California’s gaming tribes and its non-Indian card rooms are locked in a struggle the card rooms see as an existential one: the rules governing house-banked games at card clubs.
The card clubs have long maintained that they can’t operate at a profit if the letter of the law that requires that the dealer at a poker game not be an employee. The object is that the card room has no interest in the games, except for the fee it collects for each hand.
Because changing dealers with each hand steals time spent playing, the card clubs, with the tacit permission of the state’s gambling authorities have for several years used a system where a professional dealer is designated as the representative of the player who is supposed to have the deal.
This takes advantage of the fact that few players want to act as the house, mainly because that person has to be capable of covering all the bets placed. So, they are happy to pass that task on to someone else.
Tribal casinos are able to operate without this handicap and insist that card rooms shouldn’t be allowed to. Tribes have long called foul on this practice, and now the long simmering fight appears headed for a showdown in the courts.
Kyle Kirkland, president of the California Gaming Association, which represents the state’s card rooms, told Pechanga.net: “This so-called player-dealer position has favorable economic advantages… but many recreational players decline the option because they don’t understand it, don’t want added risk or simply just want to play the games in the manner to which they’ve become accustomed in other jurisdictions.”
Last year the California Bureau of Gambling Control director Wayne Quint issued a clarification on the house-bank rules that had just the opposite effect. It inflamed tribal ire.
The changes Quint sought were that no one person could hold the dealer’s position for longer than 60 minutes at a time and it must rotate to someone different. This required that dealers be rotated, which, once again imposed a money-draining delay every hour.
This didn’t mollify the tribes at all. They appear headed towards challenging the practice in court.
Leland Kinter, chairman of the Yocha Dehe Wintun Nation declared recently: “The California penal code expressly bars the playing of blackjack as a prohibited game. Yet you can drive down streets and highways in our state and see billboards on which card rooms boldly advertise that they play Las Vegas-style blackjack.” He added, “Card rooms no longer rotate the bank in the playing of their games and allow so-called third-party proposition players, essentially a partner of the card rooms, to maintain that bank.”
Cardrooms insist they are following the law. Says gaming lawyer David Fried, “… the legislature required a systematic and continuous rotation, without defining those terms, and with the Attorney General’s office to review each set of game rules for compliance. There are many different ways to ‘continuously and systematically rotate’ the player-dealer position.”
Sooner rather than later the tribes and the card rooms will probably be called on to litigate their points of view.
