The state of Florida would not be forced to pay the expected expenses of $450,000 to the lawyers of nine cardroom operators in a legal battle over the so-called “designated player” games. The Sunshine State was backed by the Administrative Law Judge E. Gary Early, who ruled against the cardroom operators and their claims.
Under the judge’s ruling, the gambling operators’ legal representatives would have to split only $50,000 in fees. Judge Early explained that Florida gambling law does not feature a definitive determination on whether multiple awards against an agency up to $50,000 are allowed in case that several parties have challenged a certain proposed rule.
At the time when he overruled the individual fees request made by the gambling operators’ lawyers, the Administrative Law Judge partly relied on a previous ruling in a case named “G.B. v. Agency for Persons with Disabilities”. In his 27-page ruling announced last Friday, the Judge reminded that the afore-mentioned ruling had concluded that in cases in which a group of petitioners are acting collectively in order to achieve a common result, the total fee that could be granted to the petitioners amounts to a maximum of $50,000.
Florida’s Legal Battle over Designated Player Games
As previously reported by Casino Guardian, back in 2017 Judge Early sided with nine gambling operators in different parts of the state in a legal challenge focused on the so-called “designated player” games. At that time, the Administrative Law Judge ruled that the gambling overseers of the state were not right to place a rule on the afore-mentioned games without replacing the regulations first.
For the time being, two types of gambling games are distinguished under Florida laws. The first are known as “banked games”, in which casino venues set up a bank against the players, collect the losing bets and pays out the winning ones. The other type of games are being offered by the local pari-mutuel establishments. In them, there is no house and the players only compete against each other.
In 2015, the gambling regulators in Florida were willing to formally put an end to the designated-player games, but they did not want to introduce other regulations in their place. The regulatory authorities argued that games in which one of the players assumed the role of a “bank” or a “house”, these were still banking games, no matter that they were masked as designated-player games. Florida regulators insisted that such games were conducted in a way which breached the existing laws in the state.
However, as mentioned above, the regulatory authorities planned only to remove the regulations but made no plans of adding new ones in their place. Local gambling operators challenged this decision and said that the removal of designated-player games’ regulations would seriously hurt the local gambling market in which the games contribute an annual revenue of more than $87 million.
At the time when the legal battle was being held, the lawyers of the gambling operators managed to convince the Administrative Law Judge that removing the existing regulations would be the same as simply suspending card rooms from offering them to customers.
- Author
Daniel Williams
