8 ms·

Non shuffled card deck results in 1.5 million casino loss

72 points by larrys 14y ago

ColinWright 14y ago
I don't understand: Since the cards were never shuffled at the plant - the casino doesn't shuffle them again - the same patterns kept repeating in game 802 The casino doesn't shuffle the cards? That doesn't sound right. I've indulged in a little card counting and shuffle tracking, and I've never been at a table where the cards don't get shuffled. Can someone explain?
- danso 14y ago
  Perhaps the cards aren't shuffled as they are first fed into the table through an automated process...but are subsequently shuffled after having been used
- astrodust 14y ago
  I thought a shuffler was a standard feature on most card tables. Still, even barring that and using the decks once and once only, as some games do, it seems odd that the dealer didn't notice, and the pit boss was completely oblivious to this winning streak. They're supposed to be paying attention to things like this.
  - kisielk 14y ago
    Yeah, I'm pretty surprised that the people working at the casino wouldn't notice the same pattern emerging and either stop the game or start manually shuffling the cards.
- brudgers 14y ago
  Pure speculation: shuffling the cards takes time. Time which could be more profitably used to separate gamblers from their money. This is consistent with the way in which MBA's look at retail transactions and logistics.
  - joezydeco 14y ago
    Card shuffling does take time, and a lot of houses use automatic shuffling units to speed that process up. But those units aren't perfect either and will jam and break down. You also have the problem of players possibly marking cards (bends, folds, tiny nicks, spots) for later use. In the casino's eye, it's a lot cheaper to use new preshuffled decks in every shoe and drop the expensive ShuffleMaster machine.
  - hermannj314 14y ago
    Does that go against their case or is it irrelevant? If you make a cost-benefit decision, in this case to "not shuffle cards", then is your position weakened when you cry about a reasonably forseeable outcome tied to your very decision? "They took advantage of us when our own decision backfired!" I mean, at the start of a shoe, draw the first three cards, if they are consecutive, then shuffle the decks or or burn the entire shoe. You end up shuffling or destroying an insignificant number of shoes by pure chance, but you don't lose 1.5 million dollars when you find out too late the guy pressing the shuffle button at the factory for $7/hr decided to take an extended lunch.
    - joezydeco 14y ago
      The cards are pre-shuffled at the manufacturer. It's a smart move since the casinos don't have to spend time dealing with shuffling cards manually (and losing time) or automatically (and investing in expensive machines). The whole situation came up because the playing card manufacturer forgot to shuffle the cards before packaging. So all the cards came in the same pattern out of the box, which I'm assuming is determined by how they were cut from the sheet or whatever is done. There's no mention that they came out in suit/count order (like the packs most people normally buy in stores). The mini-baccarat game seems to take 6-8 packs and combine them into a large shoe. The pattern would not have been obvious after the first 52 cards but when the next 52 showed up in the same order, that's when the betting started going nuts.
      - fusiongyro 14y ago
        It's a smart move, but it opens them up to black swan events like this, that shuffling the cards themselves wouldn't. Right now the cost of a deck is negligible, but if the card manufacturers start being on the hook to the tune of millions of dollars for a handful of decks not being shuffled, pre-shuffled decks are going to get more expensive, as additional QC and insurance that the card manufacturers have to buy get passed on. Eventually it'll turn back into a real cost/benefit analysis: do we make enough on casino customers losses in this game to justify $10/pack or $50/pack decks?
- lrm242 14y ago
  Each game likely used a fresh, unopened deck of cards. If each deck is non-shuffled then each time a fresh deck is opened you will see the same cards in the same order. Assuming the casino arranged for their vendor to pre-shuffle the decks it seems reasonable, if not a bit lazy, to not do a shuffle at the table. If I were the casino I'd be suing the vendor, not the gamblers.
  - RandallBrown 14y ago
    They're suing both the card manufacturer and the gamblers.
  - pc86 14y ago
