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The Tech Used to Catch Vegas Cheats
Black Jack writes "Interesting piece on silicon.com about the technology used in Vegas for catching the cheats. It goes into detail on a number of things from facial recognition and RFID to some CIA-developed systems for background checking staff. Surprised they're so open about what they do! ...or is this just the stuff they admit to?"
Surprised they're so open about what they do!
It's one thing to say you do something, it's an entirely different thing to say how you do it. For example, saying that you have an RFID chip in every casino chip is one thing. Having a monitoring system that can quickly and automatically identify a RFID position and movement anomaly among millions of active casino chips is something else.
The NSA: The only part of the US government that actually listens.
Facinating to watch.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
You figure this is a good deterant for any wanna be's. just like i'm sure the show CSI diters many would be murderers..
Anyone have information as to how cheating scanning relates to online poker?
I enjoy playing a hand or 2 of poker, but have been reluctant to try online poker as the chance of cheating seems very high in terms of people working in pairs and sharing information.
Anyone ever see someone accused of cheating on one of the poker sites?
Let's face it, their goal is to stop people from cheating. Catching people that cheat is one part. Convincing the rest that cheating is a bad idea is the other. It's a deterrant.
Catching an employee in the counting room taking his work home with him or a crooked dealer is all well and good, but card counting and varying your bet amount isn't cheating, it's playing shrewdly within the rules. This is where the casinos, IMO, are going over the top with the spying.
Actually, card counting is legal. Casinos don't like you doing it, but they can only ban you from the property.
Carol Pride, CIO of Caesars Palace, told silicon.com that many casinos favour chips and playing cards marked around the edges with invisible inks and barcodes, enabling optical monitoring of their movement and authenticity. Such a system is non-pervasive and reliable and currently far more cost-effective than RFID.
What filters are required to view these markings? I'm cool with RFID chips, but this is not at all good. Well.... It is not good until I have lenses with the right filters.
There are two types of cheating. Cheating the house and cheating the other players. I have a problem with the former and not the latter. When you're playing against the house, the odds are severely stacked against you.
However, the best defense for any kind of cheating is, and always has been, a set (or multiple sets) of well trained eyes.
While the casinos might not want to let every detail out, they certainly want people to know if they have impressive anti-cheating capabilities. The casinos would prefer you didn't do X in the first place than catch you doing X, and if you're aware that they can catch you doing X, they've solved a lot of their problem right there...
Harrah's, the largest casino group in the world and on the Las Vegas Strip
Welcome to the department of redundancy department.
I'd like to know what kind of technology is used to catch cheaters on internet Casinos. Sites like Pokerstars must have some pretty complex systems in place to catch cheaters, as it seems so easy to cheat at first sight. I mean, how hard would it be to have your friends play at the same table as you while on a conference call with them? Maybe I'll try that right now actually...
Religion for nerds. Stuff that really matters
Now how about catching some of the cheaters in my engineering classes?
FTA:
On a behavioural level such intelligence could also flag up 'one to watch' - for example a player laying $5 bets while sitting with $100,000 of chips in his or her pocket. This is certainly no cause for concern in its own right but such behaviour would in the past have caught notorious card counters waiting for the odds to fall in their favour or getting their eye in and honing a system.
While I will agree with the casinos' rights as a business to ask ANYONE to leave their casino for whatever reason, I just want to point out to everyone that card counting is NOT cheating and that people who in engage in card counting are simply using the casino rules and game's strategy to their best advantage. Both Las Vegas and Reno gambling laws state that cheating is defined as manipulating the rules of the game, or using devices to get around the rules of the game, not using the rules to your advantage, thus card counting is not illegal according to Nevada state laws (and many, if not all other state laws as well).
I was in the park the other day wondering why frisbees get bigger and bigger the closer they get - and then it hit me.
Time to start wearing a mask everywhere you go if you want to protect your privacy.
It shoudln't suprise you. It's the same reason the police officers drive around in very obvioulsy marked cars while on patrol. (Except for undercover cars of course, but they are doing a different type of work) While driving for instance, when you see a policeman pull up behind your car the first thing that comes to my mind at least is some form of "am I doing anything wrong at this point in time?" and that's kind of the effect they're after. They want you to know they are there and patroling hopefully keeping you from doing something you shouldn't because you just saw a cop.
I think the same thing goes for a Casino owner. The more that you know about the measures they are using to keep you away, the more likely you are not to try to cheat in the first place. There is also a show on TV currently on Court TV called The Takedown. It's a team of prior casino cheats and thieves that are now hired to go and test the security in casinos by beating them at their game. Interesting show, even more interesting concepts.
Generation Trance: What generation are you?
Surprised they're so open about what they do! ...or is this just they stuff they admit to?"
