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It is common knowledge amongst cheats that CCTV cameras do not protect them from all possible cheating moves. This is because a camera is only recording an event two dimensionally when in actual fact what is recording is three dimensional. Like for instance with overhead cameras on blackjack. I have heard of cases where some dealers were colluding with a certain player and one such example goes like this.

Imagine if a dealer could slightly expose the next card out of the shoe to the player at first base. Trust me when I say that this is easier than what it sounds. When the dealer is actually pulling cards to their own total then all it takes is slight pressure on the back of the card at the centre of that card to reveal the value of the card to the player at first base. Simply knowing that the next card out of the shoe is a ten value card affords the player a huge edge in the region of around 13%.

So not only can the player get a huge edge in this situation but they would appear less like a card counter by betting big off the top of the shoe. There are many cheating techniques that open themselves up when a dealer colludes with a player. The casinos know this and is why security and procedures are adhered to wherever possible.

Back when I worked as a croupier in the nineties, I remember a team of cheats that we caught on Casino Stud Poker who were marking cards. The procedure at that time was that we changed the cards every hour and while the dealer checked the cards for numbers at the end of each hand to make sure that no cards had been taken from circulation and marked and then put back in…….what wasn’t checked was if the cards had been marked during actual play.

The pit boss used to check them at the end of the hour when the decks were changed but to be honest then I am not too sure how well the pit boss could detect marked cards above and beyond the obvious. Professional markers are very good at what they do although it is a dying art now for sure. But if a team ever got access to a game like CSP then it may just be difficult to detect.

There were one such team down in London some years ago that used tinsel on the back of the cards but they got caught for one simple reason……they won a lot of money. It doesn’t really matter how well you conceal the cheating move because at the end of the day large winnings will be looked at closely and especially on a game like CSP. The key to getting away with something like that is to keep the winnings to a minimum and to use methods that cannot be detected afterwards. There is no point in taking $250,000 if in doing so you do not get away with it and end up with a jail term.

What I am about to tell you is a conversation that I didn’t have personally but which I actually read about. It was between a pit boss and a card counter over lunch. What he said was quite remarkable in that the majority of “failed card counters” often turn to cheating as a way of supporting their game or they become greedy and cheat anyway. This is true with many players although certainly not all. I did know of two card counters who switched to actually cheating after they were struggling to make money conventionally.

This is no different to the world of poker and many poker players have also switched to cheating in that environment as well. Sometimes if you have been dependent on blackjack or poker as a living or as a serious second income source then you will in some cases do whatever you need to do to keep that going. It is for this reason why there have been some very big high profile cheating scandals in poker.

If the money that was being made in poker was both abundant and easy then there would be no need to cheat. But this has happened in live poker games where the older pro’s who were making money in some instances and then were no longer doing so due to tougher opposition switched to cheating in some cases. It is for this reason why many casinos do not like card counters. Casinos know that card counters can be combatted by simply using certain techniques that reduce their edge but they also know that many turn to cheating to try and overcome that.

There have been many instances in gaming where large amounts of money have been accrued through illegal means. This has been written about countless times down the years and in fact I have even done so myself in my roulette book called “Killer Roulette”. But I would never advise anyone to go down this route for obvious reasons. Firstly it is different talking about something than actually doing it. But apart from the fact that you are breaking the law cheating a casino then this in itself should be enough to deter anyone from doing this.

Fortunately the vast majority of people are either honest or may take money in an opportunist way. However these people would not contemplate devising some thought out plan to cheat casinos and that is just as well. But let us look at why even if you wanted to cheat that you would be better off not doing so. In the overwhelming number of cases you will get caught. What you have to remember is that the casino staff are aware of a very large number of cheating techniques anyway and this alone will get you caught a very higher percentage of the time.

Even if you devise something new then this still does not guarantee that you will get away with it. Nearly all casinos have CCTV and large amounts of money that is won will be looked at closely out of procedure anyway. So the bottom line is that whatever illegal practice you have in mind……simply don’t do it!

