Texas’s Largest Poker Club Is Reopening After the Grand Jury Dropped All Charges

The Lodge Card Club in Round Rock, Texas is coming back. A Williamson County grand jury on April 28 refused to authorize the proposed charges against The Lodge and its owners, ending a nearly two-month legal battle that had shuttered what was the largest poker room in Texas. The decision means The Lodge gets its seized assets back — including over $1.3 million in cash — and clears the way for the club to reopen within weeks.

Doug Polk, one of the club’s co-owners and arguably the most prominent professional poker player in the country, announced the outcome on social media: “Breaking: all charges against myself, my partners in the Lodge have been officially rejected. The seized money and equipment will be returned and we will reopen as quickly as possible, hopefully within a few weeks.”

What Happened at The Lodge

On March 10, 2026, agents from the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission conducted an early morning raid on The Lodge Card Club, seizing over $1.3 million in cash and shutting the operation down. The search and seizure warrant cited suspicion of money laundering, organized crime, and illegal gambling. All employees were laid off. Player accounts were frozen. The club’s co-owners — Polk, Jake Abdalla, and Jason Levin — faced the prospect of felony charges.

In the weeks that followed, the TABC dropped the money laundering allegations but retained the club’s assets, claiming probable cause of illegal gambling. The state filed a civil asset forfeiture action in Williamson County’s 480th Judicial District Court, allowing it to hold the money even without criminal charges. The Lodge’s Austin location remained closed while its San Antonio club, operating under a separate entity, stayed open.

On April 28, the case went before a Williamson County grand jury — the body that would have needed to vote 9-12 in favor of indictment (“true bill”) to authorize criminal charges. The grand jury instead returned a “no bill,” meaning it found insufficient probable cause to indict. That decision ends the criminal track of the case. With no indictment and no criminal charges, The Lodge’s assets must be returned, and the path to reopening is clear.

What It Means for Texas Card Rooms

The Lodge’s legal battle has been the most visible test of the gray area that Texas poker rooms have operated in for years. Private poker clubs in Texas operate under a legal framework that allows them to charge membership fees and seat rental fees without technically taking a rake from the pot — the rake model that would clearly constitute illegal gambling under Texas law. Regulators and law enforcement have periodically challenged this model, arguing that the economic substance is the same as a traditional rake even if the legal structure differs.

The grand jury’s no bill is a significant signal that the legal framework Texas poker clubs have built their operations around is at least defensible enough that a grand jury, presented with the state’s best case, declined to authorize charges. That does not create legal precedent — a grand jury decision is not a court ruling — but it does represent a meaningful setback for the TABC’s enforcement theory and will make future raids on established, well-operated clubs considerably harder to justify politically.

For the broader Texas gambling landscape, the Lodge outcome arrives at a moment when casino legalization is an active political conversation in the state. Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick directed a Senate committee in March to study prediction markets as part of gambling-related policy review, and casino legalization advocates have pointed to the Lodge situation as evidence that Texans are gambling regardless of the legal status of physical casinos — they are just doing it in gray-area environments rather than regulated ones.

What Happens Next at The Lodge

Reopening will take time. The Lodge laid off approximately 200 employees during the closure, and rehiring and retraining that workforce — along with resolving logistics around the returned equipment and funds — is a meaningful operational challenge. Polk estimated a two-to-four-week timeline to reopen, with a possible extension depending on how quickly the operational pieces come together.

The Lodge has indicated plans for special events to welcome members back when it reopens. The World Poker Tour festival that was postponed following the March raid may be rescheduled as well, though no date has been announced. Player funds held in Lodge accounts will be made available upon reopening — Polk had personally guaranteed those funds during the closure, and the return of the seized assets makes fulfilling that guarantee straightforward.

For Texas poker players who had been following this situation, the outcome is the best possible one short of the raid never having happened. The damage to staff, members, and the club’s operational momentum has been real. But the legal result confirms that The Lodge’s model — which its owners and lawyers maintained throughout was lawful — withstood the state’s most aggressive attempt to characterize it as criminal gambling.