I will not condemn seat 8's lack of action cause IDK how intimidating the cheater was. Doing the right thing on line is not like being there and getting personally involved. Certainly seat 8 would be right to speak up if he is comfortable enough.

OTOH by getting in a confrontation with folks strange to you, you can end up like "Big Jim Walker".

I personally don't blame Seat 8... I kind of understand his hesitation getting involved.. He did speak up though when the Shift Manager started asking questions. That's all I can ask from him at that point.

I've played many hours in AC. This is a town full of some not so good people. A guy was killed over a seat change a few years back. I've played regularly with a guy who was later convicted of being a serial bank robber (next door in PA). There are players who don't get their money from working.

I don't blame the guy at all for wanting to mind his own business. What if he spoke up and the guy denies everything, then follows him out to the parking lot? These are the things that go through people's mind.

Ray, you definitely could. First, it's not entirely clear under law whose property an unpushed pot is. If it's not legally your property, then it's simple assault.

If it is your property, it's simple assault, but you MAY have a defense based on defense of property. On the other hand, you are only permitted to use reasonable force, which means you would need to prove to the jury that you couldn't have just called the floor.

Also, ANY competent casino management would at the very least properly bar you from entering the premises again if you did this to one of their employees.

So no, you don't get to do this. As on many things, we can't take the law into our own hands and have to rely on management to do the right thing, which it does most of the time but didn't here.

Good luck arguing that merely making contact with another person = beyond "reasonable force". You're stretching the word "force", and shattering the word "reasonable". Ray is not advocating that you shoot the dealer, or get rough enough to cause bruises or broken fingers.

I can't believe I need to actually type this.

Sometimes, when folks carelessly splash the pot, they try to reach into the pot to retrieve the splashed chip(s). When they do, I gently parry their hand away from the pot (I'm the dealer, I'll handle reaching into the pot to retrieve it; you're a player, keep your hands out of the pot).

The look of shock on their faces always kills me. They react I just slapped them hard across the face.

But what choice did I have? One of my many duties is to protect the pot. "Protect" does not mean "watch passively when something happens, and report it later."

You seem to be under the impression that the legal system is set up for reasonable adults to come to a reasonable solution to an agreed upon problem. The reality is that the legal system is set up to deal with corner cases.

Sooner or later you will touch someone who both has some sort of rare condition and is extremely litigious. It will be something that seems like a one in a million chance - your fingernail scratches a hemophiliac, for example - but you will be accused of making rough contact which caused a disproportionate amount of pain relative to the median example.

Your employer may defend you or throw you under the bus, but win or lose or settle, soon enough afterwards I predict there will be a corporate memo about no touching customers.

This seems unrelated, but underscores the basic premise: most banks have policies against physically preventing robberies. So when you see those videos where robbers run out of the bank with big sacks of money while those lol lazy security guards stand around with their thumbs up their asses, it's exactly what the corporate bean counters have calculated is cheapest for the bank. The highly variable cost of physical intervention is a HUGE deterrent.

Lucky for me, most people in this world--even judges and cops--are more reasonable than you imagine.

I present an American Hero, the Rhode Island judge forced to hear a parking ticket case:



Comparing armed bank robbers to poker players. What world do you live in???

yes i would grasp their hand or wrist with just enough force to keep them from giving my 1000 dollars to someone else. and you can be sure no judge or even cop is going to arrest me. and not likely the house will bar me. and the dealer will probably thank me for saving him form this mistake. the world does work.

judge-- sir i sentence you to prison for grabbing his hand to stop him from giving your money away.

I think you are correct 99.9% of the time, and catastrophically wrong the last 0.1%.

I agree people are quite reasonable as a whole. Which is why verbally asking people to stop has had an amazing record of success.

But when it doesn't work, there's no marginal increase in success by grabbing someone's arm. If you can't stop the dealer with a "Dealer, stop!" what's the probability that grabbing an arm is going to make the difference?

luckily it will rarely happen so we dont really have to worry about it.

And in order for any criminal possibilities, once the dealer's hand is grabbed, she would have to make a big scene and scream out "Get your hands off of me! Security!". So I can't imagine a dealer doing this, especially when someone is pointing out a major error on her part.

I've touched and grabbed dealer's hands/arms plenty of times and 100% of the time they were very thankful that I stopped them.

have you ever grabbed a dealers arm to stop them from making a mistake and been wrong yourself?

yes and it wasn't a big deal

There are a lot of things people learn in the first year of law school that a lot of folks who don't practice law have no idea about.

And one of them is "a tortfeasor takes his victim as he finds him". Also known as the "eggshell plaintiff".