They can still have excellent security while being totally upfront about it. It's only certain governments that feel the need to hide everything about "security" in the shadows.
This is also good customer friendlyness. If I go to a casino and there's a big sign that says they do facial scanning to catch cheaters, I have no problem with their scanning and I'll still go in. If they do it sneakily and I find out later, I'll feel violated and never go back to that casino.
I think it is only legal if you do it by yourself, with no help from any electronic/mechanical device, like a system conceiled in your shoes or something like that.
After 3 days without programming, life becomes meaningless
- The Tao of Programming
Who's calling who a cheat? They can change the take percentage on their slot machines from the other side of the country? Not taking enough money and giving away to many winnings? Click the mouse a couple of times and fix that.
It beats me why anybody would go to a place like Vegas, which is all about having your money taken away from you. Or if you prefer, it's a place to give your money away. Personally, I think the homeless people on the streets around me are more deserving than those fat corrupt corporate pigs in Vegas.
Look for the guys who are winning.
crazy dynamite monkey
Look for the little yellow fuzzy guy with black spots on his back, says "meh" a lot, reports to a shady sort of wrestleman character, sometimes answers to Ilko Skevüld.
N4st0r, trixx0r h0bb1tz0rz! Th3y st0l3 0ur pr3c10uzz!
Leave poor The Cheat alone. :)
Casinos should go after Homestar Runner or Strong Sad instead
than the patrons? Obviously, they are looking for patrons who are doing something wrong. But I would assume they are more worried about dealers dealing from the bottom of the deck, etc.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
Not sure if this is FUD or not. I've seen a lot of the celeb poker tourneys where they would promote a particular brand of online poker or another. I would think that if anyone could clamp down on cheating it would be the online rooms mostly because they could run stats realtime to be sure or not if a pair were duping a table. Just because they can run stats and check people out online, doesn't mean they do. I guess it's a matter of caveat emptor, or in this case: Adversus solem ne loquitor.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
The simplest card counding method:
Start at zero when the dealer uses a new deck
+1 for a 10 or face card
-1 for every card below 10
When the count is -5 to +5, bet nominal
When the count is below -5 bet higher
When the count is above +5 bet lower, or bet nominal, depending on how much you want to give away
The most difficult part is catching everyone's cards at the end of the hand to get the count for the next hand. There are also doubling down rules that add to the complexity, but I don't have the matrix for that with me.
Caveat Emptor. This is easiest to do when you are playing alone against the dealer, but also the easiest to detect as well.
Basically, they get to throw you out if they catch you counting because it's a private establishment. They can throw you out if they don't like the color of your shirt.
Honestly, I agree with you: it's dumb to throw out players just because they can play better than you allow yourself to. (The percentage comes mostly from the fact that the dealer must hit on 16 and soft 17 no matter what the count looks like. A smart dealer would have a huge advantage, with the player having a chance to bust first, but they don't want to make it a skill vs. skill contest.)
In Atlantic City, it's actually getting harder to find a straight 21 game. They have a lot of variants of it, and although I haven't done the math I bet they eliminate your percentage in the game. Your percentage is small and it's not that hard to eliminate it with a few rule changes. But I guess the Vegas houses feel strongly about the traditional game.
Still, it would be a lot cheaper to change the game than to try to catch people based on what's in their heads. (Or in their shoes, if they're using an illegal computer. At least there they're trying to restrict the game to skill, including memory, although again a rules change could eliminate the advantage of having a computer.)
I suspect that they like the fact that people know that there's a percentage to the player in 21, even though most people don't know how to get it. And unless you're playing on a team it's hard to make money fast at it. (If you can play well enough to get a 1% advantage, you win an average of $1 per hand at the $100 table, which comes out to perhaps $30 an hour. Real money, certainly, but a lot of work for it.)
So if there are 6 players at the table and 5 of them are losing because they don't play the game very well, and they can catch you if you're making the big money playing on a team, it may still be to their advantage to leave the rules as they are. I've never heard of them messing with a small-time card counter, even though it's obvious they're counting.
