Sometimes, the house loses. Good.

Ambiguous rules lead to interesting court case

Sometimes, two of my favourite worlds collide — this time, it's casinos and small claims court.

There's something about both of them that strips the niceties of humanity away to display raw elements like greed, pig-headedness and pride. They're also packed full of stories.

Both, sadly, are shut down right now by COVID19.

But there's this lovely mash-up from Ontario, which I only discovered a few days ago.

Two card players — Douglas Gordon and Fredrick Woolford — were playing the Pai Gow poker tables at Elements Casino in Brantford. Players get seven cards, which they split into a five-card “high” hand, and a two-card “low” hand.

Gordon was dealt a royal flush in clubs. He had a $10 bet on the table, and Woolford had a side bet of $10 that would pay off with a particular amount if any other player hit big.

The table had a set chart for wins, one detail of which said that if you had “a royal flush with AQ suited,” you'd be paid at 1,000 to one odds, or $10,000 — which is what Gordon thought he'd won. Woolford thought he was coming into $750.

Although a number of casino staff agreed with that interpretation, the bucks stopped with the shift supervisor Sherri Joseph, who said that the hand the men were referring to included a natural royal flush, along with a different suited ace and queen in the “low” hand. That, she maintained, was in the company's official rules.

But the players didn't know those rules. As the judge pointed out in the decision on the case, “The parties have agreed that the above chart was the extent of the information that was available to players at the game. It was displayed on the playing surface by Elements. There were no footnotes, and no cautions that more and fuller rules might apply.” Where were those fuller rules?

“Ms. Joseph acknowledged that the Rules of Play were not available to be taken home by players. They could be viewed, but I infer from the fact that Ms. Joseph had to print a copy out to take to the plaintiffs that there were no copies lying around in the casino for players to view. Ms. Joseph acknowledged that the Standard Operating Procedures were confidential and not generally made available to players.”

In fact, the SOPs carry a confidentiality notice on every page, and can't even be released by staff without prior written permission from head office.

As the plaintiffs pointed out, “The applicable rules, the plaintiffs say, are the ones which were printed on that table, not the ones which were locked in the shift manager's office and never shown to the players, including the plaintiffs.”

It's common sense: if you can't see the rules, you can't agree to them.

The judge ruled, “The tabletop chart contains the relevant terms. The rules and SOP are not relevant to and form no part of the contract or its interpretation. They were not incorporated by reference, and were never produced or available to the plaintiffs at any relevant time. … As the plaintiffs had no knowledge of the contents of the official rules and SOP at the time they placed their bets, those documents cannot be relevant to terms of their contract with Elements. The circumstances which are relevant to a party's understanding of the terms of a contract are the ones existing, and known to that party at the time the contract was formed, not after.”

The judge then ruled the language written on the table was ambiguous, and awarded the two men the winnings they thought they'd deserved all along.

The right words, it seems, are important. Always.