There are few places as depressing as an illegal game room on a sunny Tuesday afternoon.
Mandy Oaklander
Game rooms, like this one on Bellaire Boulevard, are legal — as long as owners don't pay out in cash or valuable prizes.
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Inside the Capri Game Room on Telephone Road, the dozen or so patrons spread among the 122 video-slot machines aren't exhibiting any signs of happiness. The only people who look like they're actually enjoying themselves are the two security guards outside the front door. They're shooting the bull a few yards away from an open box of poker chips that patrons can pick up for a "match" from the house.
Don (not his real name) has chaperoned two Houston Press staffers to the Capri, one of many gambling halls known in Texas as game rooms, after a failed mission to visit the nearby Just Gold game room. A security guard at Just Gold, which shares a building with a lawn mower store behind a Dairy Queen, told us that they were allowing in only people with membership cards, and they weren't issuing any new ones. Fortunately, the Capri was wide open.
At a machine near the back corner of the former cabaret, Don calls out "Match," and after a little while, a woman in an apron strolls over and pulls out a wad of cash. The match system, where the house matches your bet dollar-for-dollar up to a certain amount, is an incentive some game rooms offer to get you in the door and keep you in front of their machines. At the Capri, players get one match per day.
Don hands her a poker chip with "$20" on it and puts a twenty in the machine; the woman adds another twenty and then produces a roll of masking tape from her apron. She tears off a little strip and covers the bill dispenser, a reminder that you're not supposed to cash out until the house says it's okay. The Capri's rules won't let Don cash out for anything under $80, even if he just wants to switch machines.
The lights are dim and the walls are painted a rather cold shade of blue, peppered with an occasional bunch of red cherries or black spades. Food and soda are free, but it's bring your own booze, and it doesn't look like anyone's drinking today. The few patrons, mostly middle-aged women, sit still and quiet, engaged in a staring contest with their Pot-O-Gold and Life of Luxury games. There's no music, so the only sound comes from the machines' electronic blurts. It's like you not only have to abandon all hope, but any joy, upon entering the Capri.
Or at least that's the way it is on a weekday afternoon. Don says he's driven by the place at night, when the parking lot is full and patrons pack the place for the big-ticket drawings: You can win a laptop, a 46-inch TV and lots of other cool stuff. Don likes playing every once in a while, but his wife, he says, has a problem. He says the marriage is crumbling after 20-odd years because she's blown more than $100,000 in game rooms. Her own family has practically disowned her, and nothing he says can get through to her. He doesn't blame the game rooms for her addiction, but he doesn't think law enforcement is doing enough to crack down on the owners.
What Don doesn't know is that, just three weeks earlier, Houston police arrested four people they believed to be the Capri's owners; the Harris County District Attorney's Office charged them with gambling-related crimes — misdemeanors — and three of them had already pleaded out. The three had already served their few days in jail and paid a few hundred each in fines, which is probably why it's still business as usual at the Capri. As long as gambling charges remain misdemeanors, there's not much the Harris County DA's office can do. Of the 97 gambling-related charges the DA's office filed in the last year, the harshest jail sentence so far was 25 days. Only one person was slapped with the maximum $4,000 fine; most were hit with two to four days and $100 to $600 in fines. (Some of the cases are still pending.)
The Capri is just one of dozens of illegal game rooms in Houston operating in broad daylight. They're like weeds; by the time police investigate and shutter one operation, another one springs up. As long as the machines themselves are legal and the penalties minimal, game rooms will thrive, and owners will hit the jackpot.
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In an attempt to clarify gambling law and codify the difference between places like the Capri and Chuck E. Cheese's, the Texas Legislature in 1993 and 1995 amended the state penal code and gave birth to what's called the "fuzzy animal" exception.
To wit: Video gaming devices like 8-liners (so called because there are eight combinations of matching symbols) are legal to own and operate as long as there's no cash payout and you can't win anything of real value. Since the legislature didn't have a problem with children winning cheap trinkets, it had to find a way to express this mathematically; therefore, the fuzzy animal clause allows noncash payouts of anything less than ten times the amount of a single bet — or five bucks — whichever is less.
