Hope you get your money. Police and maybe lawyers is the only way you have a chance for this IMHO Casino will call out the militia if you steal from them at a table game. They have much less motivation to do much about things like your OP in the poker room. The guy was not stealing their money , so in reality they don't care and just hope you eat it and it all goes away. Some rooms likely care about bad PR more than others so you might get something from Borgota, but I would not hold my breath on it.

i hold my cards until pot is pushed as well... but doesn't apply here. pot was pushed wrong way.

holding your cards also keeps the dealer from thinking you have given up. dealers are not always players and let their mind wander and make mistakes.
also you dont yell for floor, you immediately stop the dealer from moving the pot away from you. you call the floor at decision time.
once the pot is gone then you have to rely on the dealer to explain who gets the pot then your turn and the floor doesnt want to take a pot from an unwilling person.

if i did that every time i would have 0 times when a situation like this caught a cheater and got me my money... and about 100 times where the floor would come over and say "4,5,6,8,9 is not a straight sir" or "he has a flush sir" or "you don't have an ace sir".

the more common scenario is the pot is pushed away from me and instead of telling the dealer to stop i look at the cards and think "oh... i didn't win"

if i was OP, it would have played out the exact same.. and i don't think i would have thought i wasn't protecting my hand

the pot, the muck/villains cards, my cards. i only watch these things, so much as to i drown out other people and solely focus on the hand until the pot is pushed my way and im stacking.. its still unfathomable to me that the guy could pick thru the muck for his winning hands... lol... it literally is shocking.

The other benefit to holding your cards here is that it will delay the start of the next hand. Assuming automatic shufflers where they alternate decks, most dealers won't start dealing the next hand if they don't have all the cards for the deck that needs to go into the shuffler.

Of course, this scenario is so strange that it's hard to use a hard and fast rule to explain how this could have been done differently

i said this already in here. and i'm sympathic but you will never get criminal charges unless the camera picks up he didn't have two spades before he reached in the muck. he can just say he had it. no one is prosecuting. there is no way it's happening

and in games i will generally tell dealers that they need to kill all the losing hands before they push the pot and take away the winning hand.

the cheating part aside i have seen so many times where the dealer pushed the pot to someone other than the winner. and a few of those times he got to keep it as the floor ruled once it is in his stack its too late for someone who didnt speak up soon enough.

This spot drastically changes if OP holds his cards. It was mentioned that the Dealer may have rushed to start the next hand for 'whatever' reason and that may have influenced how little the Floor did when it finally arrived.

Since I generally sit 2/3/7/8 I tend to toss my cards towards the Board. I may need to force myself to reduce that down so that the Dealer can't inadvertently muck my hand ... or in this case, move onto the next hand. GL

I'd send him away given the option to send a message that you don't get away with cheating against me.

Nobody else is saying it, but I would guess that the odds are high that this guy did actually have the cards he pulled out of the muck. Does anyone actually think he fished around until he found 2 cards that would be a winner and they weren't actually his cards? I know this doesn't matter and doing what he did was still wrong, but if the floor had done his job at the time, would we still be labeling him a cheater and wanting him arrested? I don't think so. I think he would say "those were my cards" and the floor would say "tough ****, you can't pull them out of the muck" and we would move on with life. It just sucks that the supervisor didn't do the right thing and now we have this giant mess. I think the fact that he ran out of there in such a hurry is pretty shady and he deserves whatever he gets because of it.

Just my $0.02

One of the posts from the OP said that the cameras showed the villian pulling multiple cards out of the muck until he found a 2nd spade with his Ace. I suppose chances are that he had to hunt for a while to find his own cards, but with the other facts in play here I'm apt to lean to the other side of it.

Either way, whether he was pulling his own cards out of the muck or random cards, he still cheated.

Wow! What a scumbag.

The dealer was an idiot.

The floorman was a bigger idiot.

The room manager was an idiot for not getting security to come and make sure Villain didn't leave while security investigated.

And the player who didn't pipe up until way after the fact needs to get flip-dipped on the back of his stupid head.

Have you ever BEEN to Atlantic City, farm boy?

That aside: if he actually had been holding the nuts, I'm confident he wouldn't be mucking/slamming things at showdown.

UPDATE...

Just spoke with an Investigator from the NJ DGE (dept of gaming enforcement)...

The Facts are as follows as told to me...............

Dealer didn't control the game is at FAULT. (Dealer should be disciplined by Casino but it's casinos call... Casino fine possible pending outcome of investigation).

Seat 10 was in-fact caught on camera reaching into the muck pile with dealer back turned when pot was being counted/pushed. (I was told regardless of ignorance, stupidity, didn't know the rules, etc.. Seat 10 is wrong).

Evidently, Borgata did attempt to contact individual with more than just emails and seemed to imply that Suspect refused despite evidence and police notification of theft. (It was initially told to me by Borgata investigator that only emails were sent.)

NJ State Police are officially involved specifically retrieve money and they have 100% ID on the suspect.

NJDGE is continuing their investigation working with the NJ State Police.

**** Also I was told that there is more stuff going on in the background that couldn't be reveald to me...

Exactly, Seat 10 (Villian) was controlling the action and was the one to force myself and Seat 5 All-In... 99.99999% chance that Seat 10 misread his hand.. The word around is that the guy works as a Professional dealer supposedly in the NJ/NJ area.

So, you are agreeing with me that he likely held those cards but mucked before realizing he held a winner?

It's really encouraging that you received this much feedback so quickly. For whatever reason, someone has locked in on your case. This is great, please keep us posted.

I'm particularly interested in whether the Borgata will make any effort to make things right. They should be very embarrassed about how they handled this.

Please let them fine the casino.

Sorry I typed the post quickly and didn't word it properly....

I don't believe for one second that seat 10 misread his hand given all the circumstances...

Seriously glad to hear that. Suit has the Stockholm Syndrome I guess.

Things sound good so far but you should absolutely be the squeaky wheel. Ask for updates at a reasonable interval until you're satisfied at the responses. Weekly at the very least.

Good on you for not letting this go and being active.

I can't believe the Borgota has not offered to make this right.