Sounds dumb to me. There's a lot more vigorous cheating going on (stealing chips when people aren't looking, for example) that's easier to catch.
back when i worked in a casino i had this guy buy in for a couple hundred bucks on a crap game. i was handing the money into the box person and was joking that the money looked fake. he thought i was serious and so looked at it a little more then i had. turns out it was counterfeit and security pulled the guy off the game. turns out after talking to him and running back the tape, he was passed the bogus money from our our cash cage!
the RFID in the chips is a good idea. we once had some bogus 100's come in one afternoon and everyone knew about them but i was still finding them a day later in "clean" banks. if they were all RFID'd you could scan a whole bank and see if it matches what you have down on paper as the proper amount. short a few 100 then there must be some bogus chips in there someplace better take a good long look.
as far as the cheating goes. the only place it's even worth trying is on a crap game with two of the dealers in on it. when the stick person is watching the dealer who's in on it, that's when you pass off a stack of chips. nothing too high for you might call attention, maybe $100.00.you only do a few hundred a night on a BUSY game other wise they will spot you quick, greed is bad. craps is a very verbal game, unlike BJ where everything is done with hand gestures and easy for servailance to watch. in the years that i dealt craps never did servailance call down and ask about a payout we made or about any of the action on the game. it moves too fast and is too verbal for them to know what's going on. if you have a busy game and no box person or floor watching, you could very easy hand off a "payout" that was not legit and nobody would ask or care. there were many many times where i would book a bet verbaly without seeing the actual money on the table and the dice would roll and the person would either win or lose and they would payup or i'd pay them and there was NO money any where to be seen before that moment for the camera. which is why you are always nice to the crap dealer in front of you and watch what you joke around about, i've booked bets that people were joking about, at that point they pay up or they get escorted out of the casino. that was always my favorite way to get rid of people that pissed me off.
The odd aren't just stacked in the casinos favor, they also throw out players who win too much. Casinos use the surveillance systems and facial ID systems to detect and bar players who are card counters. Card counters are not cheaters, they are people who are really good at math who carefully observe what cards have been played and place bets accordingly--just as expert poker players do consciously or unconsciously. Cardcounting can give these blackjack players an extremely small edge. But casinos don't like to lose even to legitimate players. Rather than make adjustments to the game of blackjack, casinos throw winning cardcounters out and pass a blacklist of photos to other casinos around the country. This unethical practice of baring players merely for winning should be illegal, but the gambling influenced laws in places like Las Vegas fully support it. Casinos hold out the promise that you can win if you are good, but balk at actually letting you play if you are really good. Using high tech security to bar non-cheating players for winning is unethical and should be banned. The article should be condemned for giving the false impression that casino security is only used to catch cheaters.
Of course in order for card counting to be effective, you do need to know "basic strategy" which can be found online.
Food not Bombs is a nice platitude but it breaks down when you notice that the Bombees are usually well fed
I saw a show recently about some grad students who used computer-aided counters to "time" the wheel and get a sense of when to place their bets for maximum gain. They wound up with something like 40% profit.
This was back in the '70s and the casinos weren't looking for such devices.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
All this just proves that nomatter how the 'Holier then thou' like to spin it, our vices will forever be the driving force behind our technological development.
Think about it, blood lust drove nuclear research, porn drove Internet penetration (No pun intended) and now we have gambelling (not some war on terror) driving survallience and crowd management.
Sometimes I wish I was a plumber, then I'd know how to deal with other people's shit.
Reason for them being open is to "scare" cheaters. Been like that in Vegas forever.
True, knowing how to play the game and having experience playing is needed first. Who was it that said "you have to know the rules in order to intelligently break them"?
Under law it's illegal to tamper with slot machines, use slugs, play with tampered cards, etc. It's also quasi-illegal to do things like posting, which means changing your bet after the game has started. There are tons of gambler cheats.
The most common "cheat" which isn't a cheat, however, is card counting in Black Jack. Casinos have been known to harass and eject gamblers who are expert card counters. The process is not illegal but they are labelled as cheats anyway. Card counting is little more than being really good at math and concentration and coming up with a consistent pattern. Casinos don't appreciate it because most games have an automatic "profit margin." Roulette, for example, has lots of ways to bet, but if you were to down the same amount of money on every number, you'd end up with winnings of only 80-90% of what you initially put down, essentially losing money. Mathematically they are designed to win unless you cheat.
Blackjack is not the same. You can beat blackjack because the odds say if you play things right, you can come out on top even in the long run. That's why so many organizations have popped up in the past few decades running "black jack" companies. They are made up of math wizzes who train at card counting.
Then the casinos find them, repeatedly showing up, figure out they are counting cards, and then eject them from the casino. It's completely legal so they can't arrest you, but because it's a private company they can refuse your business and ban you from their business, and future excursions to their casino would be considered trespassing.
It's pretty scummy, though I must say it's an improvement over getting your knee caps shot off for being a good poker player, like in the good old mob days.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
... it would make you wonder how many of the preventative measures, and their technological implementations, get - in fact - to be learned, reverse engineered and then avoided by same (or more skilled) level of people, as those who have designed them. Link to the book here.
== With enough Will Power, one could move mountains. With enough Brains, one would just leave them where they are ==
JC made a post talking about how the casinos nailed him for card counting:
m ack/
A few of us took a couple days off in vegas this weekend. After about ten hours at the tables over friday and saturday, I got a tap on the shoulder...
