Stopped reading at

"Gamblers aren't dumb"

I dont get it...did the game not have a human dealer? How does this even happen?

And if they just kept letting their bets ride, im assuming the floor had to come over LOOOONG before it got up to 1.5 mill because they would have had to have opened up the cage to bring in more chips and ****.

So like they kept bring in more money, paid everyone out, and then LATER realized what happened and went to a guys room and "arrested" him?

Like this doesnt even make sense, any of it. Is this an onion article rehosted or something?

A+ meme usage

I read this story and then my brother called me into the kitchen to play some gin. My dad was railing our game, and I told them both about the Nugget trying to recoup this money. First of all, we were laughing our f'ing asses off. I mean, how do they not know that the same sequence is being dealt over and over and over?! Secondly, the cause of action seems to us to be limited squarely to the manufacturers of the decks--if there was a contract for goods, and the goods were non-conforming, Nugget gets its money back from the distributor. End of story.

Which is why it seems like such a PISS POOR idea to go after the players in this spot. I mean, the PR on that SUCKS, and I'm guessing there's an ensuing pissing match between legal dept and marketing.

Regardless, the casino made a lame mistake! When players make silly mistakes, the casinos make money. Here the players made money because the casino made a lame mistake. Too bad, so sad, Nugget, IMO!

Grunching, but just FYI in law there is a general principle of "joinder", which -- stated in very broad terms -- sometimes requires that certain parties be joined to a single lawsuit. And in some cases, the failure to join a party at the very outset of litigation can result in a party waiving their ability to later sue that party, if said party should have been joined at the outset of the initial litigation. From Wikipedia:
Cliff's: I haven't read the claims in this case so can't say whether the above principles apply here, but this could very likely just be a procedural thing > aka it's not so much the casino suing the gamblers to get them to disgorge their winnings, as it is a mere procedural formality to make sure they don't waive certain rights / claims they may need later.

What a bunch of idiots.

First, they f*** up the easiest way to ensure an honest game. Next, they embarrass themselves further by allowing it to continue for over 25 hands without pausing to check things out. Assuming there is an odd energy at a 8 man table with 14+ people hovering around it, surely cheering after each hand as their bets are increasing. Does the dealer not sense something seems off but every player obv does? Finally, they decide to sue their clients for a mistake they made. LOL.

I thought very little of the Golden Nugget before this. I surely will never give them my business again now, what a trashy, joke casino. A complete embarrassment. Eat your losses, take your tail, put it between your legs and go hide somewhere for a few months, you idiots.

This pretty much sums it up.

Is this real? Am I in the twilight zone? If the case is held up think of the implications.

How ****ing dumb is the Nugget and all it's staff?

The first thing I hear at a poker table when the A and 2 of the same suit come out as the first two cards to determine the position of the dealer button s "Uh oh you didn't shuffle properly." and yet this lasted for that long and not one of the dealer/pit boss/supervisor realised?!

Well done gamblers. Wish it was more they won.

Clearly they need to be laughed out of court, you can't blame your customers for trying to win at a game you were offering because your staff are too dumb to notice that the cards are coming out in the same order once people win 41 hands in a row and you don't bother to pause the game once you realise it's borderline statistically impossible to win that many hands in a row.

What should happen - gamblers keep their winnings, nugget ordered to pay their court costs, nugget then sues their supplier for breach of contract for the faulty decks and probably wins, nugget obviously fires incompetent floor that didn't pause the game, guy who was detained sues nugget for emotional anguish, unlawful detainment and defamation or whatever.

Someone seriously needs to find out whether it was As 2s 3s 4s 5s and so on for 41 ****ING HANDS. How do you not notice that? Even if it was a different pattern, how do you not close the game?

"The same sequence of cards was dealt twice, then a third time and a fourth"...

This part of the article was written poorly and very confusing. Without a better "trip report" from someone who was there it is hard to tell exactly how the cards came out. There are several possibilities...

At mini-baccarat, I think the first card is dealt to the player, second card to dealer, third card to player then fourth card to dealer. I might have it reverse who gets the first card but you get the point, the cards alternate. Someone should be fired is it went first hand out of shoe was "As" to player then "2s" to dealer etc. and no one caught on after 2 or 3 hands. Also, there are hit or stand procedures. If the cards were in perfect sequence and you could think through what was about to happen on next hand there would be times you knew it was a winner for dealer. Then another hand might be a winner for players. And some hands would be ties which pays like 11 to 1. Everyone at the table loading up and picking the right one but then shifting all that money to the opposite bets perfectly every time wouldn't go on without notice for 41 hands. Especially to the tune of 1.5 million.

