Slashdot Mirror
Two Years In Prison For Using Infrared Contact Lenses To Cheat At Poker
dmfinn writes "It was back in 2011 when Stefano Ampollini and two accomplices cheated a French casino out of over €90,000 thanks to the help of Chinese-made infrared contact lenses. According to French authorities, Ampollini and two casino workers marked cards using an invisible liquid that would be picked up by the infrared lenses, which Ampollini then used to read his competitors' cards. Though the contacts themselves cost over €2,000, the crew managed to take €71,000 in their first night. However, the trio was finally caught when a lawyer working for the casino became suspicious after Ampollini folded with an unbelievably good hand, which suggested he knew the croupier's cards. This week, a French court sentenced Ampollini to two years in prison and a €100,000 fine. His main accomplice was handed an even harsher sentence; he was forced to pay the same fine and given a 36-month sentence. It appears, despite their best efforts and advanced tactics, that the men were still unable to beat the house without raising significant alarms. So, at least for now, it seems modern technology still can't simulate good old 'luck.'"
Be greedy and you raise suspicion. If you have a hand that you would consider a winning hand under normal circumstances then you play it, regardless if you know you will lose. Start doing impossible or improbable moves and you may as well be wearing a huge neon arrow sign on your head.
The only reason he got caught was because he folded with a great hand. He wasn't playing as if he was being watched the entire time. The technology had nothing to do with it, except perhaps make him cocky.
Even if it somehow loses. They WILL find a way to win.
On the other hand, how did the "lawyer working for the casino" know the hand that the crook folded with? That sounds like we are talking about crooks on both sides. An important part of poker is that folding does not expose your betting strategy.
If you find a way to game the gaming system, you will appear as an anomaly.
And, anomaly detection will highlight you as such.
Winning at a game of chance over a long enough sample period? Cheating is more probable than an improbable string of luck.
The only effective way to steal is to steal from people who are powerless to detect it, powerless to stop it, or weak enough in both areas.
Can you win the day at a casino? YES.
Can you win during your entire life? YES, considering your life will probably be forfeit when you've stolen too much from the wrong people.
Two years? For cheating at cards? That's nothing. Lots of people are killed over cheating at high stakes gambling. You cheat the casinos and they usually take it up with the police and lawyers. They can't break your legs and keep operating a legitimate business.
You cheat a private game? You deal with individuals who might smash your fucking face in and throw you in a six foot feet hole in the desert. At the very least you get beaten within an inch of your life and then they take back all of your 'winnings'. Those guys should have tried to get into a private game where high rollers in organized crime or even professional sports play.
The most hilarious part about this story though. Is that there are bankers that make billions cheating the system. Insider trading, fraud, embezzlement, Ponzi scheme, and so on. And those guys get a free pass as long as they throw the occasional six-figure-pass to the politicians. These morons get two years for cheating the casinos.
This reminds me of the Absolute Poker scandal in 2007. Even a relative novice should realize at some point you have to lose a showdown so it isn't obvious you're cheating.
oh, yes - an expensive gadget was used in a crime. news at 11
OK, point looks to already have been made (-1, redundant?)
They weren't careful. A careful strategy, would not raise alarms by taking extraordinarily high wins, and would accept reasonable losses, ie, not fold with a great hand *even if* you know you'll loose.
What you'd want, is to scrape in marginally better positive wins, not great hits, -- and then move on. Heck, just in case, take some more-than-usual losses at some casinos. Build a data model; speadsheet it; look for a reasonably higher ROI, say 50%/annum on the operation, not spectacular wins.
This kind of stuff should just be judged in civil court, not federal. The fact that it's federal is not right at all.
Most people associate "poker" with games where the players compete against each other, rather than the house. Texas Holdem and Draw poker are two well known variants. Many casinos have poker tables now - they provide a dealer, and make their money by taking a small percentage of each pot.
The article talks about Stefano Ampollini knowing which cards the croupier had. The croupier would not have any cards in a normal game of poker.
Looking at their website, it appears that the Les Princes Casino in Cannes does not have any normal poker tables. Instead, they run a casino game called "Casino Stud" or "Caribbean Stud Poker". It is a normal casino game that gives the house a 5% edge if the player uses the best possible strategy.
The players must ante before each game. After they have seen their cards, if they want to continue they must place a "raise" - a bet which is double the ante.
When the cheat decided whether or not to raise, he looked at the dealer's face down hand. He knew if the dealer would win or lose before he made his "raise" bet.