Three men in dark suits introduced themselves and explained that I was welcome to play any other game in the casino, but I am not allowed to play blackjack anymore.
Ah well, I guess my blackjack days are over. I was actually down a bit for the day when they booted me, but I made +$32k over five trips to vegas in the past two years or so.
Taken from here: http://doom-ed.com/blog/category/doom-ed/john-car
"TK-421, why aren't you at your post?"
and of course correctly using "basic strategy" reduces the casino's take from ~10% to ~1%
Food not Bombs is a nice platitude but it breaks down when you notice that the Bombees are usually well fed
Mod parent informative.
Any card game is only a game of pure chance when using an infinte-sized deck or when the previously-turned outside of your own hand are completely unknown at the time bets are placed.
Poker, by its very nature, is a game of skill.
I was unaware that casinos could not host games of skill.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Is the submitter trying to encourage conspiracy theories about Vegas security?... this should be a funny thread. Insert conspiracy theories below. ;)
I just use This.
Weeks of coding saves hours of planning.
amounts to some hired goons taking people out the the desert and putting bullets in their heads.
Here's an older article from Wired on just the opposite; a group of students who sucessfully hacked vegas;
. html
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/10.09/vegas_pr
It's an older article, but it's a good read.
Articles like the parent and your comments make me wonder why anyone wants to go to a Casino. I just do not get it. Vegas is full of fun things to do, without playing games of chance that are orchestrated to take money from you.
Off the Strip games will be where the players you talk about should go then, maybe back room poker games or such.
and it is a case study.
They have a number more systems in place, though most of them manned by actual people. For instance the "counter" this is a guy who would go through the casino 10 times a day, and count people. He was very good at it, and it was cheaper to pay him, than to pay a few people at the doors. Once he go together with the counters from neighboring casinos, and my god were they geeky! :)
Of course there is the safe, which was underground, and had like only two entrances.
Of course I saw three people shot dead, in my three months there too. Mostly stupid people, as the casinos definetly do attract mostly stupid people. One guy came around to the employee entrance, and called out the security manager. One woman was thrown out, one night for threating the life of a dealer, when she came back, all hostile they kept her at the door for the police. When she put her hand into her purse, blam blam.
They had the security guards there work two shifts, one watching the cameras, and one on the floor. This made for far better security, when they saw suspicious people, they could later keep an eye on them. When they were on the floor.
Watching out for card counters was the business of everyone in the casino. You went to classes to learn who to watch out for. They were very interesting. Basically they taught you to watch for people who had "regular" winning patterns, and used patterned betting. People using patterned betting are the first to go, primarily because they feel it's probably a card counter.
Also there are cameras everywhere, not to mention wireless cameras everywhere traveling on different people. They have people with wireless cameras who go through and play games all night long, and watch the other players.
When a large jackpot is won at a particular machine, no less than 10 cameras will focus in on that machine to watch it. As there have been a number of reports of stalkers who then attack a person sitting at the winning machine, and try to take credit for it.
I'll show you cheating. Here's a picture of a roulette wheel. It has two locations makrked '0' and '00' in addition to the numbers 1-36 and yet we're expected to play with odds corresponding to having only 36 locations. Now that's what I call cheating. People who 'cheat' are just evening up the odds a little.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
True. Playing basic strategy does require a good amount of discipline, though, since there are quite a few situations where the correct move is very counterintuitive.
True, they have a higher probability of defeating the single all-in player. But if they fail to beat him, he wins that much more money.
But if you're playing blackjack as a *business*, you need to be able to keep playing. Casinos do talk to each other about problem players, and while they're more concerned about actual cheaters (dealers in league with players, counterfeit chips, etc.), if they're seeing the same players winning too often at games that are rigged in favor of the house, they're going to keep track of who's doing it and stop them. And it's usually groups of players, not just individuals - making money off card counting is usually a team sport, with division of labor between the different players to try to maximize information collection and exploitation while reducing visibility. So you may have some of your players betting at lower levels and doing the counting while another player does the high-roller bit on the tables that have the right odds.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Anyone who watches Homestar gets an automatic -1 Retarded in my book.
Best Cheat ID tech I know of.
