Blackjack to stay at Club One Casino in Fresno, other CA card rooms, following ruling
Fresno’s Club One Casino and other licensed card rooms throughout California can continue to deal blackjack following a critical court ruling.
San Francisco Superior Court Judge Richard Darwin ruled that the Attorney General Office’s Bureau of Gambling Control did not have the authority to issue a statewide ban on blackjack and other “banked” games. Instead, such policy decisions needed to be through the Legislature.
“I find that in issuing the subject regulations, the Bureau acted in excess of the authority granted to it by the legislature and the Gambling Control Act,” Darwin said after oral arguments were presented by both sides, according to iGaming Business.
Banked games are considered games in which a player goes against the dealer, as is the case in games such as blackjack and baccarat.
California’s tribal casinos are supposed to have exclusive rights to offer banked card games.
But tribal casinos argue that card rooms have skirted around rules by using third-party proposition players employed by outside companies, so the establishment can offer modified versions of blackjack, such as “Spanish 21.5.”
Tuesday’s ruling affirmed what California cardrooms argued: The Bureau is responsible for enforcing California’s century-old gaming laws - not rewriting them.
“For more than a year, we have said this case is about far more than gaming — it is about whether the Attorney General and his regulators can bypass the Legislature and unilaterally rewrite decades of established law,” said Kyle Kirkland, President of the California Gaming Association. “Today, the Court delivered a clear answer: they cannot.
“These regulations were never about protecting the public. They were designed to advance the interests of a handful of powerful gaming tribes at the expense of local communities, working families, and established cardroom businesses.”
A Standardized Regulatory Impact Assessment (SRIA) report, prepared by Berkeley Economic Advising and Research, claimed the proposed statewide rules would have resulted in losses of $464 million for card rooms and 364 full-time jobs per year over the next decade.
Tribal casinos, meanwhile, were expected to gain $232 million.
Licensed card rooms like Club One Casino and Clovis’ 500 Club Casino have long offered the popular poker game “Texas Hold ‘Em” in which players compete against each other as its primary attraction.
But it also has relied on banked card games to generate nearly half of its revenue.
The attempted ban of blackjack at cardrooms threatened to cut revenues and potentially led to a reduction of jobs.
Kirkland said 500 to 600 families in Fresno County were in danger of job security had the blackjack ban gone into full effect.
The ban also could’ve meant significantly reduced tax contributions from his business to the city of Fresno’s General Fund that average about $1 million annually.
Tuesday’s ruling means the state’s proposed blackjack bans at all card rooms and casinos are halted unless the decision is successfully overturned on appeal.
