Sunnyvale, CA Gambling & Gaming: Card Room Licensing (2026)

040(1) defines "Cardroom" as any establishment where any card game is played for currency, check, credit or any other thing of value. 030, which governs permitted, conditionally permitted and prohibited uses in residential zoning districts, lists "Cardrooms" under its Commercial Uses category and marks the use "N" across every column of the table. 030(a)(4) defines what that letter means: "Prohibited (N). ), there is no path to a cardroom permit anywhere in the city; the zoning code forecloses the use before any state licensing step would even apply.

This mirrors the citywide land-use approach rather than a stand-alone gambling ordinance: Sunnyvale regulates cardrooms purely as a prohibited land use, the same mechanism it uses to bar other undesired commercial uses from every zoning classification rather than carving out specific districts where the use might otherwise be conditionally allowed.