I think New Jersey has laws against card-counting, though it's been a while since I lived there. It's definitely legal for casinos to kick people out of public establishments for playing rigged games in ways that the people who rigged them don't like, and they've got laws that permit them to do it - and *that's* cheating. Standard Blackjack rules make it possible for good players to occasionally beat the house systematically, and they've already made a number of changes to the game to make that harder (more decks of cards in the shoe, etc.) (as well as making it harder for dealers to cheat the house), but kicking out player when they're winning is poor sportsmanship. They ought to either solve the problem by making more player-neutral rules, or solve it by giving more free drinks to players who appear to be winning too consistently (or by letting them win, and giving more free drinks to the 4-5 suckers who are losing money at the table that the winner is at.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Like a hard 14 vs a 5 up :)
Food not Bombs is a nice platitude but it breaks down when you notice that the Bombees are usually well fed
If so, a person barred for using their wits to play the games means the casinos are all a bunch of sore losers. On the other hand, bans against gadgets make sense -- you know, the baseball pitcher with the Vaseline in his hair that gets on his hand kind of cheat.
I'm a programmer and some years back I worked in a LARGE well known Nevada Casino chain - in MIS. One of my projects involved the databases that tracked big rollers , another involved the databases that tracked which slot machines had hit and for what amounts. A few interesting points:
1. Slot machines are individually set to return a certan percentage of money put in.
2. The casino KNOWS which slot machines have hot and which have not hit and which are WAY behind their expected hit
3. The high money machines ($5 and up) are set to hit at a MUCH higher rate then penny through nickle machines (like 3-4 times more).
4. As I browsed through the database of people who had won money from slots I noticed that certain names came up MUCH more often then anyone else. And the names usually had different SSNs attached (usually differring by 1 or 2 nubers) but were obviously the same people. I brught this to the attention of the VP of the Casino - he pooh-poohed away the interesting info and I was advised that this was no problem and I should spen my analysis time elsewhere.
Soooo.... casino's know which machines are "ripe" to hit (statisticaly) and certain "anonymous" people get a lot more money (think millions) then anyone else.
Of course it smells. Casinos cheat you - not as bad as the lottery (at least you get a buffet out of it) but don't for one momenty think they're not as crooked as as WorldCom .
On the plus side teh Italian guys who ran the place DID are wearing some pretty nice suits these days...
It seems to me that a fraud detection job can be extremely fascinating. Can any shed some light about these jobs?
Keep in mind that in Vegas, along the strip, you're basically seeing two companies. I don't know about the smaller off-strip casinos or Atlantic City, but property by property it's been consolidated into two corporations. Thus, the information sharing is almost automatic.
It would be interesting to know the exact mechanism of how the banned/black book information is shared, but I would think that is a very closely held corporate secret.
When you sympathize with stupidity, you start thinking like an idiot.
In a moment of weakness, I sent $250 to Costa Rica via Western Union two years ago this month. I am still playing that same money... actually, my bankroll has increased, though still under $1,000 (it's varied from $40 to $1,200).
It seems it would be easy to cheat by collusion, but only at the 'ring' games. I have chosen to play small sit 'n go tournaments almost exclusively. It's much easier for the casinos to see who plays together in these 9 player matches.
When you play poker, the casino makes its money by 'renting' you your seat. It's the only game the house serves in which they don't have an interest in who wins or loses. These online casinos would die a quick death if any evidence of cheating ever emerged.
where's my freakin' foot long margarita?
In Soviet Casion KGB security catch cheats with secret methods but everybody talk about your show trial and execution. In Capitalist Casino private security catch cheats with public methods but nobody talk about your execution.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
"The house always wins". Whatever films or books you may have seen or read about beating the Las Vegas casinos - through fair means or foul - reality will always bring you back to that simple statement of fact.
Tell that to Ken Uston...
You're a bit off there. There's 4 cards that you assign a +1 value to (10, J, Q, K), and 8 cards that you assign a -1 to (2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9). I'm not sure which category you're putting Ace into, but even 5 vs. 8 is still uneven, and will result in a negative number virtually every time. Maybe you meant -0.5, with Ace being 0? It gives you better odds to do the following though:
+1 for 10s and face cards
-1 for 2-5
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
among the millions of stupid players
At its crudest level this would stop the appearance of counterfeit chips and would also catch players trying to sneak an extra chip onto their stake upon winning.
You mean these readers are good enough to read the RFID's of chips stacked directly on top of each other? There must be some sort of random delay to prevent collisions. Be interesting to know more about the technology of reading a lot of simultaneous RFID chips in close proximity to each other.
a player laying $5 bets while sitting with $100,000 of chips in his or her pocket. This is certainly no cause for concern in its own right but such behaviour would in the past have caught notorious card counters waiting for the odds to fall in their favour or getting their eye in and honing a system.
Oh, card counters are nororious now? Last time I checked, card counting is not illegal. Casinos will certainly try to keep you from doing it, but it is a skill for an Advantage Player, and not a cheat. It's only PR that tries to tell you otherwise, but the bias in this article is already apparent.
And btw, since when are casinos entitled to know the contents of your pockets? Time to get out the aluminum foil for the pockets.
