Deal leaves racetracks, Seminoles at odds
South Florida racetracks that offer certain types of card games are trying to hold onto the lucrative business after the state of Florida reached a settlement with the Seminole Tribe.
The state agreed not to appeal a 2016 court decision that allowed the Seminoles to offer blackjack through 2030. In return, the tribe will make revenue-sharing payments to the state until the end of the 2018 legislative session — but only if Florida “takes aggressive enforcement action” against designated player games that operate as banked card games at pari-mutuel casinos around the state.
But the pari-mutuel industry maintains its games are in keeping with state regulations, leaving the state in the position of cracking down on a practice that the industry says is perfectly legal.
So-called designated player games — such as Three-Card Poker and Ultimate Texas Hold’em — are major money-makers for the parimutuels. A study of 10 cardrooms estimated they made $55 million in revenue over five years, according to The Innovation Group.
As the games are currently dealt, they are in keeping with Florida law, said John Lockwood, the Palm Beach Kennel Club’s attorney.
The Palm Beach Kennel Club, Miami’s Magic City Casino and Pompano Beach’s Isle Casino all offer some form of the games. Casinos in Broward and Miami-Dade offer slot machines, unlike the rest of the state, which make the card games less popular.
The Seminole Tribe is supposed to have the exclusive right to offer banked card games — games in which every player plays against the dealer instead of playing against each other as they do in poker.
“It’s really not complicated. If the players around the table are playing against one person, a bank, it’s a banked card game. If they all have the same bet in a pile and only one’s going to win, then it’s not a banked card game,” said Seminole Tribe lawyer Barry Richard. “The tribe is paying a huge amount of money — more than twice as much as all the pari-mutuels put together — for exclusivity, and that’s what they want. They’re paying for it, they’re entitled to it.”
While previous iterations of parimutuels’ designated player games only had one player act as a “banker,” these days, the designated player who acts as a banker can rotate, just like the dealer rotates in a game of poker.
No fixed banker, no banked card game, according to the parimutuels.
“It doesn’t matter what you label it,” Richard said. “If what they’re talking about when they say a designated player game is a poker game in which the dealer rotates around the table, then that’s fine. But if, in any hand, everybody’s playing against a banker, that’s the issue. It doesn’t matter what they call it.”
The agreement between the tribe and the state settled a long-running lawsuit over blackjack. Under the terms of the agreement, the tribe will continue to offer blackjack at its casinos through 2030, while the state will get about $340 million over the next year.
In a 2016 federal court ruling, U.S. District Judge Robert Hinkle called designated player games an “egregious example of the cardrooms’ attempt to evade the prohibition on banked card games.”