California Judge Strikes Down New Regulations, Allowing Cardrooms To Keep Dealing Table Games

A San Francisco Superior Court judge on Tuesday struck down new California regulations that would have limited the ability of cardrooms to offer popular table games.

California Attorney General Rob Bonta announced the new regulations in early February after years of the state’s gaming tribes complaining that the cardrooms’ most popular games violate a law that grants them the exclusive right to offer banked games in which players bet against the house.

In early March, a group of cardrooms and third-party proposition players (TPPPs) filed two lawsuits challenging the new regulations issued by the California Department of Justice’s Bureau of Gaming Control. They were granted a preliminary injunction on the matters, which were consolidated, in early June.

Now Judge Richard Darwin has reached the conclusion that the Bureau of Gaming Control lacks the authority to impose these restrictions on table games. The state DOJ could still appeal the ruling.

Commerce, Bell Gardens get result they wanted

The regulations would limit the type of blackjack-style games cardrooms may offer and amend the operations of the TPPPs, which are special, licensed businesses that help cardrooms offer alternate versions of games that traditionally pit gamblers against the house, otherwise known as banked games.

California cardrooms and the cities that depend on them for revenue say the regulations, which went into effect on April 1 but weren't set to be enforced until May 31, threaten to devastate them.

The cities of Commerce and Bell Gardens declared fiscal emergencies and put a ¼-cent sales tax on the June 2026 ballot in response to the cardroom regulations. Voters approved both of them. Those two cities are located in Los Angeles County and are home to two of the state’s three largest cardrooms, Commerce Casino and Parkwest Bicycle Casino.

The state’s own economic assessment of the regulations found that they could result in the loss of hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue for cities as well as hundreds of jobs in California’s cardroom/TPPP sector.

Brief history lesson

State law explicitly bans cardrooms from offering banked games in a throwback to the Gold Rush era when legislators were worried miners on the frontier would get hustled. While cardrooms evolved from saloons to glitzy casinos, they long were restricted to offering games like poker, where gamblers wager against each other.

In late 2007, however, a state official named Bob Lytle reinterpreted state law, opening the door for cardrooms to offer variations of traditionally banked games. Today, thanks to both repeated approvals by state regulators and the TPPPs that work symbiotically with cardrooms, alternate versions of banked games like blackjack and baccarat are offered off reservation in California cardrooms.

The tribes say this blatantly flies in the face of the will of the people, pointing to Proposition 1A, the ballot measure approved by voters in 2000 that authorized tribal gaming in California.

Proposition 1A gives Native American casinos the exclusive right in the Golden State to offer banked games like blackjack and baccarat, where gamblers wager against the house. Tribes tried to stop cardrooms from offering versions of banked games in court, but judges ruled that as sovereign nations they lacked standing to bring a lawsuit in state court.