The problem with that? The whole twist on Spanish 21 is that it’s basically blackjack with 10s removed from the deck. In another instance, 16 hands of poker were dealt to players before the dealer realized that the cards were not shuffled - they were arranged by suit and sequentially.Īnd on another occasion, 27 hands of Spanish 21 were dealt with decks that contained 10s. The Gaming Control Board found that in one incident from May 2017, there were six blackjack decks in use that were missing cards, leading to 122 hands of blackjack played at SugarHouse without the proper number of cards. “But that all goes out the window when a casino uses broken equipment or ‘illegitimate’ decks, as the Pennsylvania Gaming Control Board previously found SugarHouse to have done.”
“For our clients, and surely for SugarHouse’s other patrons, the thrill in playing table games at SugarHouse is knowing that while the odds are against them, they can still ‘beat the house,’” said attorney Steven Feinstein in a statement. SugarHouse was fined $85,000 plus costs over these issues.
And at times, the cards had not been shuffled properly - or at all. In other cases, there were too few cards in the decks. In some cases, the PGCB found, dealers had been using decks that contained too many cards.
