Casino suing gamblers who won £1m thanks to unshuffled cards blunder

Baccarat, and the Golden Nugget in Atlantic CityA casino in Atlantic City is suing a group of gamblers who won almost £1 million thanks to a blunder that saw a game played with unshuffled cards.

The group of 14 players were enjoying a game of mini-baccarat at the Golden Nugget when they began to notice that card after card was coming out in an identical sequence.

Realising that they were in for the chance of a lifetime the gamblers calmly began to raise the stakes from the $10 table minimum up to the maximum of $5,000.

Over the course of the 41 consecutive winning hands that followed, they rinsed their hosts to the tune of $1,536,700 (£974,816).

The casino then realised what was going on and dozens of staff began to surround the table to try and figure out how the players were winning - but try as they might, they could see no evidence of cheating.

The flow of winning hands did eventually dry up, and while nine of the gamblers had been allowed to cash in their chips and leave, the remaining five - whose winnings totalled over $970,000 - were refused their money.

Security staff then turned to figuring out what they thought was "a sophisticated swindling and cheating scheme", a task they went about in a highly disturbing manner. One man from Brooklyn was woken in the middle of the night, physically restrained and kept in his room (without food or water) for eight hours while his belongings were searched.

Eventually, however, the culprit was discovered: a batch of cards from the supplier which had supposedly been pre-shuffled, but which had been sent to the casino in standard sequential order.

The casino is suing the card supplier, as you might expect - but they are also suing the gamblers, claiming that they have no right to be paid.

Ironically, they are relying on a law designed to protect gamblers from unscrupulous casinos. New Jersey law insists that odds for all games be fair, but the rule applies to the casinos as much as it does the punters. Given that the odds were stacked in favour of the punters, the casino is hoping to escape their huge bill.

The gamblers' lawyer, Benjamin Dash, is having none of it: "The Golden Nugget appealed to gamblers to come in and play games licensed and sanctioned by the state of New Jersey," he said.

"My clients did exactly that, and then were denied their winnings. There is absolutely no law in New Jersey that would permit the Golden Nugget to declare the game illegal because it failed to provide shuffled cards."