Subsequent players, one replacing the other at a table, whose bets vary greatly in size but whose chips originate from the same batch could also be identified as potential partners in a system.
I'd say any cheat team will quickly learn to acquire their checks (casino-speak for chips) separately soon enough.
Carol Pride, CIO of Caesars Palace, told silicon.com that many casinos favour chips and playing cards marked around the edges with invisible inks and barcodes, enabling optical monitoring of their movement and authenticity.
Great! The casino's are marking my decks for me now. Well, if a tv camera can see it, then there will be a way for me to see it too. It's not an invisible ink if they can read it.
Say what they want, but there are very few people serving jail time for cheating a casino in this country.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
...of course the problem with these rules is that they only work when playing a dealer who uses only one deck. For some reason, the ones in Vegas always seem to be using more like six... : )
The computer is not illegal. There is nothing in the law that makes a computer that simply keeps track of something -- cards played, roulette ball drop position -- illegal. It doesn't change how the game is played. It's only the casinos that want to make you believe otherwise, but people caught with such computers have been cut lose because it's not cheating.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Nah, it was Colonel Mustard, and he used the chandelier!
No sig for the moment.
They wouldn't eliminate blackjack any more than I would eliminate a server that got rooted. I'd close the hole and reload the server. The casinos have found that whack-a-mole is a game you can get ahead on. It just requires eternal vigilance.
I have no doubt that scams and systems suceeed more often than the casinos would like you to think. The trick for the casinos is to see to it that no one scheme works more than a few times. Would-be scammers and systemers just have to be wise enough not to get too greedy and run the scheme too long.
What is the evidence that card counters win anything. I've heard about card counting since the 60's, the latest incarnation being from the recent Wired novella er.. article. Certainly with a single deck which was used back before Sinatra, there were favorable combinations which is why casinos use multiple decks and only deal to a certain point before reshuffling to minimize the odds of a grossly favorable or unfavorable deck
So unless someone can point me to a simulation done with an 8 deck shoe reshuffled at the halfway point that shows the odds fluctuations with perfect play (someone must have done this) I think I will believe what the casino people say privately about counters. It's not that they win that they are banned, but that they clog up the tables with their minimum bets while counting (they need to take up the entire table).
And of course, it is in their best interests to make the public believe that there is a way to beat the system...
Having a monitoring system that can quickly and automatically identify a RFID position and movement anomaly among millions of active casino chips is something else.
A system only needs to track the chips around the table, not the entire casino. Catch people adding chips to a winning pile, people removing chips from a losing pile, people taking chips from their neighbor's pile, etc.
This unethical practice of baring players merely for winning should be illegal
I'd have to disagree. While being caught card-counting isn't fun, it's the casino's right to not let you play if they think you're going to take money from them. Just like it's your right not to go to a casino if you think the casino might take money from you.
But you're right about one thing: Card counting is NOT cheating. Blackjack is, at some levels, a skill game. Knowing when to bet high or low is no different from knowing when to hit or stay.
The Internet is generally stupid
if you can 'switch buckets' why not steal the fuckin bucket? Duh.
Actually, I was thinking about all of the chip movements going on at the same time. And we're not just talking about one table, nor simply adding an extra chip to a "no more bets" pile of chips. For example, a set of chips might be split between numerous people and during the course of a day, pass from winning table to winning table, yet be grouped and redivided over and over again. Some chips from the original group are won by the house then won back by different patrons. As the day progresses, most of the chips would likely end up dispursed through out the casino. Only some of the original chips would remain with any given partner of some scheme that cheats sucessfully. I think the problem is much more complex than what everyone has been chatting about.
The NSA: The only part of the US government that actually listens.
Back in '99-00 I was spending a lot of time at Las Vegas casinos. At the peak, I was visiting every other weekend, and I was card counting. Unlike the sensational stories popularized in the media, I was not a "big time" gambler. I was not doing this for a living, and I wasn't do it to strike it rich; I was doing it for fun.
Typically, I'd go out there with $500, find a place with 2 deck blackjack (single deck in true form doesn't exist... the places that advertise it typically cut the deck so deep that you'll only get two hands out of each shuffle), and spend 40-50 hours over the weekend playing. At lower limit tables, even playing perfectly, that doesn't amount to much. On average, with that $500 stake, I'd live with about $700 in my pocket, up $200 for the weekend. This works out to about $5 an hour, less then minimum wage.
Sometimes, if I was lucky, I'd come out with more, but I didn't always win. There were times where I'd leave with 5 crisp $100 in my pocket and return home with nothing but a few good stories.
My favorite experience was at the Excalibur. One night, while playing low limit blackjack an older man sat down at my table. He was flanked on both sides by attractive women nearly half his age, and he was really, really drunk. He pulled a giant wad from his pocket of tightly rolled $100 bills, peeled off a few of them and laid them on the table. The dealer picked them up and said "Changing 300", to which this man yelled "no, damnit I don't want any chips that's my bet!" "money plays".
