Chumba Casino Mississippi Lawsuit: Motion to Dismiss Filed

A motion to dismiss for lack of jurisdiction and a motion to compel arbitration were filed on September 8, 2026 in the Mississippi class action seeking to recover what residents lost on Chumba Casino, Global Poker and LuckyLand Slots. Neither has been ruled on, the plaintiff now has until October 14, 2026 to respond to them, and on September 11 the court stayed discovery again. The two motions arrived with two supporting memoranda and a Rule 7.1 disclosure statement, five entries in all, and they are the first motions on the file since an order lifted a stay on August 28. The court has since named them in its own words as the defendants' motions, confirming what the clerk's labels only implied.

The case is Saulny v. VGW Holdings Limited, No. 3:24-cv-00619 in the US District Court for the Southern District of Mississippi, before District Judge Henry T. Wingate. We read the docket on September 9, which is our verification method on every court story, and we have not seen these entries reported anywhere else. Seven further entries have gone on the file since, three later that day, two on September 10, one on September 11 and one on September 17, and are covered below. The September 11 entry stays discovery again; the September 17 entry denies the 2025 attorney-fees motion and extends the plaintiff's response deadline, and it does not rule on the motions this piece is about. Nothing about the dismissal or the arbitration question has been decided, and nothing here is a finding against anybody.

What exactly was filed?

Less than we would like to tell you. Entries 35 to 39 carry no clerk narrative in the public docket mirror, none of the five documents is downloadable, and the mirror does not name the filing party. What it gives is the label the clerk attached to each one.

Is the Mississippi case stayed again?

Discovery is. The case is not. Entry 43, dated September 11, 2026, stays discovery again, and it is the entry that changes the direction of this case. What the order says, how long it runs and whether it is tied to the pending motions are all outside the public record, because the entry carries no text and no document, and we are not going to invent them. What the label does settle is which kind of stay this is: "Order Staying Discovery" is the same clerk event that sits on entry 12, the November 19, 2024 order signed by Magistrate Judge LaKeysha Greer Isaac, and that entry does carry full text. So this is the court acting, not a party asking. It is also a stay of discovery rather than a stay of the case, and no order on the file touches entries 35 to 39.

That distinction is the part with money in it. A loss-recovery claim turns on how much each class member actually spent, and the records that would prove it sit with the operator. While discovery is stayed, none of that moves.

The five rows before it arrived after this article first published. Two numbered entries dated September 9 were logged as "Extend Deadline" and "Pretrial Memorandum", and a third, entry 42, went on the file on September 10 as "Extension of Time to File Response/Reply", each with an untexted annotation alongside it. Like everything above them they carry no narrative and no document, so we cannot tell you whose deadline is being extended, whose response is being put off, or what the pretrial memorandum says.

One row after it does contain rulings, and they are the first this docket has produced since the stay came off. Entry 44, dated September 17, 2026, is a three-page order signed by Judge Wingate. It denies entry 28, the attorney-fees motion four VGW entities filed on October 1, 2025 and which had sat undecided ever since, seeking $23,363.78. The court's reasoning is short: its earlier order had made a fee award contingent on the plaintiff failing to explain her delay in seeking to amend, it found her explanation satisfactory, and "[b]ecause the Court excused the delay and granted Plaintiff's request to amend, Plaintiff should not be required to pay attorneys' fees."

The same order grants the plaintiff's extension motion, but not as asked. She sought 37 extra days, to October 30. The court held "a shorter extension is more appropriate" and wrote: "Accordingly, Plaintiff shall have until October 14th, 2026, to file a Response to Defendants' Motions to Dismiss [35] and to Compel Arbitration [37]." Absent the extension the response would have fallen due on September 22 under Local Uniform Civil Rule 7(b)(4), and any reply is due seven days after the response. What entry 44 is not is a ruling on this article's subject: nothing on the file responds to the motions themselves.

That order also settles who filed the September 8 motions and what they ask for, which the docket labels alone could not. The court names them as "Defendant[s'] ... renewed Motions to Dismiss [35] and to Compel Arbitration [37]", and names the defendants as VGW Holdings Ltd., VGW Malta Ltd., VGW Luckyland, Inc. and VGW GP Ltd. We had read them as defence filings from the labels; the court has now said so. This docket had run the same play before: on November 18, 2024 the VGW defendants filed a motion to compel arbitration at entry 8 and a motion to dismiss for lack of jurisdiction at entry 10, and Judge Wingate's order of September 26, 2025 disposed of both at once, "finding as moot, at this juncture, 8 Motion to Compel; finding as moot, at this juncture, 10 Motion to Dismiss for Lack of Jurisdiction; granting, conditionally, 23 Motion to Amend/Correct."

One caution about the word stay, because it is easy to overstate. The only stay this docket records in text is entry 12, a November 19, 2024 "ORDER STAYING DISCOVERY" signed by Magistrate Judge LaKeysha Greer Isaac, which also cancelled the case management conference set for January 7, 2025. The case itself did not stop: the parties briefed a motion to amend through 2025 and were still filing on attorney fees in October that year, after which the docket went quiet until August 21, 2026. The August 28 order lifting a stay carries no text, so which stay it lifted is a reading of the file rather than something the court has said.

Those two motions were never decided on their merits. They fell away because the plaintiff was allowed to amend. The amended complaint went in on August 25, the stay came off on August 28, and the same pair of motion types is back on the docket a fortnight later.