    Could this have something to do with the superstitious aspect of baccarat? The fact that the deck has been shuffled before it got to the casino but not even the casino itself has any way of knowing the order? The article mentioned superstition, but I've never played baccarat myself.
larrys 14y ago
Summary if tl;dr "Someone in Kansas City allegedly had forgotten to turn on the automatic shuffler before the cards got shipped out. Since the cards were never shuffled at the plant - the casino doesn't shuffle them again - the same patterns kept repeating in game 802. The players noticed, kept on betting and upped their wagers."
stephengillie 14y ago
How is the casino able to sue the gamblers? I would think they would have to sue the card manufacturers for delivering a product that wasn't prepared as agreed, which caused material losses. Who at the casino thought that suing their customers was a good idea?
- wpietri 14y ago
  It's important to note that in America, you can sue anybody for pretty much anything. The question of whether you can win is entirely irrelevant if you have the resources necessary to batter your targets into submission. My first business lawyer gave me that advice early on and it was sobering to think through the implications of that.
  - malandrew 14y ago
    This is one of the main reasons I think that all money spent on lawyers should go into an account that both sides get to draw upon equally to pay legal expenses. You simply cannot have a system capable of meting out justice if money can skew "justice" in your favor.
    - jasonwatkinspdx 14y ago
      That's an interesting idea. I'll have to think more about what negatives might be involved (simple example: someone badgers you with an expensive to refute claim but uses a cheap lawyer to file the claim, though I guess this is just as possible in the status quo). The best solution is if free access representation was high quality. A simple way of doing that might be to give parties the option of their choice of n randomly selected representatives drawn from any practicing lawyer, funded via a fraction of punitive damages redirected to a fund locked to that purpose.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
- illuminate 14y ago
  I guess they figure that they don't need to worry about the low-stakes gamblers. If they don't come back, the casino's out much less than they can sue the guests for.
iskander 14y ago
>The gamblers unlawfully took advantage of the Golden Nugget when they caught on to the pattern and increased their bets from as little as $10 to $5,000 I don't understand why a casino feels like it's legally entitled to a profit even when it fails to perform the simplest possible action to maintain an edge: shuffle the cards!
- DanielStraight 14y ago
  A comparable situation might be a misprinted price tag at a car dealership, which they are not required to honor as long as it's corrected when discovered.
  - larrys 14y ago
    The price tag is not a contract and until a contract is executed nothing legally exists. It takes an offer and acceptance. If the price tag says $15,000 for the car, and you enter into a contract which the dealer signs then the dealer has to sell you the car. The same as if you make a mistake in your calculations and sign to purchase the car. Now in the case where perhaps a dealer employee had changed the price and it could be proven that you knew that there would be some legal concept that allows the dealership to get out of the contract.
  - iskander 14y ago
    1) I'm sad to find your totally reasonable comment downvoted. Decline in HN standards, etc... 2) An alternative scenario: what if a car dealership simply mis-priced a car? They're holding a rare race car but the owner asked his know-nothing nephew to appraise it, who was busy texting his girlfriend and absent-mindedly wrote down $500. If you buy this car and the owner realizes his mistake the next day, can he ask for the car back?
    - DanielStraight 14y ago
      1. I'm just confused, but that's OK. 2. As far as I know, the situation does not apply for mis-pricing. Some information here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mistake_%28contract_law%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mistake_%28contract_law%29 It seems the situation is basically if a mistake is made that still seems reasonable (pricing a car for $19000 instead of $20000), it must be honored. If the mistake is completely unreasonable (pricing a car for $20 instead of $20000) it does not have to be honored. But a mistake in business knowledge (pricing a $20000 car for $2000 because you think that's all it's worth) still has to be honored.
incision 14y ago