Many people mistakenly think that casinos cheat at games like blackjack and roulette and other such games……they don’t need to. The people who think that may have heard of backstreet casinos doing underhanded tactics or seen such things in movies but the reality of far different. The casinos make their money from two factors that combine to work together very effectively. These are the house edge coupled with volume. If you look at a game like blackjack then as an example then with correct basic strategy then the house has an edge of around .5% depending on rules variations.

But this only supposes that the player is using accurate basic strategy but most do not and so many players are losing somewhere in the region of between 1%-2% with the very worst players conceding around 2.5-3% in edge! Let us say that the mean average was 2% which means that the casino takes 2% per player per bet over the long haul. Now we need to ascertain just how much money is being put across the blackjack tables in total action. Remember this is not the figure that the total population have in their pockets but total action.

Remember that one player betting $20 per hand and seeing 50 hands per hour would generate $1000/hour in action. So for a large casino then it would be easy for that casino to show total action of well into seven figures per week if just one small player could produce $1000 in action in just one single hour of play. Imagine a casino that produced $5 million per week in total action and it made 2% on that figure. Taking into account the fluctuations then it would make $100,000/week or $5.2 million per year just from its blackjack operation alone…….why should they cheat?

If you do not know what a biased roulette wheel is then it is simply a wheel that for whatever reason is producing numbers more than what sheer chance would have them arrive and that those numbers are not arriving by accident. It is beyond the scope of this blog to go into the reasons behind wheel bias but suffice to say that locating a biased wheel these days is not only very difficult but also very time consuming.

I simply think that there are far better uses of your time than trying to go down this road even though I spoke about this at length in my book “Killer Roulette”. I would never advise people to do this these days as there are simply far better ways to make money full stop inside casinos. Online then you have the online poker option and even if you were a novice player then I would still advise you to learn to play better poker as a possible income stream. The combination of the new modern low profile wheels and the fact that casinos are far more clued up these days with regards to wheel bias means that finding and then exploiting them is difficult.

Plus in order to exploit one then you have to wager significant amounts of money. If the edge is very small then you could still end up losing money despite having spotted a biased wheel. Also there would be absolutely nothing to stop any casino from removing an infected wheel from circulation and replacing it with one that they had in the back room.

Card counting is a technique that many blackjack players have as a skill. Card counting is a mathematical way to keep up with when the deck is in the favor of the player rather than the dealer so they know when to place high bets.

There are several ways that cards can be counted and varies between players. Card counting typically is done by keeping a numerical count based on the number of Aces and 10-value cards. If a high number of these have been played recently then the player is less likely to win and will wager a smaller amount; however, if the count is in favor of the player to where they will have a profitable hand, the player will wager larger amounts.

When a player is able to count cards then they know when they can bet big and win, which isn’t favorable for the casino. Because of this, many casinos have developed many different tactics to try and tackle card counting and keep it from occurring within their casino.

Added Decks

One of the first things that casinos began to do to combat card counting was to add more decks. Blackjack games usually only had one and occasionally two decks in play, but now it is very common to see six to eight decks being played at a time. The more decks there are, the harder it is for a card counter to keep track of the current count decreasing their chances of accurately keeping up with the count – in other words, it makes it more difficult for the player to determine if they will be getting a card of high value and if they should bet large or not.

Penetration

Casinos also shuffle the playing cards before they reach the penetration amount, which is the number of played hands prior to card shuffling. In fact, many casinos don’t even reach half of that number before the cards are shuffled.

Security Cameras

Many casinos, especially those in Vegas, have security cameras above each Blackjack table as well as throughout the casino. The people behind these cameras can keep watch for card counters – and if you are caught counting cards, most casinos will ban you from ever returning to the casino again.

