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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?"
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.
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.
It was the History Channel. Breaking Vegas, Counterfeit King episode.
The sites do monitor for abuses like that as best they can. (Checking IPs, etc.) However, there are limits to what you can do in poker anyway. Collusion is possible, but there are also so many tables in play simultaneously that if you suspect there may be collusion going on, you can move to another table very easily.
I've been playing online for some time now and I haven't noticed anyone cheating. It's been fun and profitable for me. YMMV.
My UID is the product of 2 primes.
Whatever method is chosen can be easily faked.
Easily faked, but not necessarily usable. Imagine if each chip had a unique encrypted serial number, and the casino had the ability to track each chip's location and compare to a central database.
If you duplicated the RFID on a chip, you'd set off alarms, as there would be 2 of the same chip in the casino. If you managed to crack the encryption and create your own unique serial number you'd set off alarms as chips would be in the casino which were not in the database.
Even a simple system which doesn't need to be aware of all chips in circulation offer great security. Just track the RFID of the chip when it is played to the database of chips in the bank, and in circulation. If the ID is in the bank, or doesn't appear in the database then you know a dupe has been played. Other dupes of the same chip could not be played without setting off alarms until that first chip has exited the bank, which could be a long time (and it would be very difficult for a player to know when or if it happens).
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Uh, no you can't do that. Gaming regs here prevent casinos from doing that. If you advertise a 99% payout on a bank of slots, those slots HAVE to have a 99% payout (mind you, it's over the lifetime of the machine).
Payout schemes are locked in each machine in the presence of a gaming control agent. They have ways to tell if a machine has been tampered with. Gaming in Vegas is quite on the level- people just forget that a casino won't engage in a game of chance unless it is favored to win.
And there's plenty of homeless people on the streets here in Vegas, so come on down with your roll of cash...
Dealers are watched as much as the patrons are, sometimes more. Dealers stay clean by sticking to procedure- ever wonder why you HAVE to lay money down on the table and spread it instead of handing it directly to a dealer? Wonder why a dealer waves his/hers hands top and bottom when they get tapped out and go off shift?
You probably haven't been "back of house" in a casino, but there are craploads of security and surveillance where only the employees go.
Internet poker sites aren't as worried about collusion (the form of cheating your described) as Vegas casinos are about people cheating the house. If a gambler cheats the house, the casino loses money. But if poker players cheat, it's the other players who lose. The house still gets to take it's share of each poker pot (the rake), so they make money whether you cheat or not.
Of course, they don't allow collusion, because if other players start to lose a lot, they might not want to play as much. And the online poker rooms do watch out for collusion. But it's not nearly as big a concern as Vegas cheaters.
Stupid like a fox!
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.
No, they can't. First of all that's illegal, and is tracked. Second the machines simply aren't built to allow that. Slot machine have a locked "theoretical hold" value which is the theoretical long term amount that the machine will retain as a percentage of turnover. It is fixed, tracked and cannot be changed - certainly not at the click of the mouse.
What a casino can and will do is lay out the machines on the floor with theoretical hold as a consideration. That is, they will endeavour to put a bank of relatively low hold nickel or dime machines near the entrance (not at the entrance mind you, the machine right at the front will be dollar machines or the like: they want casual gamblers wandering by to play the high stake slots) so you get to hear the sound of people winning. The rest of the floor layout is just as carefully designed, taking into account the theoretical hold, popularity of the game type, denomination of the game, quality of the floor space (harder to quantify), and so on to maximise profit. I used to work in the R&D department for a software company that helped casinos do this more effectively, so believe me, I know how exacting they are.
Jedidiah.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
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.
Actually, knowing even one other person's hand could help a fair bit. It immediately changes the outs you know are available to you, and could give you insight into what your opponents have.
Let's say you have a flush draw. You're friend is on, and you're chatting with him offsite at the same time. You're concerned someone has full house, a higher flush, 4 of a kind, or a straight flush. If he has cards that negate any of those possibilities, then you'll be more aggressively because you now have better odds. This naturally increases if you're playing with more people.
A card counter wouldn't really work, because the deck would be reshuffled every hand. As for during the hand, most good poker players can figure out their outs in their head anyway.
- In hell, treason is the work of angels.
Really? What casinos do you go to? Last time I was in Harrah's in NOLA, most all the machines still took metal tokens. They had started a few machines that would pay out the barcoded slip of paper you could cash in...I think it gives you a choice.
I personally don't think that will catch on too well...people are attracted to the sound of coins hitting the payout bin...
If they get rid of that...I think it will hurt the slot games decidedly.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
I was in Vegas last month. Luxor and TI accepts coins. Mandalay Bay, Harrahs, and Rio all only accepts bills. To cash out, you get a voucher, which you then turn into real money at a self-service machine or at a cashier. A lot more convenient than coins. Coins are dirty and cashing out can take a while, if you have a big winner (just the actual dispensing of coins takes a while). In contrast, you have a big winner at the Rio, you print out a voucher and cash out yourself.
Anyway, turns out the site's random number generator wasn't as random as it ought to be. They wrote a program to take advantage of that, and could see not only everybodies hands, but all the cards that would follow.
Yup...this was a few years back. They seeded the RNG with the system time, so between your cards and the flop you could figure out what everybody else's cards were. Haven't heard of anything in the past 3-4 years though.
Twenties Retirement
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."
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