It's likely that the casino knew the cheat's cards from the video surveillance footage.
You're leaving out something really important and the real reason that he got caught: the casino was cheating too. Otherwise they wouldn't know that he had good cards when he folded. When he, or anyone else, folds, they just throw in their cards face down and those cards are not exposed for all players to see. The casino can't legitimately claim that they know he was cheating because he folded on good hands unless they were cheating and knew what his hands were.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Shut up and take my money!
How do you make these? You need something that will convert a frequency our eyes can't detect, in your focal plane (it's a contact lens) into something you can detect without changing direction of the light wave. Never mind they cost allegedly $2000 I want to know what the science behind them is.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
There is a standard distribution of poker skill. You can only exceed that win % by some much before you are conspicuously lucky. Without a big name and track record behind you to justify the perceived "skill" then it rapidly becomes suspicious.
Casinos have cameras - lots of cameras. When a player is winning heavily, they get heavy surveillance. Have a nice day!
It must not be forgotten that two casino employees were involved as well. That were the people who arranged for the cards to be marked, so the cheats could play their game.
No mention on punishment for those two. Not only were they accomplices, without whom the scheme would not have worked to begin with, they also breached the trust their employer placed in them. The latter is also a serious issue.
https://www.gambleromania.com/5-sets-ir-contact-lenses
If you want to cheat at gambling, work for a large bank or investment broker. If you get caught claim you were acting in the fiduciary interests of your shareholders making your misconduct legal and that your company is too big to fail. You will then receive a government bailout. Then cry that the very bailout you received was an unconstitutional government encroachment on the rights of corporations and an attack on capitalism. Profit.
Undetectable then:
http://www.imdb.com/media/rm1574082816/tt0134847
It's not like they merely used some tool to better calculate odds, this is outright cheating and in other times (and on a riverboat) it could have very well caused that Derringer to go off.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
In such a poker game, the player does not willing expose his cards for either a spectator or a casino camera to see. If that happened then someone else sitting at the table would have a team of accomplices watching everyone's hands and giving pre-arranged signals. Poker is not played with spectators watching all of the cards in any player's hand. Even casino cameras are generally overhead watching the cards to insure that none leave the table or are added, but players wouldn't play if they believed that the casino could read their cards when they took a well guarded glimpse of their dealt hand. Too much chance for a player to be cheated by the cameras if that could happen, as it would be extremely easy to signal to a house player or shill and win hands. No, if the casino knew what was in his hands they were cheating. Most likely they knew because the controlled the deal and dealt him some very good hands, expecting him to bet big and then lose to better hands they dealt themselves. When that didn't work they suspected that they were not the only ones cheating.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
This is a story right out of the old Mission: Impossible TV series. An episode used this exact premise in at least one episode I can think of to cheat a guy who was using the same trick at his own game. They way they beat him was by remarking the cards and then remarking them using a different technology. In that show, the game was baccarat instead of poker. Of course, this was television and rather fanciful, yet I'm glad to see that someone actually has done it.... and even happier to see that they got caught at it.
It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.
What kind of poker games are they running over there that the house plays a hand?
No mention on punishment for those two.
At least read the summary.
"His main accomplice was handed an even harsher sentence..."
They might have been able to buy an expensive gadget, but they did not have what it takes to understand the game. Folding with a really good hand is an absolute beginners mistake in this type of games.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
I was hoping they'd have done something cool with those lenses, like looking at the other players' face and body heat to determine their level of excitement/stress. Instead it's just a regular card marking fraud.
If it was a big game then it may have been televised, as they have glass sections on the tables to allow viewers and commentators to see what cards the players have. This may even be true of all large games regardless of whether they're televised to try and catch unusual betting behaviour (as was the case here).
Large televised poker games use a glass table so that viewers and commentators can see the players' cards. This may even be true of all large games regardless of whether they're televised to try and catch unusual betting behaviour (as was the case here).
The only problem is that this is a cheat that leaves evidence -- you don't get to take the marked cards away at the end of the night. Because of this, there's a risk that the scam has a very short shelf-life. They got €71k in a singe night, and were caught on the second attempt. Every gambler knows they should quit while they're ahead. No gambler does.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
Out of curiousity, how did the casino know that he had "folded with an unbelievably good hand"? Everytime I've been to a casino, if I've folded, I didn't have to show my hand.
If casino security did airports, they would use anomaly detection to identify possible terrorists - kinda like the Israelis are said to do. And if TSA did casinos, gamblers would have to take off their shoes, belts, and jackets, empty their pockets, and either be groped or technologically stripped naked before being allowed to play. This sounds like a win-win situation. When can we do the switch?
