands strategically, but he doesn’t con- sider it gambling. Like many players, he says poker is a game of skill and strategy, not chance. Play it right, and poker can be a lu- crative side hustle. Play it like a pro, and poker can become a living. Williams plays like a pro in poker rooms across Dallas-Fort Worth, but his days of placing bets at Texas Card House or any of the other legal poker rooms in the city may be numbered. Two years after the city granted Texas Card House a permit to oper- ate, the City Council is trying to shut down it and other above-ground poker rooms by re- voking their certificates of occupancy. The city now says the rooms are illegal. Local players say if illegal activity is going on, it’s happening in the underground scene, where players will flock if legal establish- ments are closed. The smart money says the question is heading to a showdown in court if the city rejects the card rooms’ efforts to appeal the revocation of their certificates of occupancy. Whatever the outcome, players like Wil- liams say the games will go on, much as they did before the city issued its first permit for a card room. Williams should know. He’s been playing poker for about 15 years, professionally for about three. “I’ve been involved in the Dallas and Fort Worth scene for quite a bit,” said the graduate of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where he played poker as a stu- dent in the 2000s. “When I started getting into it, I met a player who was a professional, and he had told me if I just played poker and didn’t play any other games — slots, blackjack, craps — that I could have a side income eventually,” Williams recalled. “And as long as I stayed away from everything else, I could play a skill-based game and really not have to worry about a whole lot. From that point on, I never played anything outside of poker.” When he moved to North Texas, Wil- liams started playing at Winstar casino in Oklahoma and researching how he could become better. His regular job was as a “fleet buyer” for the city of Fort Worth, responsi- ble for purchasing police cars, firetrucks and other vehicles. “After work, I would always go and play,” he said. “I’d play in big tournaments, some of them being $1,000, $500 entries, and I started collecting some pretty decent sized hits.” In 2019, he made $56,000 just playing poker tournaments. “It really shocked me because I was working full time at a job making $40,000 a year, and here I was on the weekend and after like two or three months I was up $56,000 in poker tourna- ments,” Williams said. >> p6 MONTH XX–MONTH XX, 2014 MARCH 17–23, 2022 DALLAS OBSERVER DALLAS OBSERVER | CLASSIFIED | MUSIC | DISH | MOVIES | CULTURE | NIGHT+DAY | FEATURE | SCHUTZE | UNFAIR PARK | CONTENTS | CLASSIFIED | MUSIC | DISH | CULTURE | UNFAIR PARK | CONTENTS dallasobserver.comdallasobserver.com