Like I said, without a better trip report of what happened there are many possibilites. I've played a lot of blackjack and been seated often enough next to a mini-baccarat table to have seen a few things. When there is a long run of players or bankers in a row people start loading up on it. Imagine a roulette table that keeps hitting red numbers and a lot of people start betting red. I've seen a mini-baccarat table come out 35 times player and everyone at the table was cheeering and getting paid big time. So it might have just been a run of 41 straight players or dealers. And as such, if the decks were loaded to run a long run of players then the scammers who put in the loaded decks were making a ton. Innocents who just happened to be there too enjoyed the fun until GN decided to go after people.

* long runs of just player or just dealer happen. It provides perfect cover for a scam because you aren't hopping back and forth between player and dealer always getting it right. Instead, for instance, you just make a bet on player and win then leave bet out there and win again, and again 10, 20, 30 or 40 straight hands.

A better trip report of the sequence of cards or player/dealer run is needed.

lol at people itt taking side with scumbag casinos

total shills

A competent floor person, security and dealer would instantly notice after the 2nd or 3rd hand that the cards weren't shuffled when the first 4 cards on the table are 2345 clubs. Then the next card out is a 6 of clubs, then a 7 of clubs etc etc.

How could no one watching that game realize that the cards weren't shuffled?

The players weren't cheating or doing anything illegal.
Sometimes when we **** up we have to suffer the consequences, pay them their money Golden Nugget.

This was my thinking too. The players did nothing illegal here. The error was completely on the part of the casino and/or card manufacturer.

If I go into a casino, sit down to gamble, do nothing illegal, and win, then I find out later the casino gets LOL Takebacks! that's the very last time I'm going into a casino.

Hard to believe they would risk so much bad blood over what I assume for the casino is a modest amount of money. Eat the loss, take it up quietly with the card manufacturer, fire who you gotta fire. Suing players has got to be the worst option.

I'm just imagining some fry cook at McDonalds stuffing an extra Big Mac into all the drive thru orders because it's his last day and he doesn't give a ****. Then McDonalds decides to sue everyone who bought food that day. The Bad PR **** storm would be legendary, but apparently in the gambling world it's standard practice?

$1.5m won... Jesus, maybe they might have noticed the 10th time they had to re-fill the racks?

The reason it couldn't of happened this way is because an incompetent floor person and dealer would've noticed by the 5th hand.

Here it is the clip we've all been waiting for ........http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CIpRvBQ-dOU

It would make much more sense to sue the card manufacturer ....

The players can always say, but you gave us this nice little pencil and paper to keep track of that **** with

Here's a story from this weekend... since De Niro is talked about in here. (sorry for derail, but I feel like it's okay since I posted this thread, ha):

[derail]
I went to Montauk Point (Long Island) this past weekend with my girl. We went to this super nice spot right on a private beach named Navy Beach Restaurant. Great food. Anywho, I happened to bump into one of my old co-workers there who had a later reservation. My girlfriend and I finished eating, and left for the bars.

Turns out, about 15 minutes after I had left, De Niro had showed up (with his autistic son, or stepson), and sat in the same seat I was sitting, right next to my co-worker, who talked to him for about 45 mins-hour.

SO pissed off I left when I did.
[/derail]

Pre-shuffled shoes are used to increase security and save time between shoes. They arrive sealed and are placed directly into the shoe. Most casinos deal baccarat out of an 8 deck shoe.

Based on my understanding and experience, I think this is a poorly written article.

First, I think it's likely the shoe wasn't "unshuffled" but was arranged in some other manner which was predictable only to the players. In other words, the players were in cahoots with someone at Gemaco regarding this shoe.

If the cards were truly unshuffled, the player hand would have A, 3 and the banker hand would have 2, 4. The player would then draw a 5 and win the hand with a 9. Each of the cards would be the same suit - hearts, diamonds, spades or clubs and the sequence would repeat itself over and over again (with the value of the cards progressing up and then down into the next suit). This pattern would be relatively easy to spot I believe.

The Golden Nugget would be seemingly stupid to not spot it after a few hands and it's easy to say "they deserved it." However, they are likely suspicious that the players knew to watch for an unshuffled shoe and were waiting for their opportunity to score big.

As I stated before, I think it's more likely the cards did NOT come out as described above and the players knew the exact order of the shoe. This would make it more difficult for the casino to spot. When the article described "unshuffled" the writer is likely ignorantly playing up the fact that the casino does not shuffle the cards itself.