Let the gamblers game in every way. Gambling is a stupid thing and let them all have it. "Cheating"? Really? We have gamblers losing the world's economy and at the expense of the rest of the world, the gamblers are getting bailed out so they can do it some more.
Let actual gamblers do what they want. It doesn't harm the world. And let their continued operation go on as it is.
If these laws had been applied in another era, two well known scientists would have been jailed for cheating at roulette . (Those would be Edward Thorp and Claude Shannon)
It runs poker tables, you play against the other players. If he was cheating at poker, he wasn't cheating the casino.
The casino does play blackjack, though.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
progressive side bet pays even if you lose.
I will admit, I didn't click through to the story but the summary says they took $90k from the House. The big poker game these days is Texas Holdem which is played against other casino goers, as are most other forms of poker, with the casino only collecting a rake on each hand. Cheating at that would cost the other players a buttload of money for sure but the house still takes their rake if he wins or not.
As for the roulette prediction computers, they are the reason most jurisdiction now have anti-device laws. Counting cards is legal, although the casino can also legally throw you out for doing it. But using a computer is actually illegal.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
Why you sheeple dribble about all the irrelevant aspects (the only direct point of this story is that these crooks were too dumb to make the effort to 'win' in credible ways- the technology they used worked brilliantly), the real point passes you by.
In the UK, or France, or most of the USA, or in ANY Fabian controlled nation of the West, vile crimes against vulnerable citizens draw extremely MILD punishments. You can rob an old lady of 50% of her wealth, and so long as you do not kill her, a first time offender is almost certain to avoid prison. Carry out a non-violent robbery of an establishment linked to your masters, on the other hand, and even if you take a tiny fraction of 1% of their wealth, you will get serious prison time.
In the eyes of your masters, the sheeple are worthless garbage, and crimes of violence against the sheeple are of no real significance.
Think! THINK! why should the full force of the State be working to protect the interests of this 'casino'. The very concept of a casino is crime made flesh- a place specifically designed to con people out of their wealth using every psychological method known to Man. If a casino is too lazy to do simple tests for a gag as old as infra-red marking, why should one penny from taxpayers be used to protect the interests of the scum that own casinos?
There are shills here who constantly tell you that Obama's obscenities are in the interest of the sheeple. Exterminating the secular society of Syria, Obamacare, supporting the insane racists of Israel and Saudi Arabia, giving trillions to the wealthiest people in America, rewarding the most powerful financial crooks, growing the greatest war machine in Human History, prosecuting more whistle-blowers than at any earlier time, spreading torture facilities across the planet, and exponentially growing NSA full surveillance projects with the intention of ending ALL concept of privacy in people's own homes. Look about you (and this casino story is another example) to see the truth about the monsters form the so-called 'left' and the so-called 'right' that rule you.
Why is it that almost every citizen sees crime against the person as the form of crime they want to receive MOST priority, and yet live in nations were this form of crime receives the greatest leniency?
This is old stuff. Chow Yun-Fat and his cronies have used this technology (in glasses and contact lenses form) to cheat poker over 20 years ago at a private casino event on a yacht near the shores of Hong Kong to get revenge on the man who nearly destroyed him!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M-sliAVtxSE
Interesting that this is illegal in France .... hahha
... you have to play a plausible game and not get too lucky.
You get too lucky without cheating and you are shown the door.
You get to lucky and you cheat, you attract a lot of attention and you will almost certainly be caught.
No, if you are going to cheat at poker and not get caught, make sure you don't win too much over too long a period of time, OR make a habit of spending your way to break-even at the end of every day. Cheat and win $100K a day at poker then blow almost all of it at craps and give the rest away in big tips and even if the casino thinks you are cheating they might look the other way, especially if you wind up encouraging others to gamble more and tip more. Try to take that $100K a day home more than a few days in a row and you'll be caught or if you are really lucky and not caught, probably barred and blacklisted.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
what is wrong with that
the casinos are pure thiefs!!
Of course, they still don't want people cheating because that is bad for business.
No Inflation Taxation without Representation
Anyone who wins a lot of cash and the house will always suspect cheating.
Cause they don't believe casino are about odds, Odds don't exist to the house, unless you're playing the lottery.
fuck poker, where the fuck do I score this crazy fucking cyber punk uber futuristic sci-fi infrared viewing contact lenses.
I didn't even know this was possible.