I'm reminded of those stories that seem to come up every so often about the casinos denying slots players jackpots [1][2][3]. On a semi-related note... I've been wondering with more and more Casino games going digital, is there anything requiring the systems to use realistic odds? The last time I was in a Casino I had great success (15x return in 90 minutes) essentially betting against the field of players on a large video roulette machine. I was curious and simply bet opposite whenever the board became particularly "unbalanced". The idea being that the machine had some kind of of average return to maintain and that it would avoid big bets (relative to what it was earning) in light of that. 1: http://gizmodo.com/5867314/57-million-winner-loses-prize-after-casino-argues-slot-machine-software-glitch http://gizmodo.com/5867314/57-million-winner-loses-prize-aft... 2: http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_14795166 http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_14795166 3: http://abcnews.go.com/TheLaw/story?id=3772215&page=1#.UEYofYrnClg http://abcnews.go.com/TheLaw/story?id=3772215&page=1#.UE...
- joezydeco 14y ago
  Yes, there is a very formal and rigid system for validating the odds on all gaming machines. In almost every regulated gaming jurisdiction (let's leave US Indian Casinos out of this for the time being), a third-party lab is hired to evaluate the code, look for backdoors, and verify the odds that are specified with the PAR (Probability and Accounting Report) of the machine being tested. In the case of your roulette machine, that code was verified to make sure the random number generator created a valid distribution of numbers. If you had won a large enough jackpot (as those players did in your links), the gaming board technician would have been called in to verify the game's program code against a known verified version of the system as signed off by the third-party lab. When the checksums don't match...no jackpot. That's why every slot says MALFUNCTION VOIDS ALL PAYS. That being said, there can still be bugs in the program code. When a machine is listed as paying a max of $2500 and a player wins $1,597,244.10, there's definitely a bug. Casinos, since they own the place, will err on their side and send you home without the jackpot. That's just the way it is. The manufacturer will get an earful and probably lose their positions on the casino floor until the bug is fixed. Oh and look at your second link. The jackpot was "42 million". Wanna bet it was $42,949,672.95? (Hint: What is 4294967295 in hexadecimal?)
pkulak 14y ago
The Casino made a mistake and wants its money back. Seems totally reasonable to me. I'm sure if a gambler makes a mistake playing a game, they get any of their losses back from the Casino. Such a gentlemanly society we live in!
- sukuriant 14y ago
  </sarcasm> I never really did mean to bet my car, can I have it back, please! "Why sure, of course you can. Our mistake :D!"
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
  - mistercow 14y ago
    I believe you may have missed some sarcasm.
- rhizome 14y ago
  The Garry Marshall scene in Albert Brooks's "Lost In America" comes to mind.
dsr_ 14y ago
Let's look at it from a business perspective: When a casino has an unexpectedly large payout, and they can't prove that it was the result of cheating by the customer or an employee, there is only one reasonable thing to do: pay up, and advertise the win loudly and widely. If you're in the business of suing your customers, there are several results: 1. You stop having so many customers. 2. Even if successful in court, you don't make back anywhere near what you lost. (Customers don't have much money, in general. You already know the ones who do -- you call them whales.) 3. The regulatory commission looks at you more carefully.
- ChuckMcM 14y ago
  Heh, having spent much of my youth in Las Vegas I can tell you that if a casino has an unexpectedly large payout then someone is going to have a really really bad day. And that someone will do anything they can to deflect the repercussions. See the comment about the same issue at the Taj casino, 9 people got fired. The only way to avoid getting fired is to both prove that the people who won cheated and that their cheat was something you could not have protected against.
mherdeg 14y ago