The guy who was detained likely bankrolled the entire operation. Casinos have table limits as additional protection and players often circumvent these limits by teaming up and all betting the max on the same side (player or banker) every hand. Keep in mind that baccarat players rarely actually bet every single hand out of the shoe. They often take free hands to try to determine the pattern of the shoe. Players max betting in unison on every single consecutive hand and winning every single one is highly suspicious.

$1.5 million is a lot of money and it's worth it for each side to battle it out in court.

The impression I got was that the decks came pre-shuffled but were all "pre-shuffled" identically, causing a spotable pattern. For example if the first card was 7 the next card might be 3 followed by K then 4 and so on. Then in the next deck, the first card would again be the 7 , followed by 3, etc. Random looking on the first go-through but when you hit the second or third deck the pattern emerges.

When I was a kid we played a game called "Egyptian Rat Screw," a form of slap-Jack. It was commonplace, after winning cards, to just tuck them to the bottom of your pile without shuffling. I was able to win this game (a lot) by simply remembering the order the cards had come out relating to the key cards you were supposed to slap. I suspect that if I was at that table, once I spotted the pattern (likely by noticing the dealer was dealt AK or some other "memorable" hand for the second or third time) I would be able to watch the deck through once and then be able to bet with near 100% accuracy.

Even for those with a less aggressive memory, you're allowed in baccarat to mark down the patterns. Once noticing the pattern, even a fairly incompetent joe could have the night of his life without any actual cheating occurring. .

^^
Good points here, but from what I understand it was 8 suited up, unshuffled decks that got loaded straight in. I have friends of friends that work at the Nugget. The only thing I'm not sure about is how they blew the shuffle procedure. Even with preshuffled decks, you still hand shuffle them at my joint.

The biggest thing that they missed, was that everything was coming out in suits. The pattern of cards is hard to pick up on.

If 8 unshuffled decks got loaded into the shoe, the first card in out of the shoe is a King. That determines how many more cards get burned. In this case - 10 more. 11 total.

Burned - K,Q,J,10,9,8,7,6,5,4,3 (11cards)

First card in play is a 2 of spades, and the sequence goes like this:

Player - 2K (2)
Banker - AQ (1)
Player draws a J for a 2, Banker draws 10 for 1. Player wins.

Player - 97 (6)
Banker - 86 (4)
Player stays at 6, Banker draws 5 for 9. Banker wins.

Player - 42 (6)
Banker - 3A (4)
Player stays at 6, Banker draws K for 4. Player wins.

Player - Q10 (0)
Banker - J9 (9)
Banker Natural 9. Banker wins.

Player - 86 (4)
Banker - 75 (2)
Player draws a 4 for 8, Banker draws 3 for 5. Player wins.


Next card out of the shoe is a two. So the pattern takes five hands to form from the way I see it.

P - B - P - B - P and repeat.

There was a case of "non-shuffling" costing the then new Casino of Montreal $400,000 in 1994.

Basically, the pseudo-rng of their electronic keno started up with the same seed each morning, so drawings would be identical from day to day.

Naturally, someone spotted this and made and hit a couple of jackpots in succession before the machine was shut down.

Payment was withheld for a few weeks while there was an investigation to see if the winner had colluded with anyone on the inside.

The casino ended up suing the machine's manufacturer for not supplying them a mechanism for randomly seeding the RNG. I believe the case was settled out of court and no details were publicly released.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casino_...l#Keno_scandal

Link to original AP article.
http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/u...sinos-17042177

It makes it sound like the same sequence was coming out over and over.

The card manufacturer said they provided a deck that was not pre-shuffled.

If you think it's impossible for the dealer, a bunch of floor people and security staff to miss such an obvious pattern as a completely unshuffled deck, the second linked article in OP's link describes that happening at Taj recently.

http://www.pressofatlanticcity.com/b...9bb2963f4.html

Dealt 3.5 hours with unshuffled deck. Dealer didn't notice, floor didn't notice. They even reviewed the videos numerous times before they figured it out.

End result. Taj fined $91k, players keep money, 9 employees fired.

Not only is Golden Nugget staff incompetent for not detecting such an obvious pattern. Their management failed by not alerting their staff that this very thing happened hack in December at Taj. Their legal and PR staff are equally if not more so incompetent for bringing a suit against the players having seen the results in the Trump case. Joinder or not, having the players named in a lawsuit is a horrible move.