If you want to make millions dollars with absolutely zero chance of going to jail, just join a major financial firm with good political ties and commit massive mortgage fraud. Just remember to make a large campaign donation to the president even though it isn't an election year.
-- Will program for bandwidth
The real question is do they really work, and if so how? I'm not aware of any technology that is capable of converting infra-red to visible light except with a significant input of power, which is obviously not available in the case of contact lenses.
Blackjack is just you against the house - a dumb player's going to get the standard odds and lose a bit, a good card counter can beat the house, but needs to play a good social engineering game to cover it up if they want to make significant money.
But poker's you against the other players, with the house raking off a cut of the pot. If you're better at it than the other players, you can beat them, and statistics isn't going to tell the house much because it's as much about predicting what how good the other players' hands are as predicting what cards are left in the deck, plus you might have a steady advantage because some of the other players are dumb about probability and you're not, or because you've got more nerve than they do when you're right.
I can't just say "so don't be greedy when you're cheating", because the reason you're cheating is that you're greedy, but you can't be too greedy or it'll be obvious. But yeah, this idiot was lucky he was being greedy in France, where he only had to deal with fines and jail, rather than Las Vegas where he might get beaten up by the mob, or the Old Wild West where he'd end up as the subject of a country music song with gunfights involved.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Some people are going to win a lot, some are going to lose a lot, most are going to lose a bit or occasionally win a bit. On average, you're going to lose, but the odds aren't overwhelming, just steady. The casinos need to have enough people winning that suckers will go in feeling like they'll get lucky, and unlike lotteries, that means that the odds aren't overwhelming.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
If you're counting cards in blackjack, that's not cheating, it's just playing to win, and the casino doesn't like it when people do that, so they'll whine about it being cheating and kick you out if they catch you. If you're counting cards in poker, and trying to find which player is the sucker and what their tell is when they've got a good or bad hand, that's not cheating, it's part of the game, because it's a game of skill, not just chance. And faking your own tell may be card sharping, but it's not cheating, nor is having a pretty girl accomplice flirting with the sucker as long as she's not telling you what cards he has.
But if you're marking the cards? Yeah, that's cheating. So is keeping an ace up your sleeve, or using a mirror to look at your opponents' cards, or dealing from the bottom of the deck if you're the dealer, or putting a magnet behind the roulette wheel.
And loading your opponent's six-shooter with blanks for the gunfight that'll happen if he catches you cheatin'? That's way cheating.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
You might or might not get to keep your winnings if you get caught card counting. The people who make a lot of money doing it work in teams, because it's easier to cover up having some people doing the grunt work of counting and some being the dumb lucky high roller who collects the winnings by playing at the table where their team member indicates the odds are good. Also, if you're actually making a lot of money, you're winning chips, not cash, and you've got to get the casino to let you trade them back in for cash, which they might not do if they've caught you, even if they're not actually mobsters who are going to beat you up.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
How did they know he was cheating, cause he was winning ...
..
That's a quote from some movie, can't remember which one
Anyone here know it ?
Prison is the real crime here. Why should the taxpayer fork out to lock people up non-violent crimes? Surely a community sentence doing useful work for some charity or other is ten times better? Crazy.
work in progress
gambling-pro-archie-karas-charged-defrauding-casino - The article doesn't say how he was marking the cards, but Archie Karas was arrested at his home in Las Vegas for cheating at an Indian Casino near San Diego. (The article also doesn't say why state police were involved; the casino's on an Indian reservation, and casinos are allowed to operate there because it's not subject to state jurisdiction, though California's tried to cheat the local tribes on that for years because they want a cut of the gambling take.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
"So, at least for now, it seems modern technology still can't simulate good old 'luck.'"
Uh - no. It just means this group couldn't do it. We don't know about the people who don't get caught.
2 years in the clink is a lot better than a pair of concrete shoes. They should be glad they got off so easy.
How ya like dat?
Both sources make it abundantly clear that the lawyer had nothing to do with catching the card shark, but merely released the statement indicating that casino security had spotted the scam.
Beside the failure at basic written English comprehension that could lead to that sort of error, I personally wonder how the editor could write that and not stop two seconds to wonder why a lawyer would be on a casino floor looking out for card cheats.
I've come to the conclusion that Slashdot editors do not really know what the word "lawyer" mean either, which explains a lot...
I'm more offended by the article's picture. Crappy chinese plastic chips and a rounded-off red die?
If you're going to fake a casino "moneyshot" picture, you might want to visit one prior to doing so.
More Twoson than Cupertino