A San Francisco Superior Court judge has blocked California from enforcing new rules that would have sharply limited table games in cardrooms, including traditional blackjack. For now, licensed cardrooms can keep dealing the games while the legal fight continues.
According to Courthouse News, Judge Richard Darwin said in a bench ruling that the Bureau of Gambling Control did not have the authority to issue statewide regulations. He sided with the California Gaming Association and found that the bureau had acted beyond its powers.
The rules had been approved by the state Office of Administrative Law earlier this year and were supposed to take effect on April 1, though they were not expected to be enforced until June 1. CalMatters reported that Darwin had already issued a preliminary injunction on May 21 blocking enforcement while the case moved forward.
The proposed regulations would have rewritten blackjack-style play in ways that went far beyond a name change. Under the rules, players would have been unable to bust, the winner would have been the player closest to a target point count against the player-dealer, and game names could not include the number 21 or the word blackjack.
They also would have tightened the player-dealer system used in cardrooms. The player-dealer role would have had to be offered to other players at the start of every hand, rotated to at least two other players every 40 minutes, and could not be filled consecutively by a third-party provider of proposition-player services.
The state and the cardrooms framed the dispute as a question of authority. Jeremy Kreisberg argued that the bureau could approve games individually but could not categorically prohibit them, while Sharon O’Grady said the bureau has primary authority to control games, has regulated game activity since 1999, and has tried to implement the restrictions for 10 years.
The conflict sits inside a wider battle between privately run cardrooms and tribal casinos. Cardrooms use third-party proposition players to serve as the house or bank, and tribal casinos have argued that those games violate state law because only tribes may offer house-banked table games.
Cardroom operators and several local governments said the rules would have put more than 30,000 jobs at risk and cut tax revenue that helps pay for city services. In one example cited by CalMatters, San Jose receives $30 million a year from cardrooms, enough to fund 150 police officers or 133 firefighters.
The stakes have also been political. CalMatters reported that Hawaiian Gardens Casino spent $9.1 million on lobbying in 2023, and that after Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a 2024 law that empowered tribes to sue cardrooms, the industry spent more than $3 million that fall in retaliation against four lawmakers.
After Tuesday’s ruling, the California Attorney General’s office said it was disappointed and reviewing its options. Darwin said the case would go up on appeal, and the attorney general’s office is expected to keep fighting over who gets to regulate the games.
