California cardrooms and their employees are bracing for a major change after the state’s Office of Administrative Law (OAL) approved new rules targeting how the rooms work around the law to spread blackjack games.

The rules, approved earlier this month, will effectively ban blackjack in the more than 70 cardrooms in California.

This is something the 63 Indian Tribes, who operate 86 casinos around California, have been pushing for years and will give them a monopoly on the popular table game.

Essentially, California law does not allow cardrooms to operate games where the casino serves as a “bank.” The cardrooms work around this law by contracting with third-party companies that provide “player-dealers” to run their versions of blackjack.

The OAL, a wing of the state’s Department of Justice, decided that was illegal, and changed the rules for clarification, despite the decades that the games have been spread.

The new regulations will go into effect April 1, but the cardrooms have until May 31, to submit plans for compliance to the state.

The new regulations were approved despite the concerns expressed not only from the cardrooms and their employees who are facing layoffs, but from the cities and towns that are home to them. The state received 1,764 public comments about the changes, and people spoke at two public hearings that took place last May.

Tasha Cerda, the City of Gardena’s mayor, was one of those commentators. Her Southern California town is the home to The Hustler Casino and The Lady Luck Casino, and she wanted to make it clear how eliminating blackjack at the cardrooms will dent state and local economies.

Citing studies, she wrote that the cardrooms generate $2.48 billion annually, employs a total of 28,107, and generates more than $124 million in annual fees to state local and state government agencies. That last figure does not take account of the payroll taxes paid by these employees.

“The foregoing data demonstrates the enormity of the card club industry’s beneficial impact on the state’s economy,” Cerda wrote. “Thus, the City of Gardena requests the Bureau to consider the impact of its proposed regulation on card room revenues and jobs as well as revenues paid to state and local governments by pursuing alternative regulations that achieve the Bureau’s legitimate purpose and that remove the adverse impacts to the existing revenues and jobs created by California card rooms.

Representatives of the cardrooms claim that about 40% of revenue will be lost by banning blackjack. There is no way that this change will not cause people to lose their jobs.

Many of these cardrooms, like The Hustler, have a healthy poker scene. Poker rooms in a lot of these places cannot exist without the revenue generated by blackjack simply because poker doesn’t generate enough of a profit.

Players in California should be prepared for possible card and poker room closures as the fall-out from this decision begins to affect the state’s poker and gaming economy this year.