San Antonio’s Rounders Card Club will be hosting its first-ever tournament series in November. It’s one Texas poker players are not going to want to miss.
Tournament sports $1.5M in guarantees
The South Texas Poker Championship is Nov. 7-21. It takes place at a time when the legality of poker in Texas is being questioned by authorities.
The tournament features over $1.5 million in guarantees across 13 events, including a $1 million guaranteed live-streamed Main Event starting on Wednesday, Nov. 16.
Series opens with Monster Stack event
While the $1,400 Main Event headlines the series, plenty more remains on the schedule worth checking out. The series opens on Monday, Nov. 7, with a $240 buy-in Monster Stack event and a $40,000 guaranteed prize pool.
Leading into the weekend, Event No. 3 has a $300,000 guarantee for its nine-flight $400 event. Day 1 flights start on Nov. 9 and conclude with a 9 a.m. turbo flight on Nov.13. Day 2 then begins at 2:30 p.m.
There are also three mixed games events and five freerolls throughout the series.
Membership is required to compete
Unlike casinos around the country, Rounders and other venues throughout Texas function as private card rooms that require a membership to enter the venue and participate in games. These card rooms do not offer games of chance and operate within a legal gray area of state law.
Membership serves as an alternate way of collecting rake for card rooms. In a typical poker room, the house takes a certain dollar amount, usually based on the percentage of the pot or a hand making it to a given street. Instead, Texas rooms make money by allowing entry into the room, making no additional money from the games themselves.
Rounders offers memberships at daily ($5), monthly ($50) and yearly ($500) rates, all requiring a $20 initiation fee. In addition to poker, the club has a 24/7 restaurant, a barber shop and two full golf swing simulators.
Conditions are ripe for a successful series
Texas has over 50 card rooms, confirming that it is one of the largest poker markets in the country, even without legal casino gaming. Much of the action across the state consists of cash games, but several rooms have also run large-scale series and drawn huge turnouts for those series.
Houston’s Prime Social Club ran its first series in February 2021, with $1 million in guarantees and a $500K guaranteed Main Event. The Main Event got over 1,000 entries and more than doubled its guarantee with a seven-figure prize pool, paving the way for two more seven-figure Main Events later in the year.
The Lodge Poker Club, located outside Austin, has also been known for its large tournaments. Its first big series was in September 2021, culminating with a $1,100 Main Event that amassed a $1.77 million prize pool. In March 2022, that same event eclipsed $2 million.
Now, it’s time for Rounders Card Club to step into the spotlight with the South Texas Poker Championship. The table is set, and all signs point to a successful series.
