THE GAME NEVER BREAKS

Are home poker games legal in Los Angeles?

State law says yes. Los Angeles city law says no, and almost nobody knows it.

Start with the state. A home game is expressly carved out. Penal Code 337j(e)(2)(D) excludes from the definition of a controlled game: "Games played with cards in private homes or residences, in which no person makes money for operating the game, except as a player." No rake, no fee, in a residence, winning as a player does not count as making money for operating it. You need no state license. That is a real exclusion the Legislature wrote on purpose, and it is where every other poker site stops.

But that same statute hands the question to your city. Penal Code 337j(e)(1) defines a controlled game as one "that is not prohibited and made unlawful by statute or local ordinance." Los Angeles has an ordinance. On June 5, 1917, city voters passed Initiative Ordinance No. 36,674. It has never been repealed, it is still printed in the Municipal Code at Section 43.01 under the misleading title Gambling - Dice Shaking, and its penalty was last amended in 1985. Section 3 reads:

"It shall be unlawful for any person to play or bet at or against any game not mentioned in Section 330 or 330a of the Penal Code of the State of California, which is played, conducted, dealt or carried on with cards, dice, billiard balls, pool balls, cues, or other device, for money, checks, chips, credit or any other representative of value or for any merchandise or any other thing of value."

Poker is not mentioned in Section 330. That is what makes it legal in a card room, and it is the same fact that drops it inside this ordinance. Read plainly, the 1917 initiative reaches the players at a no-rake kitchen table game in the City of Los Angeles. It is a misdemeanor: ten to a thousand dollars, or up to six months.

Is it real law? In In re Hubbard (1964) 62 Cal.2d 119, the California Supreme Court upheld an almost identical Long Beach ordinance against players of a card game for money, holding that the state "has not occupied the entire field of gambling or gaming" and noting that draw poker "in some situations, is expressly left to local option." The Legislature has since written local prohibition into the statutes twice over. Business and Professions Code 19803: nothing in the Gambling Control Act "shall be construed to preclude any city, county, or city and county from prohibiting any gambling activity."

And this is not a reading we invented. Professor James M. Fischer of Southwestern Law School, writing in the UNLV Gaming Law Journal, puts it plainly: "Under section 330, the local government could permit or ban the playing of poker. However, when these matters were pursued as criminal cases, it was under a local ordinance, not section 330." His footnotes collect the cases, including one where a city ordinance was held "broader in their application than the State statutes" such that "there is no doubt that they apply to this game," and a 1949 prosecution brought under the police code of the City of San Francisco. Historically, people were charged for poker under city law, not state law.

Is it enforced? We looked and found nothing: no case, no City Attorney opinion, no news report of anyone charged under it for a social game. Practically it reads like a dead letter. Legally it is on the books and unrepealed. Both of those are true at the same time, and a site that tells you only one of them has not read the record. There is also a real argument, never yet tested for poker, that an ordinance reaching games of skill is too broad, since a court discharged a bridge player on that ground in In re Allen (1962) 59 Cal.2d 5.

This is not legal advice, and we are not lawyers. Ordinances differ in every city in the county, and yours may be nothing like the City of Los Angeles. If it matters to you, talk to a California gaming attorney.