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A poker-loving Tucson couple have opened a card room on the North Side, hoping to provide local players with a cheaper alternative to casinos and give exposure to a growing debate over poker's legality in Arizona beyond Indian reservations.

Donna and Johnny Ray Rogers, owners of a local tattoo parlor called Majestik Tattoo and the Blaze Threads clothing shop, opened Club Royale Friday.

The 3,500-square-foot facility at 2665 N. Campbell Ave. is open from 4 p.m. to 4 a.m. seven days a week and offers fixed-limit, pot-limit and no-limit cash poker games such as Texas hold 'em, Omaha and seven-card stud.

Club Royale is affiliated with the International Card and Game Players Association, founded in May by Tombstone resident Harold Lee.

Lee has operated card rooms in Bisbee and Sierra Vista since 2005 and has been the subject of at least two Arizona Department of Gaming investigations into illegal gambling.

Donna Rogers, who like her husband has been a regular at the poker rooms at Casino del Sol and Desert Diamond Casino for more than 10 years, said the couple opened their card room because they were tired of making long drives from their East Side home to play at the Indian casinos south and southwest of Tucson.

They also became fed up with the amount of money, known as the rake, that the casinos were taking from the pot during each hand.

Casinos take up to $6 from each pot, depending on the pot's size and the number of players at a table, with a portion going to a fund used for jackpots and other special promotions.

"I just hate how much they take," said Donna Rogers, 43.

Rather than rake from the pot, Donna Rogers said Club Royale charges a "button fee" of between $1 and $3 that the player seated on the button — a small disc that rotates around the table to indicate the order in which the cards are dealt — must pay before the hand is played.

The button fee helps pay for operation of the card room, Donna Rogers said, and a percentage goes toward franchise fees owed to the ICGPA.

"Somehow, you've got to pay the bills," said Donna Rogers, who added that she and Johnny Ray Rogers invested about $50,000 in Club Royale.

Along with eight poker tables, the card room features a lounge area with leather couches, four flat-screen televisions and a kitchen area with a refrigerator stocked with soft drinks and water.

"We didn't go on the cheap with this place," Donna Rogers said.

Club Royale is open only to ICGPA members, who pay a $20 annual fee. As of Tuesday, 40 people had signed up, including 27 the night the room opened.

The fee goes to help Lee, a former Maricopa County justice of the peace, organize the ICGPA, which he calls a union for professional poker players.

"Poker is a 300-year-old profession. (A union) should have been formed 200 years ago," said Lee, who has been at the forefront of a grass-roots effort to challenge what he considers Indian casinos' state-sanctioned monopoly on poker.

Lee wrote on his Web site, www.arizonacardroom.com, that in 1998 the Arizona Attorney General's Office issued a formal opinion that the state gaming office was allowing casinos to run poker rooms illegally because raking pots violates state gambling laws.

However, Lee said, casinos have been allowed to continue that practice.

"Casino poker rooms have been operating as felonious criminal enterprises every single day since they opened," Lee wrote in a letter dated June 7 to all parties involved in the Arizona Tribal-State Gaming Compact.

"The Gaming Department, in an obvious case of dereliction of their duty, has neglected to suspend their operation or to formally notify the victims of the continuing felony being perpetrated against them."

Officials with both the Attorney General's Office and the Department of Gaming would not comment for this story, and calls made by the Star to officials with poker rooms at Desert Diamond Casino and Casino del Sol were not returned.

Lee said ICGPA card rooms fall under the scope of social gambling, though state law defines "social gambling" as gambling that is not conducted as a business and where no person other than the players involved in a game can benefit from the gambling activity.

Although players are charged to play, Lee said the button fees don't constitute a benefit because the fee is assessed before the cards are dealt.

"We're not raking from the pots," Lee said. "There is nothing going on until that fee is paid."

The state Department of Gaming has investigated Lee in the past. Undercover agents went into Lee's card rooms in October 2006 and June 2007, and last January they recommended that the Attorney General's Office charge Lee and then-business partner Michael Palmer with promotion of gambling and benefiting from gambling.

No charges were filed, though. Lee said that was because Attorney General Terry Goddard doesn't want to debate the legality of poker in a courtroom.

"They know they can't win this case in court, because poker is not gambling," Lee said.

Club Royale is the second ICGPA-sanctioned card room to open.

The first opened in mid-June at Poker Nation, a poker accessory store in northwest Phoenix. Another is scheduled to open Sunday in Surprise, Lee said, and a license application has been submitted for a card room in Flagstaff.

The Phoenix card room has signed up more than 110 members, Poker Nation owner Christine Korza said. She has yet to have any complaints about illegal activity.

"I haven't heard a word," Korza said. "I've had cops come in here and told me they wanted to play."

Donna Rogers said police have driven past Club Royale without stopping, and she said an off-duty officer came in before the room opened "because he wanted to play some cards."

Concern over getting his players busted in some sort of a police raid was the first reaction of Fred Adler, president of the Monthly Poker Tour, a Tucson home-based tournament series that has operated for five years.

But after hearing the ICGPA's stance, he said he thinks aligning his outfit with Club Royale would benefit all poker players.

"I think it builds a stronger alliance for all of us to take back the game," Adler said.

"Right now, we're being taken advantage of (by the casinos). They can charge whatever they want. Here, it seems like we have some options."

Lee said the Sierra Vista card room, which he sold to get the ICGPA up and running, is not sanctioned yet because it doesn't meet the organization's standards for such things as security.

Club Royale has 12 video cameras — a camera is pointed down on each of the poker tables and on each of the three entrances to the room, and one camera is trained on the cage area where chips and money are stored.

Plans call for upgrades to the cage, as well as higher-quality chips and cards, and armed security may be hired on busier nights, Donna Rogers said.

One thing Club Royale will not have, though, is alcohol.

As a private club, members can legally bring in adult beverages, Donna Rogers said, but she doesn't want that because "alcohol brings problems."

Early reviews of Club Royale have been positive.

"Everyone that came in here said they're not going to go to the casinos anymore," said Tucsonan Michael Richard, 30, who added that he plays poker for a living. He sat in on Club Royale's first game on Friday. "They're only going to come here."

Donna Rogers said it took three months to find a location in Tucson that was both centrally located and didn't cause the property owner to shy away from the idea of housing a card room.

She said Club Royale's location, just north of the Continental Adult Shop, is a perfect fit.

"Poker and porn — it goes hand in hand," she said.