Judge Richard Darwin of San Francisco Superior Court has invalidated state rules that would have fundamentally reshaped how gambling operates across California’s licensed cardrooms.
California is home to 78 licensed cardrooms, according to the state’s Gambling Control Commission, with many municipalities depending on cardroom revenue to fund police, parks, libraries and other local services.
The Bureau of Gambling Control, which operates within Attorney General Rob Bonta’s Department of Justice, was found to have exceeded its authority by imposing the restrictions statewide.
Darwin accepted the cardrooms’ argument that enforcement powers cannot substitute for legislative authority when it comes to recasting lawful games already operating within the state.
The rules, approved in February and effective from 1 April, targeted blackjack-style games and player-dealer games, both of which sit at the centre of most cardrooms’ business models.
Darwin had already halted enforcement in May through a preliminary injunction, but Tuesday’s ruling went further by striking down the regulations entirely rather than merely suspending them.
Among the specific restrictions voided were rules barring games from using blackjack’s defining features, including a target of 21 and a bust rule, alongside limits on third-party proposition players who supply the bank in player-dealer games.
The California Gaming Association warned that the affected games produce roughly half of all cardroom revenue and cautioned that the original rules could have triggered closures, job losses and significant cuts in tax payments to cities across the state.
Kyle Kirkland, president of the California Gaming Association, described the ruling as a firm restraint on regulatory overreach, arguing that substantial changes to California gambling law belong with the legislature and not unelected regulators.
Kirkland said: “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. Today, the Court delivered a clear answer: they cannot.”
The dispute sits within a much longer conflict between commercial cardrooms and tribal casinos, with tribes long contending that third-party proposition players create casino-style banking that infringes on their exclusivity rights.
Cardrooms have used third-party proposition players for decades to act as the bank during individual hands, a practice tribes argue crosses into territory reserved for them under tribal-state compacts.
Governor Gavin Newsom signed the Tribal Nations Access to Justice Act in 2024, allowing tribes to seek court declarations over disputed cardroom games without needing to claim financial damages.
Several tribes filed such cases in early 2025, though a Sacramento Superior Court judge dismissed one major action in October, holding that federal Indian gaming law pre-empted the relevant state statute.
Darwin’s ruling weakens the regulatory backdrop that may have supported tribal arguments, since the bureau’s attempt to restrict these games can no longer be used to suggest the existing cardroom model was improper.
The decision does not, however, prevent tribes from continuing to press their own statutory and constitutional arguments through separate legal channels still working their way through the courts.
Without the now-invalidated regulations in place, cardrooms are free to continue operating under the prior framework unless another court orders otherwise at a later stage.
The tribal pressure on cardrooms becomes less immediate following this ruling, but the underlying dispute over their legality remains very much alive and unresolved.