When the AP ran this story a couple of weeks ago (http://www.seattlepi.com/news/article/Unshuffled-cards-a-costly-headache-for-NJ-casinos-3801123.php http://www.seattlepi.com/news/article/Unshuffled-cards-a-cos...), I thought it was hilarious because casinos do extra work at the baccarat and mini-baccarat tables to encourage exactly this kind superstitious magical betting. And then they have the gall to act all surprised when it works! In Vegas, they'll often distribute little pads of paper and pencils you can use to take notes on past hands, and mini-baccarat tables often have electronic signs showing the player/banker/tie outcome of several past hands. (This is funny because the game is memory-less.) The folks who manage the games must have discovered that when they encouraged players to bet superstitiously, players stayed for longer and bet more. How deliciously ironic for a casino to encourage people to try to find patterns and bet on them, and then lose and sue after they finding a pattern that worked!
- danielweber 14y ago
  There is a joke that casinos have a saying for people who come up with systems to beat the house: "Welcome."
sageikosa 14y ago
The gamblers took advantage of the information they had available to them. And this reminds me of someone else who figured out a pattern and cashed in: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Larson http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Larson
- chimeracoder 14y ago
  That's quite the story - too bad it ends on such a downer...!
guard-of-terra 14y ago
I don't see how abducting people the next day isn't a criminal offence. But I also don't see anyone caring. Weird.
- YokoZar 14y ago
  If not a crime the DA will pursue it could very well be at least a tort, which is why the casino was offering them their money in exchange for dropping further claims (such as kidnapping).
  - pbhjpbhj 14y ago
    Aren't the players entitle to the money and to restitution for their kidnap?
sequoia 14y ago
"They saw a pattern and didn't know how long it would last," said Feldman, whose clients are Asian and speak little or no English. Ha- they must speak "Asian" :p
drcube 14y ago
I've never bought a deck of cards that was pre-shuffled. I thought casinos had machines that did that for them.
- TylerE 14y ago
  Baccarat is a special case. The cards are only used once, and then disposed of. They don't use shuffle machines because cards never go back into the shoe.
lambada 14y ago
The most serious claim in this article, that hasn't been mentioned in the comments so far is that although a Judge ordered the Casino to cash the remaining chips, and the Casino has claimed it won't appeal, they will only cash the chips if the gamblers drop ALL other charges. Is that even legal? To impose a condition on an order from a judge? This seems to me far more dodgy than the allegations of avoiding betting limits.
- YokoZar 14y ago
  I've heard from a Vegas lawyer that basically all of the serious law firms there do some amount of business with each of the casino chains. This is intentional on the casinos part, and gives the law firms a very simple conflict of interest claim when someone wants to sue a casino. Combine this with the fact that Nevada doesn't allow out of state lawyers (and passing the Nevada Bar requires a considerable investment in time), and as a consequence the only counsel you can get to sue a casino amounts to the sort of low-budget lawyer you might see advertising on a billboard. If I had enough money and brass, I'd hire a bunch of promising attorneys from out of state, relocate them to vegas, get them certified in Nevada, and then create a firm specializing in suing casinos. I'm sure there's a fortune to be made (if you don't get bought/killed by organized crime)
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
- d0de 14y ago
  They aren't exactly imposing a condition on an order from a judge. They are promising not to appeal if their conditions are met. Strictly speaking, it would only be imposing a condition on an order from a judge if they had exhausted all of their appeals and just said "Drop all the other charges or we won't pay you." In that scenario, it would clearly be illegal.
jeffem 14y ago
The most surprising thing to me is that the casino let the betting go on for over 2.5 hours.
d0de 14y ago
I think the real question here is: if the non-shuffled deck had somehow worked in the Casino's favor and caused an otherwise-virtually-impossible losing streak for the customers, would the casino now be scurrying to reimburse them all for their losses?
stevewillows 14y ago
Is there a reason why casinos are not shuffling decks in-house before sending them to the tables?
rsanchez1 14y ago
Seems to me that when you're dealing in money, you don't want to assume that the card factory shuffled the deck before shipping. I know that I would want to secure my investment, so why not shuffle it again before playing?