He lost. He did it again. He lost. When he would win, he'd throw his winnings back on the table and give them back to the casino. Chips, he explained loudly, were "unlucky". His play was horrible; he'd hit a 16 with a 5 showing, double down on an 8 against an Ace. Meanwhile, I just sat there quietly plunking down my $5 bets, occasionally raising them to $10 or $15 when the count was good. This guy was attracting so much attention from the casino staff that my small potato attempt at card counting (which wasn't on that night anyway) went by unnoticed.
At one point, he put $800 down on the table. This was a min $5, max bet $500. "I'm sorry sir, but the maximum bet here is $500". Almost instantly, the pit boss swooped down said "This man can bet as much money as he likes". Of course; this man was a drunken idiot trying to impress the those two woman (I don't know if they were prostitutes or what) by loosing as much money as he could. During the 45 minutes or so he was there, he lost about $20 grand. After that fat roll of $100s were gone, he got up with the help of his lady friends and stumbled out of the casino with a big grin on his face.
I pretty much stopped playing seriously after three losing trips in a row. Now when I get to Nevada I might spend a few hours at the tables, but the all night sessions are a thing of the past. To this day, I still don't consider myself a "cheater"
The Internet is generally stupid
Today's casinos are the experimentation grounds for tomarrows controlled cities.
Remember, the cameras aren't just there to prevent you from cheating - they are also there to prevent the house from cheating. The NGC is, thankfully, a bunch of hard-asses who will pull licenses if the casinos don't play on the straight and level.
This message brought to you by the Las Vegas Tourism Commission. What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas.
If you really think "The NGC is,... a bunch of hard-asses who will pull licenses..." You are either delusional or on the take. Go read any number of books on the topic.
Gambling owns the whole town. Bought and paid for. Be realistic.
You are correct: it's not illegal by the law (as far as I know), but it's against the house rules.
I have no idea what laws casino owners were able to buy in Nevada; for all I know it may actually be illegal to use a laser system against a roulette wheel. But it doesn't much matter; once they've discovered you they can kick you out. The only difference would be (a) whether you can keep what you've won so far, and (b) whether the police meet you on the outside.
Why dont they just shuffle the cards a lot earlier into the shoe?
That way, the odds are against enough cards comming onto the table before the shuffle for the counters to actually identify usable patterns.
And where I come from SOA stands for sexually transmittable disease (remember Fletch: "How's the herpes, Fred?"), so hasta la vista (M$) Ajax!
ADO The Hague rulez!
Actually, in Nevada, it is very illegal.
From the NGC's website:
"NRS 465.075 Use of device for calculating probabilities. It is unlawful for any person at a licensed gaming establishment to use, or possess with the intent to use, any device to assist:
1. In projecting the outcome of the game;
2. In keeping track of the cards played;
3. In analyzing the probability of the occurrence of an event relating to the game; or
4. In analyzing the strategy for playing or betting to be used in the game, except as permitted by the Commission."
"Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos!"
"...It's an older article, but it's a good read..."
We don't tolerate that kind of demeaning, labelling language round here any more.
Please refer to the story as a senior article in future.
Once upon a time, in a Vegas two+decades ago, there was a group of South Asian engineers who came to the city with technology never before seen. It consisted of a keyboard inside of a shoe and eyeglasses with a tiny spreaker in it connected to a small radio tranmit/receive device. The person attired in this gear would play blackjack and enter every card as it was played using the shoe keyboard, which would be transmitted it to his partners in the hotel room.
The hotel room had a computer system set up running software to crunch the card data and when the count became favourable enough, they would transmit the data to their man at the table.
Over the next several weeks, the engineers proceeded to win a substantial amount of money from many of the larger hotels, and they had built up a bit of a reputation amongst the Vegas Gambling Executives.
The engineers ended up making another substantial sum of money by having the casino executives pay to view their system. The next time that Nevada's State Legislature met, the gaming lobbyists made sure that they enacted new legislation making it a felony to use any electronic calculating device to aid a gambler while playing.
Rush Limbaugh is a perfect real world example of an oxycontinmoron
Casino chips are one way to carry and transfer lots of money.
Thing is with RFID is casino chips are no longer going to be as anonymous as they used to be. You'll know that a particular bunch of USD1 million in chips has been passed from one person to someone else.
I wonder whether there's more behind this story than just catching cheats.
Card counting works because as you progress through a deck you occasionally are left with cards that, when dealt, are advantageous to the player. A good counter tracks these situations and makes higher bets when the odds are in his or her favor.
