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Unshuffled Cards at Casino Lead to Huge Winnings -- and a Flurry of Lawsuits
The Golden Nugget casino in Atlantic City, N.J., buys -- or at least used to buy -- playing cards for its gaming tables from a Kansas City card manufacturer. One of the key requirements of the cards purchased by the Golden Nugget is that they must be pre-shuffled, as the casino puts them in play immediately.
Earlier this month, however, it began to dawn on a group of gamblers who were playing the game of mini-baccarat at the Golden Nugget that the cards were being dealt in the same exact sequence deck after deck. These gamblers quickly jumped on that discovery by placing huge bets on each new hand. The Associated Press reports (via Deadspin) that "forty-one consecutive winning hands later, the 14 players had racked up more than $1.5 million in winnings -- surrounded by casino security convinced they had cheated but unable to prove how."
A flurry of lawsuits has now resulted, with the Golden Nugget predictably suing the card manufacturer for failing to shuffle the cards, but also the gamblers who took advantage of the error. The AP reports that the casino's lawsuit asserts that state gambling regulations requiring all casino games to offer fair odds to both sides, but that this was not the case due to the unshuffled cards. A lawyer for the gamblers argues that the gamblers did nothing wrong, and that "[t]here is absolutely no law in New Jersey that would permit the Golden Nugget to declare the game illegal because it failed to provide shuffled cards."
Nine of the 14 gamblers were reportedly able to cash out over $550,000 worth of chips, but the others still have nearly $1 million in chips that the Golden Nugget will not permit them to cash out.
Posted by Bruce Carton on August 21, 2012 at 04:22 PM | Permalink
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