Jim -- Interesting "Then and Now" series you're doing. I like it.

I'm in Orange County California and would drive down to San Diego to pick up chips from the card rooms down there. This was quite a few years ago -- like 25 years ago+.

Anyway, the local city of San Diego card room regulations only allowed a maximum of 7 tables and also required a picture window in front, so that the local police could drive by and look in. (I'm not kidding.) The ordinance also made it nearly impossible to sell/transfer a license, except to another family member. Obviously, they (barely) tolerated them, but didn't ban them outright. It may have had something to do with San Diego being a military town, particularly Navy, and they didn't want "vices" of various sorts in the area.

As the years went on, they did liberalize some of the rules, but a lot of the action went to places outside the city limits, like the Oceanside Card Room, up in Oceanside. And eventually the Native American casinos also sprouted up on surrounding reservation land.

Their rules were a bit like Gardena, in Los Angeles county, that maxed out the number of tables at 35 per club. At least until competition in other cities (Bell, Bell Gardens, City of Commerce, and more) forced them to compete on a larger scale. (And Gardena did have 2 clubs next door to each other, with a driveway in between, so those two together were, effectively, a 70-table establishment.

Those were some of the quirks in the "old days" of player-dealt draw (high) and lo-ball poker a while back.