Hi everyone,
I came across this used/cancelled Borgata Casino playing card recently and was hoping if someone can shed some light on this particular deck. I'm pretty certain this was actually used by the casino table games and was sold at their gift shops years ago. The holes are punched on all of the cards. Was this particular deck the first generation of Borgata playing cards? I think they now go with Gemaco as their source for playing cards.
I don't know how long the Borgata's been in business, but if I had to guess, I'd say that's a rather old deck there, relatively speaking. The process for canceling decks at casinos about 20-ish years ago or more used to be just an off-center, drilled-in hole created on a drill press. These days, they often will use a heavy black magic marker to make a line along each side of the deck, then use a band saw to slice off an entire corner of the pack, often while the cards are still in the box, resulting in a very uneven cut from card to card - it makes the cards nearly unusable in a serious poker game without some major alteration of their alterations to keep the cards from being considered "marked."
Some casinos have even ended the practice of selling floor-used, canceled decks as souvenirs - when I was in the Wynn and Encore casinos last spring, they were only selling souvenir decks custom-printed for that purpose, not floor-used decks that had been canceled. The store staff informed me they no longer carried canceled decks.
Interesting bit of trivia - in the state of Nevada, all the casinos use prison labor to re-sort canceled decks into packs for later sale to tourists. The prisoners themselves are not permitted to keep any of the casino-used decks for their own use; they're considered contraband. Prisoners are typically paid pennies an hour - the most recent data I could get was from 2001, but back then, Nevada prisoners were paid as little as $0.25/hour. Paltry as it sounds, it's better than in some states - there's a few that don't pay prisoners at all. In general, they typically earn nothing even close to minimum wage, in the process taking jobs away from the general public that would have paid at least minimum wage. Attempts by prisoners to protest this governmental and corporate exploitation are usually suppressed and hidden from the media.
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