A comparable situation might be a misprinted price tag at a car dealership, which they are not required to honor as long as it's corrected when discovered.
The problem is that the car dealership would indeed be required to honor the misprinted price tag if it was discovered after they completed the sale. This situation is like, a car dealership misprints the price tags; the salespeople spend hours selling cars; and then the dealership turns around and sues the people who bought cars and drove away. It's not going to be a winner.
(N.B., no analogy is really going to help us too much here, because the outcome will depend on the specifics of state law regarding malfunctioning gambling machines and any agreements made by those particular gamblers to get into that particular casino. So anyone who tells you they have any idea what will happen is either a gambling law expert or making it up. I just thought the car dealership thing was an interesting example.)
My point was mostly that mistakes are often forgiven in business.
Whichever way the legal ruling goes, once the gamblers discovered the mistake, they were, in my mind, cheating by exploiting it.
Imagine the opposite scenario. By my understanding, a deck full of face cards benefits the gambler in blackjack. If a dealer notices that his cards are missing say, the jack of diamonds, it would be wrong of him to keep dealing knowing that the house had a better advantage that intended. Surely players losing money in such a situation would want their money back.
Again, the analogy isn't perfect, but I can see the casino's point of view... even if the decision to sue customers is short-sighted.
The analogy is beyond not perfect -- it is completely broken. The "opposite" scenario you bring up requires actually breaking the game. The deck was not broken at all in this case, it was just in an unfavorable ordering to the house: an ordering that is still perfectly possible. Regardless of being very unlikely to happen, having the ordering these players dealt with over and over, it is still possible. Realize that if even one of the decks had been shuffled, then the players' strategy would have failed and they would have probably lost it all again. The players did not know all the decks would be unshuffled, they saw a pattern and took their chances. That is in fact the whole reason you play a luck based game -- for the off chance that luck falls in your favor.
It is enlightening that you cannot come up with the "opposite" scenario without actually breaking the game. Here allow me to come up with the opposite scenario for you: an ordering that does not favor the player, which by the way, happens basically EVERY HAND. That's why the house basically always wins, because these games are designed to have the odds against the player. By shuffling the cards the house is actually ensuring a higher likelihood of unfavorable outcomes.
That is what is so upsetting about these cases to me: the fundamental reasoning this all comes down to is that people are "not supposed" to win these games, thus winning must be cheating. If you design a game with the odds against the player, then spend tons of money outsourcing the randomization of cards to guarantee no card counting etc, and then encourage superstitious playing to keep people hooked and losing more money -- then on top of all this the player still wins, sue them?
I think we are at an impasse, because I feel the game was broken when the decks were not shuffled. A fair game requires a random (in the sense of unpredictable) deck. No, it wasn't guaranteed, but it was certain enough for me to call it broken.
I hope you can at least understand how it would be more broken by actually having different cards, because again, even after shuffling the events that took place here are still possible. No amount of shuffling or not shuffling can change how many face cards in a deck.
With regard to it being "certain enough", consider whether you would have done the same thing as these people. I can tell you that had I sat at that table, I would have not continued betting higher and higher with the possibility that the next deck is not in my favor and thus possibly losing everything. It of course looks certain in retrospect knowing the whole story of how they were actually unshuffled -- but when you are actually at the table, without this knowledge -- it is again just a chance. You have no idea how many decks come from what company or anything thats going on to result in this. For all you know it might have just been two decks that had the same order due to some weird malfunction. I am sure in the history of gambling lots of people have thought they've seen a pattern recur, bet a lot on it, and LOST -- again, to the favor of the casino.
In other words, consider it from a game theory perspective -- the casino's "long term" winnings absolutely rely on this kind of behavior from patrons. If patrons were to think to themselves "uh oh, something is fishy and this might be unfair, better stop betting" every time they thought they had spotted a pattern or had a system, then the casino would lose tons of money, since they are 99.99% of the time wrong. Casino's winnings fundamentally rely on greediness. That's the basic point I'm trying to make: you can't have it both ways, you can either have greedy patrons who almost always lose everything because of it, or weird bizarro-world patrons that are looking out for the casino.
I think you are right about the retrospect aspect. No one who thought they had detected a pattern (which wasn't later confirmed in the news) would then offer to return the money because they cheated. So I suppose my comment that the gamblers were cheating once they detected the pattern is only really valid in retrospect.
That said, I still don't think I could keep the winnings knowing, in retrospect, that I had won them unfairly, but I think you are right about the casinos needing to sometimes suck it up and take a loss if that's the game they're going to play.
It's fairly common for people to buy high value antiques for a tiny fraction of their actual value at flee-markets etc. However, the seller does not get to say, 'my bad sale is void'.
1) I'm sad to find your totally reasonable comment downvoted. Decline in HN standards, etc...
2) An alternative scenario: what if a car dealership simply mis-priced a car? They're holding a rare race car but the owner asked his know-nothing nephew to appraise it, who was busy texting his girlfriend and absent-mindedly wrote down $500. If you buy this car and the owner realizes his mistake the next day, can he ask for the car back?
It seems the situation is basically if a mistake is made that still seems reasonable (pricing a car for $19000 instead of $20000), it must be honored. If the mistake is completely unreasonable (pricing a car for $20 instead of $20000) it does not have to be honored. But a mistake in business knowledge (pricing a $20000 car for $2000 because you think that's all it's worth) still has to be honored.
The price tag is not a contract and until a contract is executed nothing legally exists.
It takes an offer and acceptance.
If the price tag says $15,000 for the car, and you enter into a contract which the dealer signs then the dealer has to sell you the car. The same as if you make a mistake in your calculations and sign to purchase the car.
Now in the case where perhaps a dealer employee had changed the price and it could be proven that you knew that there would be some legal concept that allows the dealership to get out of the contract.
In New Jersey the casino is not allowed to ask you to leave for counting cards. They can only force you to bet the same amount and/or shuffle every hand.
