Gambling on Card Rooms : It’s a New Deal as Rincon Indians Cut the Deck 24 Hours a Day

Move over, bingo; here comes the newest promise of quick bucks for Indians: hi-ball, lo-ball, pan and pai gow poker.

A card room has quietly opened on the Rincon Indian Reservation here, bringing with it the promise that the reservation will make $25,000 a month in new revenue as gamblers ply their trade 24 hours a day, seven days a week in this bucolic countryside.

The allure of round-the-clock card playing and the wide variety of popular games, which makes the Rincon operation unique in San Diego County, is unsettling news to the county’s two dozen established card room operators--much the same way that high-stakes bingo games brought cries of anguish from churches and other charities several years ago who saw their bingo revenue plummet in the face of the upscale Indian competition.

“How are we going to be able to compete with them, for heaven’s sake?” asked Jerry Stapp, who runs a 12-table card room in Oceanside that is closed between 2 and 10 a.m. and is limited to only a few select card games and 15 tables. “There’s no question they’re going to hurt us.”

“It’s going to absolutely kill us,” said Stan Penn, owner of the Lucky Lady Card Club on El Cajon Boulevard in San Diego, which is limited by the city to seven tables and a small menu of card games. “Who’s going to want to play here if they can play on Sundays and all night long on a reservation? It’s like having a little store and, across the street, a big supermarket opens up.”

The card room here is the first of several that may open on San Diego County Indian reservations. A card room is expected to open within weeks on the small Jamul Indian Reservation in East County, while the Sycuan and Viejas Indians have considered opening card rooms on their East County reservations.

The Rincon Poker Casino opened Saturday with 30 brand-new tables at the ready and dealers standing by in black pants, white shirts and ties. While only a handful of players have so far heard of the card room by word of mouth and made their way to the reservation northeast of Escondido, a heavy advertising campaign is expected to begin within days to attract players from throughout Southern California.

Some players may even be bused in, on the same transportation network that brings bingo players to the reservation from such points as Compton, Orange County’s Leisure World and Riverside.

The card games began without the explicit approval of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, causing some hand-wringing in Sacramento over whether to admonish the Rincon Indians for their newest enterprise.

The issue is ambiguous because the BIA previously approved a contract between the Rincon Indians and Southwest Indian Consultants Inc. for bingo “and related activities.”

Max Mazzetti, chairman of the Rincon Tribal Council, said card gambling is a “related activity” to bingo. The tribal council signed a five-year contract with Southwest Indian Consultants last month, in which the Indians were guaranteed $25,000 a month in income from the card operation. Rincon has received $50,000 for two months’ proceeds in advance, he said.

The BIA’s policy on Indian reservation gambling is for its Sacramento area office to approve any bingo contracts between Indians and management companies. But card room contracts must be forwarded to Washington for approval by Ross Swimmer, assistant secretary of the Department of Interior who is the head of the BIA.

“It’s questionable whether our approved contract for bingo would also cover them for card games,” said Ron Jaeger, the BIA’s man in Sacramento who oversees bingo and other gambling operations by Indians in California. “We’re trying to get a clarification from our Washington office.

“I don’t want to say they’re illegal, but we do have some questions. And it may have just been an oversight on our part for not realizing when we reviewed their bingo contract, that they also were referencing a card room.”

Approved or not, Rincon is geared up for the card games.

Saul Wright, who brought a second generation of bingo games to Rincon last May after a previous bingo operation went broke under different management, said card room income will overtake the promise of bingo profits, which have not yet materialized.

Under his bingo contract with the Rincon Indians, Wright’s Southwest Indian Consultants pays the Indians $6,600 a month for the use of the bingo hall, and promises to give 70% of any net profits to the reservation as well. In the first four months of operation, however, there have been no net profits, Wright and Mazzetti said.

The card room contract between Wright and Rincon gives the Indians the choice of either $25,000 a month or a split of the profits, with the share favoring Rincon slightly. So far, the Indians have opted for the guaranteed $25,000, and the $50,000 already advanced to the tribe has been invested in a money-market account, said Dennis Smith, the tribe’s business administrator.