72 points by larrys 14y ago

I don't understand: Since the cards were never shuffled at the plant - the casino doesn't shuffle them again - the same patterns kept repeating in game 802 The casino doesn't shuffle the cards? That doesn't sound right. I've indulged in a little card counting and shuffle tracking, and I've never been at a table where the cards don't get shuffled. Can someone explain?

danso 14y ago
Perhaps the cards aren't shuffled as they are first fed into the table through an automated process...but are subsequently shuffled after having been used
astrodust 14y ago
I thought a shuffler was a standard feature on most card tables. Still, even barring that and using the decks once and once only, as some games do, it seems odd that the dealer didn't notice, and the pit boss was completely oblivious to this winning streak. They're supposed to be paying attention to things like this.
- kisielk 14y ago
  Yeah, I'm pretty surprised that the people working at the casino wouldn't notice the same pattern emerging and either stop the game or start manually shuffling the cards.
brudgers 14y ago
Pure speculation: shuffling the cards takes time. Time which could be more profitably used to separate gamblers from their money. This is consistent with the way in which MBA's look at retail transactions and logistics.
- joezydeco 14y ago
  Card shuffling does take time, and a lot of houses use automatic shuffling units to speed that process up. But those units aren't perfect either and will jam and break down. You also have the problem of players possibly marking cards (bends, folds, tiny nicks, spots) for later use. In the casino's eye, it's a lot cheaper to use new preshuffled decks in every shoe and drop the expensive ShuffleMaster machine.
- hermannj314 14y ago
  Does that go against their case or is it irrelevant? If you make a cost-benefit decision, in this case to "not shuffle cards", then is your position weakened when you cry about a reasonably forseeable outcome tied to your very decision? "They took advantage of us when our own decision backfired!" I mean, at the start of a shoe, draw the first three cards, if they are consecutive, then shuffle the decks or or burn the entire shoe. You end up shuffling or destroying an insignificant number of shoes by pure chance, but you don't lose 1.5 million dollars when you find out too late the guy pressing the shuffle button at the factory for $7/hr decided to take an extended lunch.
  - joezydeco 14y ago
    The cards are pre-shuffled at the manufacturer. It's a smart move since the casinos don't have to spend time dealing with shuffling cards manually (and losing time) or automatically (and investing in expensive machines). The whole situation came up because the playing card manufacturer forgot to shuffle the cards before packaging. So all the cards came in the same pattern out of the box, which I'm assuming is determined by how they were cut from the sheet or whatever is done. There's no mention that they came out in suit/count order (like the packs most people normally buy in stores). The mini-baccarat game seems to take 6-8 packs and combine them into a large shoe. The pattern would not have been obvious after the first 52 cards but when the next 52 showed up in the same order, that's when the betting started going nuts.
    - fusiongyro 14y ago
      It's a smart move, but it opens them up to black swan events like this, that shuffling the cards themselves wouldn't. Right now the cost of a deck is negligible, but if the card manufacturers start being on the hook to the tune of millions of dollars for a handful of decks not being shuffled, pre-shuffled decks are going to get more expensive, as additional QC and insurance that the card manufacturers have to buy get passed on. Eventually it'll turn back into a real cost/benefit analysis: do we make enough on casino customers losses in this game to justify $10/pack or $50/pack decks?
lrm242 14y ago
Each game likely used a fresh, unopened deck of cards. If each deck is non-shuffled then each time a fresh deck is opened you will see the same cards in the same order. Assuming the casino arranged for their vendor to pre-shuffle the decks it seems reasonable, if not a bit lazy, to not do a shuffle at the table. If I were the casino I'd be suing the vendor, not the gamblers.
- RandallBrown 14y ago
  They're suing both the card manufacturer and the gamblers.
- pc86 14y ago
  Could this have something to do with the superstitious aspect of baccarat? The fact that the deck has been shuffled before it got to the casino but not even the casino itself has any way of knowing the order? The article mentioned superstition, but I've never played baccarat myself.

larrys 14y ago

Summary if tl;dr "Someone in Kansas City allegedly had forgotten to turn on the automatic shuffler before the cards got shipped out. Since the cards were never shuffled at the plant - the casino doesn't shuffle them again - the same patterns kept repeating in game 802. The players noticed, kept on betting and upped their wagers."

stephengillie 14y ago

How is the casino able to sue the gamblers? I would think they would have to sue the card manufacturers for delivering a product that wasn't prepared as agreed, which caused material losses. Who at the casino thought that suing their customers was a good idea?

wpietri 14y ago
It's important to note that in America, you can sue anybody for pretty much anything. The question of whether you can win is entirely irrelevant if you have the resources necessary to batter your targets into submission. My first business lawyer gave me that advice early on and it was sobering to think through the implications of that.
- malandrew 14y ago
  This is one of the main reasons I think that all money spent on lawyers should go into an account that both sides get to draw upon equally to pay legal expenses. You simply cannot have a system capable of meting out justice if money can skew "justice" in your favor.
  - jasonwatkinspdx 14y ago
    That's an interesting idea. I'll have to think more about what negatives might be involved (simple example: someone badgers you with an expensive to refute claim but uses a cheap lawyer to file the claim, though I guess this is just as possible in the status quo). The best solution is if free access representation was high quality. A simple way of doing that might be to give parties the option of their choice of n randomly selected representatives drawn from any practicing lawyer, funded via a fraction of punitive damages redirected to a fund locked to that purpose.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
illuminate 14y ago
I guess they figure that they don't need to worry about the low-stakes gamblers. If they don't come back, the casino's out much less than they can sue the guests for.

iskander 14y ago

>The gamblers unlawfully took advantage of the Golden Nugget when they caught on to the pattern and increased their bets from as little as $10 to $5,000 I don't understand why a casino feels like it's legally entitled to a profit even when it fails to perform the simplest possible action to maintain an edge: shuffle the cards!

