The Jerry's Nugget Whale [2]

1999. A man from France arrives in Las Vegas. He gets into a limousine and asks the driver to head straight to the casino.

One thought consumes his mind.

He is about to buy thousands of decks of playing cards—so many that he will spend the rest of his life using them and never run out.

Rumors say that after the man left the casino, only a handful of decks remained for others to buy.

Soon after, the cards would sell out forever.

What reads almost like a casino heist script actually happened. Back in 1999, a French man arrived in Vegas and cleaned out thousands of playing cards that would later soar in price more than 500 times their original value.

The man is Dominique Duvivier. The decks bear the name of the casino that printed them in 1970—Jerry's Nugget.

The 40,000 Missing Decks

We began investigating the backstory of Jerry's Nugget playing cards last year after discovering an anonymous account offloading the decks at an alarming rate. Six weeks into monitoring the reseller, they'd meticulously sold 34 decks of cards—between four and six decks per week—among listings for random books and DVDs.

At their peak, those 34 decks could have sold for $17,000. These days, the resale price is lower, and we'll soon share some of the reasons why, along with the final figures and quantities the anonymous account sold while we tracked them.

The seller continued to offload decks.

In part one of this Jerry's Nugget story, we covered the early history of Jerry's Nugget playing cards and the key players who helped elevate them to legendary status among magicians and cardists.

Printing techniques and environmental laws make reprinting the deck as it was initially produced in 1970 impossible.

The truth is that while the cards have never been reprinted with the same stock and printing technique, no one knows how many decks were printed originally.

This perceived scarcity, combined with the captivating story of a deck that was printed but never used by a casino (supposedly because they were easy to mark and cheat with), plus the hype status created by Jerry's Nugget's earliest magician collectors, led to resale prices hitting as high as $500.

As we continued to monitor the seller and research the cards, it became impossible to avoid consistently running into the same conspiracies and rumors.

One mystery stands out above all: beginning in the 2000s, it was common knowledge amongst fanatics that a mysterious European collector had bought out the entire remaining stock of Jerry's Nugget decks from the casino gift shop.

This story has circulated widely, but verifying its accuracy has been difficult.

The origins of the claim remain elusive.

We found some excellent research on the subject in a post on The Magic Cafe Forum by Ender Game Reviewer. He recounted the story, verified key details, and spoke to many of the people involved.

We reached out to Ender, who provided valuable additional insights.

Multiple sources corroborated the figure of 40,000 decks on magician forums, and Reddit, and the number even appeared in online auction listings. Between 2015 and 2019, Jerry's Nugget's Wikipedia page also stated a private collector had purchased the remaining stock of 40,000 decks.

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