Mazzetti said that, while the tribal council approved the card room contract without holding a general tribal vote--a source of bitterness on the part of some Indians who oppose the card room--he said the council would defer to the entire tribe the decision on how to disburse the card room income. He said he would expect the tribe to vote for the profits to be disbursed per capita among the members of the Rincon band.

Wright said card rooms are easier to operate, and are a surer source of profit than bingo because they are less complicated and have fewer variables. Bingo operations involve the handling of playing sheets, different kinds of bingo game rules, different kinds of cash transactions depending on the games to be played, and the requirement that cash prizes be paid whether there was enough income that particular night to meet the prizes or not.

In contrast, management’s only responsibility in a card room is to provide a dealer, cards and a table. Players pay the house several dollars an hour for the right to sit at a table, and they gamble against one another. The dealer himself does not play, and the house does not contribute to the kitty. The hourly table rate and the amount of money a player needs to buy into a game depends on the game being played.

By their sovereign nature, Indians are not governed by county or city laws on card gambling. The county Board of Supervisors has banned card gambling in unincorporated areas; the only cities where card rooms operate are San Diego, Imperial Beach, Chula Vista, Carlsbad and Oceanside. In San Diego, the City Council voted in 1983 to phase out card rooms by prohibiting any new ones from opening and by not granting license renewals if a card room owner dies or if the card room seeks to move.

Mazzetti said that Rincon’s card games will be limited to those allowed by the state, although others say they would expect the Indians eventually to introduce games that are not allowed in California but are legal in Nevada, and to thereby force a court test on the degree to which the Indian games can be regulated by state law.

The Rincon bingo hall had a capacity of 1,400 people until the card room contract was approved; the hall has since been split, with seating for 814 in the bingo hall and room for 30 tables in the card room. Each table can handle eight players.

The bingo operation had been attracting an average of about 670 people nightly before the card room was constructed; since then, the nightly average has dropped to about 565 people. With the drop, the nightly guarantee of prizes has been reduced from about $24,000 to between $15,500 and $18,400.

To offset the loss of space within the bingo hall, the reservation is constructing a new tent alongside it to handle additional players even though the hall has not been filled to capacity, he said.

Although the bingo games have not yet generated any profit for the Indians over and above the lease payments for the building, Wright said the games nonetheless have contributed to the reservation economy. The monthly payroll totals about $50,000--most of it to Indians--in addition to the $33,000 in lease payments paid to the tribe to date.

A 15-table card room is expected to open on the tiny, six-acre Jamul Indian Reservation within weeks, said Chuck Guiliano, who is to manage the operation. He said his contract with the Jamul tribal council has been sent to the BIA for approval.

“Economically, they’re hurting pretty bad out there, and this would really boost their economy,” said Guiliano, who estimated that the card room would generate upwards of $200,000 a year for the Jamul Indians based on a $1,500 monthly guarantee and a 55% share of the profits.

The prospect of a card room in Jamul has so angered 2nd District Supervisor George Bailey that he has fired off a letter to Sen. Pete Wilson (R-Calif.) asking for federal legislation requiring that Indian land uses be compatible with those in neighboring communities.

“Their reservation is no bigger than the surrounding single-family lots in that area, and we’re certainly not going to let those single-family residences put in card rooms,” Bailey said. “These little reservations like Jamul are a lot different than the Navajo and Apache and Seminole nations. They’re just not in the same category and, hey, there’s got to be a limit to the amount of self-government they have.”

The attraction of Indian card rooms will be that “the players won’t have to fight the clock at closing time, which is important to card players, and they won’t have to drive to Los Angeles to play on Sundays” (where 24-hour, seven-day-a-week card rooms are legal in Gardena, Bell and other cities), said Guiliano, who currently manages a card club in Pacific Beach. “Hundreds of people are driving up to L.A. on weekends to play cards. We can keep them here in San Diego, and do some good for the Indians at the same time.”

Guiliano said it was his understanding that the Viejas Indians plan to open a mammoth, 65-table card room on their reservation. Viejas Tribal Chairman Anthony Pico refused to discuss the matter, saying tribal council policy prohibits public discussion of the tribe’s “economic development projects.”

The Sycuan Indian Reservation also has given thought to opening a card room but has, for now, dismissed it, said tribal chairwoman Anna Sandoval.

“We talk about a lot of things,” she said, “but nothing has happened yet. Heck, we might open a child care center.”