DanielStraight 14y ago
A comparable situation might be a misprinted price tag at a car dealership, which they are not required to honor as long as it's corrected when discovered.
- larrys 14y ago
  The price tag is not a contract and until a contract is executed nothing legally exists. It takes an offer and acceptance. If the price tag says $15,000 for the car, and you enter into a contract which the dealer signs then the dealer has to sell you the car. The same as if you make a mistake in your calculations and sign to purchase the car. Now in the case where perhaps a dealer employee had changed the price and it could be proven that you knew that there would be some legal concept that allows the dealership to get out of the contract.
- iskander 14y ago
  1) I'm sad to find your totally reasonable comment downvoted. Decline in HN standards, etc... 2) An alternative scenario: what if a car dealership simply mis-priced a car? They're holding a rare race car but the owner asked his know-nothing nephew to appraise it, who was busy texting his girlfriend and absent-mindedly wrote down $500. If you buy this car and the owner realizes his mistake the next day, can he ask for the car back?
  - DanielStraight 14y ago
    1. I'm just confused, but that's OK. 2. As far as I know, the situation does not apply for mis-pricing. Some information here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mistake_%28contract_law%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mistake_%28contract_law%29 It seems the situation is basically if a mistake is made that still seems reasonable (pricing a car for $19000 instead of $20000), it must be honored. If the mistake is completely unreasonable (pricing a car for $20 instead of $20000) it does not have to be honored. But a mistake in business knowledge (pricing a $20000 car for $2000 because you think that's all it's worth) still has to be honored.

incision 14y ago

I'm reminded of those stories that seem to come up every so often about the casinos denying slots players jackpots [1][2][3]. On a semi-related note... I've been wondering with more and more Casino games going digital, is there anything requiring the systems to use realistic odds? The last time I was in a Casino I had great success (15x return in 90 minutes) essentially betting against the field of players on a large video roulette machine. I was curious and simply bet opposite whenever the board became particularly "unbalanced". The idea being that the machine had some kind of of average return to maintain and that it would avoid big bets (relative to what it was earning) in light of that. 1: http://gizmodo.com/5867314/57-million-winner-loses-prize-after-casino-argues-slot-machine-software-glitch http://gizmodo.com/5867314/57-million-winner-loses-prize-aft... 2: http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_14795166 http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_14795166 3: http://abcnews.go.com/TheLaw/story?id=3772215&page=1#.UEYofYrnClg http://abcnews.go.com/TheLaw/story?id=3772215&page=1#.UE...

joezydeco 14y ago
Yes, there is a very formal and rigid system for validating the odds on all gaming machines. In almost every regulated gaming jurisdiction (let's leave US Indian Casinos out of this for the time being), a third-party lab is hired to evaluate the code, look for backdoors, and verify the odds that are specified with the PAR (Probability and Accounting Report) of the machine being tested. In the case of your roulette machine, that code was verified to make sure the random number generator created a valid distribution of numbers. If you had won a large enough jackpot (as those players did in your links), the gaming board technician would have been called in to verify the game's program code against a known verified version of the system as signed off by the third-party lab. When the checksums don't match...no jackpot. That's why every slot says MALFUNCTION VOIDS ALL PAYS. That being said, there can still be bugs in the program code. When a machine is listed as paying a max of $2500 and a player wins $1,597,244.10, there's definitely a bug. Casinos, since they own the place, will err on their side and send you home without the jackpot. That's just the way it is. The manufacturer will get an earful and probably lose their positions on the casino floor until the bug is fixed. Oh and look at your second link. The jackpot was "42 million". Wanna bet it was $42,949,672.95? (Hint: What is 4294967295 in hexadecimal?)

pkulak 14y ago

The Casino made a mistake and wants its money back. Seems totally reasonable to me. I'm sure if a gambler makes a mistake playing a game, they get any of their losses back from the Casino. Such a gentlemanly society we live in!

sukuriant 14y ago
</sarcasm> I never really did mean to bet my car, can I have it back, please! "Why sure, of course you can. Our mistake :D!"
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- mistercow 14y ago
  I believe you may have missed some sarcasm.
rhizome 14y ago
The Garry Marshall scene in Albert Brooks's "Lost In America" comes to mind.

dsr_ 14y ago

Let's look at it from a business perspective: When a casino has an unexpectedly large payout, and they can't prove that it was the result of cheating by the customer or an employee, there is only one reasonable thing to do: pay up, and advertise the win loudly and widely. If you're in the business of suing your customers, there are several results: 1. You stop having so many customers. 2. Even if successful in court, you don't make back anywhere near what you lost. (Customers don't have much money, in general. You already know the ones who do -- you call them whales.) 3. The regulatory commission looks at you more carefully.