Yes, indeed, if you grab that arm and it happens the dealer has a medical condition or goes into shock or was simply moving her wrist in a direction that causes a fracture, you just wait and see how the prosecutors and the juries will view your actions. Callip is exactly right-- most of the time it works out OK, but when it goes wrong, it can go catastrophically wrong. Which is why you should not solve your problems with violence.

To clarify my exact position, it's not that all physical contact is violence and all violence is bad. Rather, it's a cost benefit of all your options.

If someone bursts into the casino, runs into the poker room, and grabs your chips, your best course of action is going to grab their hand and wrestle them to the ground. There's really no doubt that robbing you is their intent and it's clear that reason is futile.

Compare that to a dealer pushing the pot to someone else. It's possible you're wrong (and in the OP there was confusion as to whether the Villain had actually cheated or just pulled an epic slowroll) so the intent is unclear, and there's the overall assumption that everyone is submit to the authority of the dealer / floor / supervisor so overall reason works quite well (in this case it didn't, but let's not be results-oriented).

It would have been different if OP had personally seen Villain cheat, tried to stop it verbally, and the dealer was intent on pushing the pot in clearly the wrong direction. But that wasn't the case - confirmation that Villain had actually cheated didn't happen until well after events transpired.

To that end, and I suggested it earlier, a reasonable use of "force" would be to insist that security prevent Villain from leaving until the matter had been reviewed from the cameras. It was bad policy on the casino's part to continue action, really bad policy to let someone leave with disputed money. And I don't know exactly what the laws are in AC but there is specific legal justification for detaining people suspected of a crime in other jurisdictions. Let the security guards take the legal liability.

Before I put my hands on a stranger over a poker hand I would want to make sure it was Steven Van Zandt and NOT Silvio Dante. Legal matters might be secondary. Just sayin'

This thread has kind of veered off into crazyland. Just my opinion, maybe I'm wrong.

Don't they all?

No doubt. But part of the reason this is a different situation is that there is no doubt that the chips in your stack are your property and no doubt that you can use reasonable force against a stranger to defend them. And also there really isn't a procedure in place under the rules of the game for handling it.

The key is that in your normal interactions with people, mistakes are not met with force-- and if you make it your policy to meet mistakes with force, you run the risk of a very serious judicial sanction. And, honestly, the county jails of the country are actually replete with people who we wouldn't consider hardened criminals who are there on simple assault convictions because they didn't live by this principle, because they too quickly and based on insufficient justification escalated to force.

A particular case I thought of (because someone I know handled the defense) involved a ticketed passenger who tried to push his way past a gate agent at the airport to board a flight where boarding had closed but the plane was still at the gate and he had been kept off the flight due to a stupid acknowledged mistake by the gate agents. He was sure that a suburban jury would sympathize (and he got himself a very good lawyer)-- he ended up with a misdemeanor conviction and 60 days of jail time. It was kind of the reverse of the United Airlines situation that we had recently-- but the fact that it was the reverse made all the difference, because it was the passenger, not the airline, who escalated to force.

When someone makes a mistake in a business interaction, you need to take it up the chain. If you make it physical, you run a risk.

Update....

I have received no notifications since the NJ State Police and NJ Gaming Commission accepted the complaint a few weeks ago... I will follow up with the detective sometime this week to find out status....

I have been contacted by a Law Firm who specializes in Gaming Law so we will see what can be done, if anything....

If the cops find this guy, repaying OP will be the least of his worries.

And while it doesn't get paid for awhile, court ordered criminal restitution is a LOT more effective than a civil judgment. The criminal courts enforce these orders pretty rigorously both during prison time (it's taken out of prison work pay) and during probation (you get thrown back in jail if you miss a restitution payment).

So if the NJ authorities take an interest in prosecuting this case, OP will eventually get his money back.

Hope you're right.

This thread is like a cop show, I can't wait for the next scene.

Unfortunately for us gawkers the best thing OP can do now is be quiet, listen to his lawyers and not provide anymore blow by blow until it is resolved.

I don't have any lawyers as of yet.... A law firm actually reached out and contacted me due to this thread. The law firm is in a trial right now in Vegas and is going to set up an official call to discuss matters in the next week or so.

Further, I have already spoke to NJ Gaming Commission and they have reviewed the tape and told me that there is no doubt it was "dealer error" for failure to control the game. This undisputed fact will never change no matter how much info I divulge on this forum.

I feel that as everything proceeds I will update this forum as much as I possibly can related to whats going on with my case as this affects everyone that plays poker at brick and mortar casinos.