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.

• The Jerry's Nugget Whale: Part One

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.

During this period, a well-known figure in European and French magic circles named Dominique Duvivier began to be rumored online as the man behind this staggering, potentially market-altering purchase.

Over the years, magicians repeatedly mentioned Duvivier as the buyer of 40,000 decks. By 2019, even the Wikipedia page for Jerry's Nugget included his name as the man responsible for the purchase.

The rumor spread quickly and began to be retold as accurate, but the number of decks and the man behind the purchase were unverified. Looking at promotional online photos of Duvivier, it's easy to see why people believe he could be the mysterious man behind the vast stockpile.

Duvivier did not publicly comment on the conspiracy, but those who knew him, like Lee Asher, dispelled the validity of the claim.

In 2020, Asher told Ender:

In Ender's forum post, he stated that he believed Lee Asher knew Duvivier personally, visited Duvivier on multiple occasions, and that Asher was the person who first told Duvivier that the casino even had the cards for sale.

Duvivier has since revealed in a Genii article that Michael Weber first told him the cards were available for purchase from the gift shop. Duvivier has said that Weber was initially his main supplier, regularly bringing him decks and even bricks from time to time. More on this later.

Asher went on to tell Ender:

So, where did this rumor begin? Did someone really wipe out the remaining deck supply back in 1999, and if so, how many decks did they manage to stockpile?

The Real Figure

The number 40,000 seemed implausible to many, including our team at One Ahead. The problem is that it's incredibly difficult to track down where it really started.

Ender used the Wayback Machine to find out that the earliest online reference to the 40,000 figure was from 2004 on a ucsb.edu website by someone neither Ender nor we managed to contact.

Some people familiar with the casino online suggested that Jerry’s Nugget never had that many decks in stock to begin with. Our team decided to start making efforts to speak to the United States Playing Card Company and Jerry's Nugget Casino.

As Ender discovered, most sources quoted each other, creating a pyramid of references that all led back to a single, unverified post from 2004. Many, including Ender, began to believe we would never solve the mystery of the missing decks.

Then, Dominique Duvivier addressed the rumor directly. He first published an article about it on his website in French in 2011, but it reached the general public with the English translation published in Genii Magazine in March 2022.

His version of the story remains astonishing.

He confirmed that he had indeed purchased thousands of decks. In his own words:

He bought them all, negotiating a price of one dollar per deck.

Woah—hold on a moment. Magicians all over the world have been paying up to $500 per deck for the "rare" playing cards, while this entire time, one man has been stockpiling thousands of them that he bought for $1 each.

Did you do the math? Yes—Dominique Duvivier purchased 14,400 decks (14,000!) of Jerry’s Nugget playing cards in 1999. If valued at $300 per deck, the number Cardistry Con used when valuing Michael Weber's gross in 2023, Duvivier's stockpile might represent $4,200,000.

But could you even offload that many decks without crashing the market value? And does the existence of a 14,000 deck stockpile in itself not drastically reduce the value of Weber's $43k gross?

Multiple sources online claim that only one gross of decks remained in the casino gift shop once Duvivier left, and were later bought by a collector from Japan.

Duvivier transported the decks to France by boat and now stores them in secure locations. The story reads as though he robbed the casino and had to transport 14,000 bricks of gold across the globe and hide them.

Duvivier claims to use these cards exclusively for personal purposes and remains indifferent to market trends. In his own words:

Hats off to you, Mr Duvivier.

This revelation raised questions about our understanding of Jerry’s Nugget cards and their perceived scarcity.

We knew we needed to speak to a collectibles expert about the impact "whales" can have and the potential for market manipulation.

How much of the total market must one person own to control it? And how could the knowledge of Duvivier's massive stockpile have impacted the resale price if it had been made known much earlier?

The big question remains: how many Jerry’s Nugget decks were printed in total? If nearly 15,000 decks were still available 30 years after production, how many were sold before? We were going to try to find out.

The Obsession Among Magicians

Did you notice a trend in this story? All the key players are magicians or involved in the magic community, and all of them happen to be early collectors.

Given the unique history and qualities of this deck, one might expect broader interest from playing card collectors and enthusiasts outside of magic.

Consider the market for rare Pokémon cards. Even if you’re not part of that community, you’ve likely heard about the astronomical prices some of them fetch. The same applies to vinyl records, signed memorabilia, and other collectibles. But why does the Jerry’s Nugget phenomenon seem confined mainly to magicians?

We reached out to playing card collectors outside of the magic world. One expert, known as "The Congress Guy," is a leading authority on Congress Playing Cards. He became interested in Jerry's Nugget playing cards before 2020 and began investigating the story upon encountering the claim of 40,000 decks, which he found unrealistic.

In fact, The Congress Guy was the one who removed the figure from Wikipedia in 2020. Here’s what he had to say:

The Congress Guy confirmed that the only verifiable figures for Jerry's Nugget decks come from Duvivier and the collector in Japan.

We asked for his thoughts on secondary market prices—will they continue to rise?

We posed the same question to Lee Asher, one of the first magicians to popularize Jerry’s Nugget decks. Asher wrote a guide on identifying counterfeits and sold many decks through online auctions. He says he still owns a personal stash.

Asher shared his thoughts on the secondary market:

We also reached out to Ender, the person behind the original investigation into Duvivier, which he published on The Magic Café.

We asked if the hype around these cards seemed to exist only among magicians. Contrary to what we had seen in our research, Ender believed the cards' popularity had grown beyond the magician market. Ender says:

The story didn't stop there. Even with the revelation of Duvivier's stockpile, decks continue to sell on the secondary market.

Many have continued to cash in on their perceived scarcity, so we wanted to get a sense of what's happened in the more recent world of Jerry's Nugget cards.

We certainly had the time to keep digging for details as the reseller we were monitoring continued to offload decks.

In fact, by the time we published the first part of this story, our team had a pretty good idea who the account might belong to.

We decided to reach out to them directly.