Comment by misja111 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by misja111 | Hacker News Reader

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> my reading of the opinion is that, regardless of if you take advantage of it or not, the game is no longer authorized under the Casino Control Act, and therefore is void.

If this is true, it means that any game ever played with those 'marked' cards is void. Since Baccarat is a winning game for the casino, it would mean that this verdict could cost the casino many times more than what it has won against Phil Ivy.

Maybe I'm too cynical, but I don't believe that anyone who will now start a court case to claim his money back from a game with these cards has even the slightest chance to win. Surely the judge will find a way to interpret the law text in another way so that it again favors the casino.

The "marking" in this case is not inherent in the cards; but is rather a combination of an assymetry in the cards, and the dealer rotating a non-random subset of the cards (thereby turning the assymetry into a "marking").

Further, in order for a marking to count, it has to "tends to deceive the public or tends to alter the normal random selection of characteristics or the normal chance of the game which could determine or alter the result of the game." If the only mistake that the dealer makes is some form of an information leak, and no one modifies their behavior based on the information being leaked, then this condition would not be met.

If, instead, the dealers mistake changed the odds of the game regardless of if the player acted on it, the this clause would be invoked. Indeed, this is likely the intended case of this clause, as the alternative is that the house can cheat.

Do you really think that a losing gambler would be able to bring a suit against a casino because a dealer placed cards in a slightly uneven way that seemed suggestive to the gambler and caused him to make sub-optimal bets? Even if it could be shown that the dealer had studied the psychology of cards for that very purpose?

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