ChuckMcM 14y ago
Heh, having spent much of my youth in Las Vegas I can tell you that if a casino has an unexpectedly large payout then someone is going to have a really really bad day. And that someone will do anything they can to deflect the repercussions. See the comment about the same issue at the Taj casino, 9 people got fired. The only way to avoid getting fired is to both prove that the people who won cheated and that their cheat was something you could not have protected against.

mherdeg 14y ago

When the AP ran this story a couple of weeks ago (http://www.seattlepi.com/news/article/Unshuffled-cards-a-costly-headache-for-NJ-casinos-3801123.php http://www.seattlepi.com/news/article/Unshuffled-cards-a-cos...), I thought it was hilarious because casinos do extra work at the baccarat and mini-baccarat tables to encourage exactly this kind superstitious magical betting. And then they have the gall to act all surprised when it works! In Vegas, they'll often distribute little pads of paper and pencils you can use to take notes on past hands, and mini-baccarat tables often have electronic signs showing the player/banker/tie outcome of several past hands. (This is funny because the game is memory-less.) The folks who manage the games must have discovered that when they encouraged players to bet superstitiously, players stayed for longer and bet more. How deliciously ironic for a casino to encourage people to try to find patterns and bet on them, and then lose and sue after they finding a pattern that worked!

danielweber 14y ago
There is a joke that casinos have a saying for people who come up with systems to beat the house: "Welcome."

sageikosa 14y ago

The gamblers took advantage of the information they had available to them. And this reminds me of someone else who figured out a pattern and cashed in: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Larson http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Larson

chimeracoder 14y ago
That's quite the story - too bad it ends on such a downer...!

guard-of-terra 14y ago

I don't see how abducting people the next day isn't a criminal offence. But I also don't see anyone caring. Weird.

YokoZar 14y ago
If not a crime the DA will pursue it could very well be at least a tort, which is why the casino was offering them their money in exchange for dropping further claims (such as kidnapping).
- pbhjpbhj 14y ago
  Aren't the players entitle to the money and to restitution for their kidnap?

sequoia 14y ago

"They saw a pattern and didn't know how long it would last," said Feldman, whose clients are Asian and speak little or no English. Ha- they must speak "Asian" :p

drcube 14y ago

I've never bought a deck of cards that was pre-shuffled. I thought casinos had machines that did that for them.

TylerE 14y ago
Baccarat is a special case. The cards are only used once, and then disposed of. They don't use shuffle machines because cards never go back into the shoe.

lambada 14y ago

The most serious claim in this article, that hasn't been mentioned in the comments so far is that although a Judge ordered the Casino to cash the remaining chips, and the Casino has claimed it won't appeal, they will only cash the chips if the gamblers drop ALL other charges. Is that even legal? To impose a condition on an order from a judge? This seems to me far more dodgy than the allegations of avoiding betting limits.

YokoZar 14y ago
I've heard from a Vegas lawyer that basically all of the serious law firms there do some amount of business with each of the casino chains. This is intentional on the casinos part, and gives the law firms a very simple conflict of interest claim when someone wants to sue a casino. Combine this with the fact that Nevada doesn't allow out of state lawyers (and passing the Nevada Bar requires a considerable investment in time), and as a consequence the only counsel you can get to sue a casino amounts to the sort of low-budget lawyer you might see advertising on a billboard. If I had enough money and brass, I'd hire a bunch of promising attorneys from out of state, relocate them to vegas, get them certified in Nevada, and then create a firm specializing in suing casinos. I'm sure there's a fortune to be made (if you don't get bought/killed by organized crime)
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
d0de 14y ago
They aren't exactly imposing a condition on an order from a judge. They are promising not to appeal if their conditions are met. Strictly speaking, it would only be imposing a condition on an order from a judge if they had exhausted all of their appeals and just said "Drop all the other charges or we won't pay you." In that scenario, it would clearly be illegal.

jeffem 14y ago

The most surprising thing to me is that the casino let the betting go on for over 2.5 hours.

d0de 14y ago

I think the real question here is: if the non-shuffled deck had somehow worked in the Casino's favor and caused an otherwise-virtually-impossible losing streak for the customers, would the casino now be scurrying to reimburse them all for their losses?

stevewillows 14y ago

Is there a reason why casinos are not shuffling decks in-house before sending them to the tables?

rsanchez1 14y ago

Seems to me that when you're dealing in money, you don't want to assume that the card factory shuffled the deck before shipping. I know that I would want to secure my investment, so why not shuffle it again before playing?