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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.
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.
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
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 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
Now how about catching some of the cheaters in my engineering classes?
Don't worry. They'll be caught in the real world when the buildings they design collapse, or the machine they design breaks apart and kills someone, or when they can't design a functioning 4-bit comparator.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
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.
Funny, every time I watch a show on "hey, look at how these criminals did x, and look at how were so smart that we still busted them!" I think to myself.. well, you've given us all the info on how the criminals used to do it, and told us that it still works on a large number of cases, and now you've told us how you catch people, so we can avoid doing that in future. Although I can never be bothered to get into the business of it all, mainly cos it costs a fair bit (or you need to know people) to get started and I'm lazy and don't have the money. But I'm sure for every TV show on how to bust people, you simply introduce a whole number of new crooks to the game, with bigger and better ideas.
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.
There are plenty of good reasons to go to Vegas for business meetings. Good airline connections, decent hotels at reasonable rates. Good food. All subsidized by those fools who go there and leave their money on the tables.
:-)
Now if you go there to gamble, that's a different matter. But other people should continue to do that in order to keep subsidizing my meetings.
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"
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?"
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...
Convince people that giving money to the homeless is "entertainment" and throw in the notion of completly random rewards of cash and prizes for giving money to the homeless, and you will have very rich "homeless" people in no time.
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.
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.
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
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
No, because there aren't any magic formulas. I can walk into a casino and predict a lot about their slot layout. The more data I have the more analysis I can do, and the more I can predict about the layout.
Without a reasonable amount of data to analyse there is nothing I can tell you about slot machine layout that is going to be of any reasl significance. I can tell you that you'll loses money the slowest on the video poker games near the middle of the casino. I can't tell you how to make money though.
Besides, I don't gamble in casinos. I know how they work, I know the odds, and I know exactly how much money they make. Casinos don't need to legally bar me from gambling, showing me their average actual hold and turnover is more than enough to stop me ever playing their slot machines.
Jedidiah.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
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...
I'd hate to be in that building, or my children or wife to be on that bridge. While I sense your sarcasm and pessimism, thats one area where you don't want cheaters making through the educational program.
Thanks,
Leabre
Make no mistake, Las Vegas made millions off of Ken Uston. For every player willing to study, practice, refine and yes, even cheat, there are thousands who flock to Vegas with the "latest system" that some person or book promoted as the "easy way to beat the casinos". Inspired by the "easy money" of professional gambling, basically all of the will end up handing whatever money they bring to the table over to the casinos.
There is much pleasure to be gained in useless knowledge.
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."
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
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!"
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.