Different counters' skill allows them to see these situations more clearly. More complex methods turn up more advantageous situations (by modifying play style as well as betting amount based on the cards remaining) as well as identify them better. Most counting styles will never tell a player "You've got a 0.7% edge this deal" but rather "You have a 80% that this deal will have an edge in your favor."
What this means is that a weak counter has to make much larger swings between the throwaway bets (dealer's edge) and the money bets (player's edge) in order to have an expected gain for the session. This is of course what the casinos look for, and why blackjack teams are so popular for "professional" counters.
As for the rules, no casual player cares what the special rules are. Most like more rules, as it makes them look more like a 'regular' when they know the specifics of a table. These are the same people that will play tables that have the bonus bet spots for specific hands-- like throw away another dollar and if you draw a 7-7-7 you get $100. Anyone playing to win doesn't look twice at this, but people out for fun often are looking for the big win. This is why casinos get away with adding all the extra rules:
In a single-deck, player vs. dealer, standard rules game that goes through 35 cards, a mediocre counter has a very good confidence when he/she has an edge. When you're playing 8 decks through 250 cards with dealer hitting soft 17, aces split once, a single card on split aces, double on 9-A only, no double after a hit (very common house rules), you need to be a very solid counter to make money.
All of this aside, there are really two types of counters out there-- casual players and professionals. Professionals are the ones who are making teams, pulling big bets, and making a living off the casinos. These are the ones you hear about that get blacklisted and come back in disguise or bring and train new people to go when they can't. They're playing the big money tables, and posting huge betting swings. If casinos weren't allowed to ban card counters and didn't change their rules, these guys could pull thousands of dollars per hour easily. I don't have a problem with casinos banning these players, or at least restircting them from blackjack.
I fall into the former category, casual players. I don't play anthing larger than a $50 table, usually $15 and $25. My bet swings between throwaway and money bets is usually around 1:3, not big enough to raise an alarm with the pit. It's also not enough to make serious money. On average, I make around $30-$40/hour. If I did this 18 hours a day for a three day vacation, they might care, but I'll usually play 12-15 hours over a weekend at a couple different casinos and then go home. I also drop money here and there on other table games where I know I'm going to lose.
When I was first learning, I'd play low stakes tables, and in retrospect, I was absurdly obvious. No one ever hassled me. I got a couple looks and felt like I needed to get up and leave, but I don't think anyone ever gave me a second thought. Partially because at a $5 table, you're taking perhaps $15/hour from the casino on a full table. As was stated in the parent post, for every legitimate counter, there are 10 people with different betting schemes that are losing $15/hour. It's difficult to tell them apart unless you watch them for a long time, so who's going to analyze 40 hours of play to find the one guy who took less than $50 from your business? I think low-stakes counting is written off by casinos, perhaps partly also because having one winner at a table keeps other players pulling money out of their wallet rather than moving on.
Long winded way to get to my point, but it is this-- the casin
Walk in with a pocket transmitter doing 5000watts bursts at that freq for .1second and watch their recievers fry.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
"I'd have to disagree. While being caught card-counting isn't fun, it's the casino's right to not let you play if they think you're going to take money from them. "
And I'd have to disagree with you. The promise of gambling is that it is a fair game--fair in the sense that they won't cheat you. The game isn't fair if they will accept your money as long as you are loosing but kick you out if you win. That is cheating on the part of the Casino.
If it is possible to card count and win, then the game of blackjack is "broken" and the casino can fix it by using more decks or changing the rules of the game, but they know that players like games with fewer decks and better odds. So, instead of fixing the game they throw out good players. That is wrong. That is cheating.
Most online (and brick-and-mortar) poker rooms have a cap on the amount that they rake from each pot. The typical upper limit is something like $3 or so. This is based upon a 5% rake. IOW, a $60 pot and a $6000 pot both generate the same amount of rake to the house. Anybody dumb enough to play in a 5% rake with no cap on the rake will get what they deserve. Some of the small B&M poker rooms in some European countries do this. At the end of the evening, all of the players at the table will be scratching their heads, wondering why nobody at the table is a winner....
The only difference would be (a) whether you can keep what you've won so far, and ....
Actually, at least as of a book I read a while ago, written about a decade ago (I know, lousy source...), casinos have every right to refuse to pay out on chips. You have bought chips, but you have never entered into a contract with them to be able to sell them back. Of course, casinos generally don't refuse to pay out on chips, even in cases of card counting, because it would cost them more in bad publicity (you don't want people aware that there is no obligation for the casino to pay out when you hit the triple jackpot on the slot machine). Interestingly enough, casinos also have no real legal recourse for debts. If they loan you $500 in chips and you refuse to pay them that $500 at day's end, the worst they can do is ban you from the casino.
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.