Was the September 8 motion about arbitration?

Yes. The court said so on September 17, in the order at entry 44 quoted above, which calls entry 37 a motion "to Compel Arbitration". Until that order landed the docket said it only in labels, and the reasoning we used then is set out below, because it turned out to be right and the method is the point.

Entry 8 in 2024 reads in full: "MOTION to Compel Arbitration by VGW Holdings Limited, VGW Luckyland Inc., VGW GP Limited". The document label the clerk attached to that motion was the single word "Compel". Entry 37, filed on September 8, 2026, carries that same one-word label and nothing else. The same holds for the other pair: entry 10 in 2024 was a "MOTION to Dismiss for Lack of Jurisdiction or, in The Alternative, to Transfer, in Part, and Otherwise Dismiss The Complaint", labelled "Dismiss/Lack of Jurisdiction". Entries 9 and 11 were the supporting memoranda. Set the two rounds side by side and the four labels line up one for one.

So "Compel" is not an ambiguous word on this docket. It is the label this clerk used for a motion to compel arbitration in this case. That was an inference from a naming convention rather than a reading of the motion when we published it, and we flagged that a motion to compel something else - discovery, most obviously - could draw the same label. The September 17 order has since confirmed the reading.

One more thread points the same way. When the 2024 motion to compel arbitration was live, the plaintiff's October 6, 2025 response to Judge Wingate's order attached the JAMS Streamlined Rules as an exhibit, which is what a party does when the fight is about being pushed into arbitration. Five days after that motion was mooted, four defendants - VGW GP Limited, VGW Holdings Limited, VGW Luckyland Inc. and VGW Malta Limited - moved for their attorney fees. That motion sat undecided for almost a year and was denied at entry 44 on September 17, 2026.

If the court does compel arbitration this time, the class action ends as a class action. That is the practical stake for anybody in Mississippi who lost money on these three brands. A Georgia federal judge did exactly that to a different Chumba Casino and LuckyLand Slots class action on July 1, 2026, and what happened when that case was sent to arbitration is the clearest picture available of what this docket would look like on the other side of a compel order.

What is the Mississippi Chumba lawsuit about?

The claim is about getting money back. The complaint pleads a single count under Mississippi Code section 87-1-5, the state's gambling-loss recovery statute, on behalf of residents who lost money on Chumba Casino, Global Poker or LuckyLand Slots, reaching back at least three years. We set out the whole claim, its named plaintiff and the two VGW entities the amendment adds when the stay lifted on August 28; nothing about the claim itself has changed since. What is new here is the defence answer to it, and the fact that it arrived as a jurisdiction-and-arbitration pair rather than an answer to the complaint.

Old loss-recovery statutes are doing a lot of work in this category right now. The two Minnesota class actions against VGW run on Minnesota's version of the same idea, and neither state has a sweepstakes-specific ban, which is what our Mississippi sweepstakes legality page sets out. If the mechanics of that carve-out are what you are trying to follow, what the sweepstakes carve-out actually allows is the background.

Do Mississippi players need to do anything?

No. There is nothing for a player to do about it, and that is worth saying plainly rather than leaving implied. No class has been certified, no claims process exists, no deadline is running, and nobody legitimate will ask you for a fee to join. The one thing worth doing is a record-keeping one: if you played any of the three brands in Mississippi, the class as pleaded is defined by past losses, so account statements and redemption history are the only things that would ever matter, and they are easier to export now than after an account closes.

The arbitration clause behind the compel motion is a separate question with its own clock, and it is not one this docket opens or closes: how the sweepstakes arbitration opt-out window works sets out which operators give 30 days and why the count starts on the day you sign up rather than the day a case is filed.

Nothing on this docket changes availability or balances anywhere. It does not touch the separate LuckyLand Slots redemption deadline of September 14, which was a wind-down with its own clock and has since run out: the brand stopped accepting redemption requests that day and has published no post-closure process. Our VGW operator profile tracks the corporate structure the four defendant entities sit in, our biggest open file on the same group is the Florida attorney general's suit against VGW and Stake.us, and the brand pages are Chumba Casino, Global Poker and LuckyLand Slots.

Sources & documents

• Saulny v. VGW Holdings Limited, No. 3:24-cv-00619 (S.D. Miss.) - full docket
• CourtListener docket-entry index for No. 3:24-cv-00619
• Proposed amended complaint attached to the April 24, 2025 motion to amend (PDF)
• Order on Motion [28] for Attorneys' Fees, ECF 44, entered September 17, 2026 (PDF)

The docket was read on September 9, 2026 and re-read on September 10, September 11, September 12, September 18 and September 20, when it still listed September 17 as its date of last known filing. Entries 33 to 43 remain title-only in the public mirror: no clerk narrative, no filing party and no retrievable document, and we tried both attachment paths for each of the five September 8 entries and got HTTP 404 on all ten. Entry 44 was title-only on September 18 and had backfilled with full text and a downloadable three-page order by September 20; that order is the source of every quotation attributed to it above. Every quotation above comes from an entry that does carry clerk text. CourtListener mirrors what somebody has pulled from PACER, so an absence here is an absence from the public mirror rather than from the court's file. No court has held that VGW or any of its entities did anything unlawful, and every allegation in the underlying complaint remains an allegation.

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