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Cheating At Roulette May Be Legal In UK
nuke-alwin writes, "A hidden device that appears to give an advantage to roulette players may be legal in the UK when the gambling industry is deregulated next year. The device — which consists of a small digital time recorder, a concealed computer, and a hidden earpiece — uses predictive software to determine where the ball is likely to land. It has been tested by a government lab, which found that 'the advantage can be considerable.' It will be up to casinos to spot people using such devices."
They may be legal but it doesnt mean casinos have to let you in with them, or to allow you to continue playing should you be caught with one.
Simpler than that: the house can just set a rule that all bets have to be down before the croupier releases the ball.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Actually, casinos have a very simple method to sense if you are cheating: you are winning.
No there is no skill for roulette, but the payoff for one game can be considerable, many, many times what you can win in blackjack(provided you pick a number, not a color). Therefore you don't need to win nearly as many times to make significant amounts of money without raising lots of suspicion, and you can always go hit up lots of casinos in one night before anyone catches on.
Monstar L
Yes, they do. And it's not sometimes. It's pretty much all the time, these days. They might be competing with each other for tourist bucks, but they all have a mutual vested interest in not being fleeced themselves. If someone is caught cheating, they are usually arrested for it, not taken out back so a couple of goons named Guido and Nunzio can kneecap them. And if you're arrested for cheating in a casino, your name and picture goes in a wonderful database that is made available to all the major casinos (you know, in addition to, say, a prison sentence), so if they catch you again, they can check and find out that, yes, you've done this before or no, you haven't.
I believe that if you're convicted of cheating in a Las Vegas casino, and thereby banned, you can be hit with another felony charge for gambling in that, or any other casino in Las Vegas (or possibly across the whole of Nevada), regardless of whether or not you were cheating the second time.
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
The primary reason this doesn't get done at the moment is that it opens the house up to accusations of cheating: it's very hard but not totally out of the question to influence which area of the wheel the ball ends up in. Allowing bets to placed after the ball is released removes any suspicion that this might be happening.
Just knowing on which quarter of the roulette the ball will fall is more than enough. You don't just go and put everything in one number. Putting money in consecutive numbers is a common practice. If you know it's going to fall arround 17, then three persons working togheter may place their bets on 17 and consecutive numbers.
Without help, you can win. Reducing the possible ressults to a 25%, or even 50% is good enough for most players. Thay may not win an all bets, but at the end of the night, they will get out of the casino with a very large ammount of cash.
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
You're missing some salient facts:
a) Fraud is a criminal offence, prosecuted by some representative of "the people". Breaches of contracts are not criminal acts, they are not even "illegal", but each side may sue the other under civil law to have the terms of the contract enforced and/or redress.
I.e. you seem confused about law, and appear to be mixing up different parts of it.
(At least, above is generally true in English jurisprudence and its derivatives, such as Canada, Ireland, the USA, etc.. - approaching half the world.).
b) Casinos in the past *have* retained winnings of customers who "cheated", and the *customer* sued and *won*. In both the UK and in Spain (well, i didn't read who sued who in the spanish case, but the Casino lost either way).
c) UK courts have ruled that using skill, without influencing the game in any way, is *not* cheating.
d) If you'd read the article, it covers why the UK super-casinos are not keen on overbearing measures, such as contracts, to try counter "clever players" - it would do them more harm than good. Would you gamble large amounts of money if the Casino made you sign a contract to say it could arbitrarily not pay you if you won?
When will slashdot learn that US jurisprudence (or common practice), particularly region-specific in a region uncommonly beholden to some industry, has 0 bearing on the rest of the world? Particularly when the story is about *some other part of the world*???
I use Friend/Foe + mod-point modifiers as a karma/reputation system.