CalMatters60%
Judge Rejects California Tribes’ Latest Attempt to Kill Blackjack at Cardrooms 57%
By Ryan Sabalow29% CalMatters31%
7/7/2026, 6:49:20 PM
BS Summary: This article contains 20 faulty reasoning types, including Biased Writer Voice, Self-Serving Bias, and Appeal to Authority, with Negativity Bias as the most egregious example at 37.8% saturation with 122 hits. Analysis detected 846 faulty-reasoning hits from 323 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 54.3% and a BS Rank of 57% (8,902 of 20,371 articles). This article is worse (more manipulative) than 56.30% of the article peer group.
California’s tribal casinos found an ally in Attorney General Rob Bonta who sought to ban blackjack at private cardrooms, but a judge ruled Bonta overstepped his authority.
California’s dozens of private gambling halls can continue offering blackjack and other table games after a San Francisco judge ruled last week that Attorney General Rob Bonta overstepped when he tried to ban them.
San Francisco Superior Court Judge Richard Darwin ruled that Bonta's Bureau of Gambling Control didn’t have the legal authority to issue statewide rules severely restricting the games at cardrooms.
The ruling, which followed Darwin’s temporary order in May, is the latest defeat for the state’s casino-owning Native American tribes.
They have spent years and tens of millions of dollars unsuccessfully appealing to courts, voters, the Legislature and California regulators to put their only in-state competitors out of the blackjack business.
The tribes contend cardrooms have unscrupulously violated state laws prohibiting anyone but tribal casinos from offering “house-banked,” Las Vegas-style table games including blackjack, the most lucrative.
Cardroom operators say the ruling once again proves their business model is legal.
It also ensures taxes that cities receive from blackjack revenues will continue to support local government services and cardroom jobs.
“For more than a year, we have said this case is about far more than gaming — it is about whether the attorney general and his regulators can bypass the Legislature and unilaterally rewrite decades of established law,” Kyle Kirkland, a Fresno cardroom owner and president of the California Gaming Association, said in a statement.
“The court delivered a clear answer: they cannot.”
James May, a spokesperson for California Nations Indian Gaming Association, didn’t return an interview request.
Bonta’s office said in an email that officials were disappointed in the ruling and are reviewing their options.
This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.
Speakers
4speakers38%attributed speech200writer words
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100%flagged-word coverageKyle Kirkland
63 attributed words51% of attributed speech92% writer coverage
Attribution is sentence-level. Pattern percentages are calculated only from words assigned to that voice.
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Analysis
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