In a 54-page order, Florida Administrative Law Judge Suzanne Van Wyk recently ruled designated-player card games, such as those offered at the Jacksonville Kennel Club‘s bestbet Jacksonville which brought in million a month, “did indeed violate” state law. Ten Florida card rooms offer designated-player games, which account for up to 20 percent of their revenue.
“Given the strict statutory prohibition against gambling, the intricate regulatory scheme imposed and the narrow carve out for cardrooms, the games cannot be allowed to continue to operate in the current manner,” Van Wyk wrote. She concluded under the cardroom statue, “the designated player is a player in name only. The existing operation of the games does no more than establish a bank against which participants play.”
Van Wyk fined bestbet Jacksonville $4,500 for nine counts of violating state gambling regulations. She dismissed other charges concerning allegations that employees of a third-party company worked in the Jacksonville cardroom without authorization.
The case began more than four years after Florida gambling regulators initially signed off on the games, which have steadily grown in popularity. But last year, after state officials and the Seminole Tribe reached an agreement on a gambling deal, regulators attempted to shut down the games. In January, regulators filed complaints against more than 24 cardroom operators, claiming the designated-player, or banked, card games are illegal.
Parimutuel operators disagreed and got around the complaints by using designated players, employed by third-party companies, to sit in front of chips trays without actually playing the games. Dealers, working for the cardroom, passed chips to the other players at the table. Lawyers for the state argued bestbet Jacksonville thereby established a “bank,” even if it did not directly operate it.
At a June 1 hearing, Department of Business and Professional Regulation lawyer William Hall said, “If a mannequin was sitting in the designated player’s seat, or you just put a Coke can there, the games would play no differently than if a living, breathing, human being was sitting there. They’d play the exact same way. Literally, all the designated player does is sit next to the chips. Can that person legitimately be called a player?”
In response, Attorney John Lockwood, representing bestbet Jacksonville facility and other operators, said the games were just like the ones regulators approved a few months earlier. He also showed videotapes of identical card games at another parimutuel that regulators approved years earlier.
But Hall said although the games themselves are legal, the way they were played was not, even if they had been operated in the same way for years. He said if regulators “allowed something that should not have been allowed, shame on us. But are these games legal, or are they not?”
Van Wyk found bestbet Jacksonville, which began offering the designated-player games last September, failed to prove the games as played ever were authorized. She agreed that lawyers for bestbet Jacksonville gambling regulators “were negligent in failing to stop the games as soon as it became apparent that Jacksonville was operating the games in a banking manner.”
Lockwood also claimed regulators began cracking down on cardrooms’ designated-player games after Governor Rick Scott and the Seminole Tribe signed a proposed $3 billion gambling compact last December. The deal would have extended the tribe’s exclusivity to offer house-banked card games, but it was not approved by the legislature and never took effect.
Lockwood said the cardroom operators will review Van Wyk’s order and most likely will appeal.
