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Could poker games become a permanent fixture in Keizer?

It’s much too soon to tell. But if two men have their way, there could be a regular place to sit and play right here in town.

Ryan Mough and Jordan Bailey were at the Keizer City Council meeting Monday night to inquire about possibly opening a private club to allow gaming in town.

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MailTribune.com: Ashland poker club shut down

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ASHLAND — A state agency’s ruling that a poker club’s activities violated state law led to the shutdown of the gaming business.

The Oregon Department of Justice’s Charitable Gaming Unit said that some membership dues and fees charged by The Downtown Poker Club were outside the rules established for social gaming clubs. Following that ruling, the Ashland Elk’s Lodge, which owns the building on Will Dodge Way, declined to renew the poker club’s lease.
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As the final straggler takes his seat at one of three kidney shaped tables, Russell Bjerke, co-owner of the Downtown Poker Club, begins the Tuesday night tournament by uttering the legendary words, “Shuffle up and deal.”

The room goes silent and it suddenly seems that the quiet and the cards are the only things this group of people has in common — there is a representative from almost every gender, age group, class and ethnicity.

Actually, there is one other common thread.

Each player paid $40 for the chance to pit their skill and wit against twenty four competitors in order to win the top prize worth 50 percent of the entry fees which is around $1,000 on this particular night. Second and third place receive 30 percent and percent respectively.

While this scenario might seem to be something you could only find in a casino, the Downtown Poker Club is anything but. It is in fact a non-profit corporation and, because of Ashland’s gaming laws, is just as legal as your Friday night games around the kitchen table.

“The reason the games are legal is that this is a social game played in a private environment,” says Bjerke.  “We are not soliciting the game for business purposes; we are soliciting it for general fellowship and gamesmanship.  We’re not in the business of profiting or the business of marketing a casino style environment, we are a fellowship environment.”

The club offers tournaments almost every night of the week as well as nightly cash games.

The difference between tournaments and cash games is that in a tournament each player begins with the same amount of chips and the winner is the person with all of the chips at the end of the night; in other words, the chips have no cash equivalent.  In a cash game, a player may begin with as many chips as he or she chooses to pay for, each chip is worth a specific amount and a player can begin or end play at any time during the game.

In order to play at the club, each member must pay annual dues of twenty dollars.  In addition, players pay a twenty dollar table fee each night they play which is deducted from each pot in the cash games.  These monies are used for upkeep and improvements to the facility.

While this may resemble a ‘rake’ to anyone familiar with casinos, whenever this fee exceeds twenty dollars per person, it is automatically kicked into a player fund that is used as the members see fit.

The Downtown Poker Club is located underneath the Elks Lodge on Will Dodge Way and actually rents their space from the Lodge, the only other place in Ashland to host poker tournaments.

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