Non shuffled card deck results in 1.5 million casino loss

http://www.philly.com/philly/news/new_jersey/20120904_A_C__s_Golden_Nugget_in_legal_war_with__1_5_million_winners.html

by larrys • 14 years ago

72 79 14 years ago

larrys3• 14 years 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."

ColinWright• 14 years 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• 14 years 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• 14 years 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• 14 years 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• 14 years 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.

joezydeco6• 14 years 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• 14 years 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.

lrm242• 14 years 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• 14 years ago

They're suing both the card manufacturer and the gamblers.

pc86• 14 years 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.

stephengillie• 14 years 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?

sp3323• 14 years ago

Because they didn't win a game, they took advantage of a rigged deck. Also they're being sued for exceeding the betting limits. "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 and by passing money to fellow gamblers in order to place bets in excess of posted betting limits."

larrys3• 14 years ago

"they took advantage of a rigged deck"

I think that a "rigged deck" assume someone knowingly did something. In this case, from the story, this was an accident and not intentional.

Of course even if the deck was rigged (say someone at the manufacturer turned off the shuffle process) while it would be defacto rigged I'm not sure it would be dejure rigged because there was no connection between the gamblers and the person doing the rigging.

danielweber5• 14 years ago

How did the table allow the betting limit to be exceeded? Why didn't they stop it right at the time, and only wait until they lost to decide to retroactively enforce their own rules?

Apparently the pit boss knew something was up but didn't stop the game. Which squarely puts the fault in the casino. The casino could easily have closed that table.

wpietri• 14 years 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• 14 years 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.

funkdobiest• 14 years ago

Atlantic City is in New Jersey. Where everyone sues everyone else when they have an issue.

kamaal• 14 years ago

There is also a ridiculous law that you can't use math at blackjack tables.

Its like only stupid people can play blackjack and if you are clever enough to beat it, then you are cheating.

Put simply according to them the game is fair only if you lose and casino wins.

dagw• 14 years ago

There is also a ridiculous law that you can't use math at blackjack tables.

Not true. There is no law (in the US) forbidding card counting. However casinos will kick you out (or most likely politely ask if you might want to play something else) if they believe you're counting cards effectively (they have no problem with people who count cards badly). But this has no basis in law and isn't an accusation of cheating. It's just the casino exercising their right to remove anybody from the casino floor for any reason they feel like, much like they have the right to remove you from the casino floor if they don't like the way you're dressed for example.

iskander2• 14 years 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!

DanielStraight5• 14 years 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.

iskander2• 14 years 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?

larrys3• 14 years 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.

danielweber5• 14 years ago

The casino was not required to keep the table running.

It's not illegal to count cards but the casino can tell you to leave, and it you don't you are then trespassing.

JackC• 14 years ago

The problem is that the car dealership would indeed be required to honor the misprinted price tag if it was discovered after they completed the sale. This situation is like, a car dealership misprints the price tags; the salespeople spend hours selling cars; and then the dealership turns around and sues the people who bought cars and drove away. It's not going to be a winner.

(N.B., no analogy is really going to help us too much here, because the outcome will depend on the specifics of state law regarding malfunctioning gambling machines and any agreements made by those particular gamblers to get into that particular casino. So anyone who tells you they have any idea what will happen is either a gambling law expert or making it up. I just thought the car dealership thing was an interesting example.)

Retric• 14 years ago

It's fairly common for people to buy high value antiques for a tiny fraction of their actual value at flee-markets etc. However, the seller does not get to say, 'my bad sale is void'.

EX: Value ~6,000$ sale price 14$.

http://cleveland.cbslocal.com/2012/03/31/man-finds-picasso-o...

joezydeco6• 14 years ago

Read the entire quote:

"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 and by passing money to fellow gamblers in order to place bets in excess of posted betting limits"

Where was the pit boss to shut those players down when the bets were coming in that large? Or did the casino believe these players would eventually lose most of it back and relax the table limits while this much money was in play?

weaksauce• 14 years ago

Cards were not shuffled. They didn't enforce their own rules regarding betting. I honestly don't see how they can come at them. I am not a lawyer so I wonder what legal stance they have in this to sue the gamblers?

fusiongyro4• 14 years ago

Somewhere or other I read an example of protocol design: handling the lint trap in your dryer. One way to do it is empty the trap at the end when the clothes are dry. Another way is at the beginning, right after loading the wet clothes. In a mathematical sense they're equivalent, because in both cases the lint gets removed once per load. But in practice, emptying first is better because the protocol will "work" even if someone fails to empty the trap.

Same situation here. Blaming the card company and the customers and doing all this suing is a lot of work compared to shuffling the damn cards. It's a bad protocol. If they always shuffled, this kind of thing couldn't happen.

KevinEldon• 14 years ago

Yes, you guarantee the cards are shuffled, but you also add a question as to whether you've shuffled the deck in your favor. A competitor might make the point that they play unopened decks while you manipulate the decks before the game.

incision2• 14 years 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-aft...

2: http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_14795166

3: http://abcnews.go.com/TheLaw/story?id=3772215&page=1#.UE...

joezydeco6• 14 years 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?)

fusiongyro4• 14 years ago

The Indian casinos are also highly regulated by the National Indian Gaming Commission. For some things, each tribe also has their own regulations that need to be handled, so it can be a major PITA work for or sell a product to more than one tribe's casinos.

incision2• 14 years ago

Thanks.

One thing I'm still not clear on. In the case of a machine that suggests it is simulating something physical, are the machines required to implement realistic odds or just accurate to what's official stated?

Do virtual card games have to maintain a proper virtual deck? Do virtual slots that suggest 20x20x20 reels have to implement 8000:1 odds?

konstruktor2• 14 years ago

If they can check the machine, they should have done so before allowing people to play. After all, they aren't paying back the losses on the "malfunctioning" machine.

danielweber5• 14 years ago

Case 1 seems to be that the siren accidentally went off. The board still showed 4 matches instead of the 5 needed.

Case 3, as joezydeco pointed out, gave out more money than was possible as printed on the machine.

I'm sure there are thousands of cases of jackpots not being given out for bugs, so I tend to think they should assume responsibility for the bugs that aren't in their favor, and pay out the maximum as printed on the machine.

pkulak• 14 years 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• 14 years 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!"

rhizome3• 14 years ago

The Garry Marshall scene in Albert Brooks's "Lost In America" comes to mind.

dsr_• 14 years 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• 14 years 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• 14 years ago

When the AP ran this story a couple of weeks ago (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!

danielweber5• 14 years ago

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

sageikosa• 14 years 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

chimeracoder• 14 years ago

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

guard-of-terra• 14 years 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.

YokoZar2• 14 years 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).

pbhjpbhj2• 14 years ago

Aren't the players entitle to the money and to restitution for their kidnap?

sequoia• 14 years 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• 14 years ago

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

TylerE• 14 years 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• 14 years 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.

YokoZar2• 14 years 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)

d0de2• 14 years 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• 14 years ago

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

d0de2• 14 years 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• 14 years ago

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

Non shuffled card deck results in 1.5 million casino loss

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