The Remarkable Case of Golden Ten: An Interplay of Justice and Science

THE DECADE OF THE 1980s was the heyday of the Golden Ten game in the Netherlands. At that time there were more than 100 casinos in the country that exploited Golden Ten; many were small casinos with no more than one or two playing tables but a number were larger gaming places that could measure up to the three state casinos in Zandvoort (1976), Valkenburg (1977) and Scheveningen (1979). Mostly the Golden Ten casinos were tolerated but they were often controversial as well. Not only were some of the casinos suspect of fraud and associated with criminality, but they also had an unclear legal status. The uncertainty lay therein if Golden Ten was to be considered a game of skill, as the operators claimed it was, or rather a gaming game, as, among others, the Dutch Casino Counsel marked it. In the early nineties all uncertainty was ended, and consequently Golden Ten bloomed. In 1991 the Supreme Court finally decided that Golden Ten is indeed a game of chance and that exploitation is therefore illegal according to the Dutch Gaming Act. Since this decision the Golden Ten casinos have been leading a marginal existence. On the other hand, the Dutch state casinos, known as Holland Casino since 1989, has expanded and extended considerably in the late eighties and early nineties. Its number went up from 3 to 10 between 1985 and 1995 and profits rose from 142 to 665 million guilders. This way, the rise of the legal casino industry seems to present a classic example of a market of “vices” that enter the business illegally, are then tolerated and eventually legalized, a developmental logic that, generally speaking, seems to revolve around alcohol, drugs, and prostitution as well.1