Scanning Technology

Another piece of technology that hasn’t recently came to light is the scanning of cards prior to Blackjack games being played. This allows for the staff to keep track of the cards that have been dealt as well as the bets that have been made. This further allows for the staff to track the betting patterns of each player to see how they react when higher value cards are being dealt – specifically keeping an eye on those that increase their wagers at this time.

Alleged Card Counting/Counters

If you are suspected by the casino staff of counting cards, the punishment will vary based on where you are playing and the casino’s rules. However, most casinos will follow this course of action:

1. Send someone over to break the player’s concentration. If that fails then they will likely proceed to number two.
2. A member of the casino staff may speak to the player and reiterate the fact that card counting is not allowed. If that fails….
3. The player will likely be thrown out of the establishment to the extent of being banned from ever returning.

Card counting is something that has not gone away despite recent technology efforts to diminish it and it is unlikely to disappear anytime soon. The only difference now is that card counters have to spend more time developing their skill in order to be successful.

There are essentially three types of people who play roulette. There are the largest percentages of players who basically have little to no knowledge of the game and this is where the casino makes its profits. Then there are a tiny percentage which is probably in the region of around 5% if truth be known who are more than aware of the casino edge and how much it is. These players may also be utilising system based play to reduce the casino edge to the absolute minimum.

These two types combined account for nearly all of the people who play roulette…..probably 99.99% of them……but not all. This is because there is also one other type of player, a rare type and a type who knows that the 35/1 pay offs are not a weakness at all but a strength. So just how can roulette be attacked and beaten……certainly not by mathematical systems for sure. But it can be beaten by cheating, biased wheels and reading a careless dealers spin.

The reading of a spin is a skill in its own right but it is far easier to do when dealers do not reverse spin. The act of reverse spinning is done to thwart players who can read the spin. However there are still many casinos who do not tell their dealers to do this. These are precisely the casinos that can get targeted by players who are adept at exploiting careless and sloppy dealers.

Believe it or not, even in blackjack where you cannot get to touch the cards, cheating is not only possible but also profitable in the long term. I am going to relay to you the account of a full time cheat in blackjack who I know made something in the region of $20/hr. Firstly he knew that card counting wasn’t an option because there was only one casino in the area and the game wasn’t all that good. So he hatched a plan to play nothing but basic strategy to reduce the house edge.

Doing this means that the house only has roughly a 0.5% edge against you. He was using $5 chips and moving his bets around from $10 to $20 to $15 etc in a rather chaotic way! So his average bet size was around $15 and on most games he was getting around 50 hands per hour. This meant that his totally hourly action was around $750 of which the casino was taking $3.75 of it. He used to factor in the free sandwiches and drinks and so a forty hour week was costing him $150 in the casino but was probably saving him close to $100/week in lower fuel bills at home as well as food bills.

However he had a great skill of being able to manipulate dealers or to choose dealers who were prone to mistakes that would often leave his losing bets on the table or pay losing bets. He was even so friendly to the dealers that some of them even paid his losing bets sometimes because they liked him. However he also used to employ cheating methods which meant that he got extra money onto the table when he shouldn’t have. Without going into details, this guy was good but getting an extra $15 bet per hour catapulted his earn rate from -$3.75/hr to +$11.25/hr. Sometimes he would get two extra pay offs per hour but as long as he got at least one then he was making money.

Even just one every two hours equated to an extra $300/week which still made him $150 by the end of the week plus the additional benefits discussed previously. This account is entirely true because I knew this guy personally.

I read a book on blackjack some years ago that discussed the merits of beating blackjack games with automatic shuffling machines. The book discussed the older models that were not quite random with their shuffles. However I believe that these flaws have been well and truly corrected now and so beating these games in that way is impossible in my opinion. However there have been some very good books down the years which have discussed tactics for beating blackjack by not counting cards.

Many experts would say that this is impossible but card counting is not the only way to extract money from blackjack. Remember that we are not just talking about fair play here but by any means possible. In fact to put a finer pint on that then what we are actually talking about here is cheating plain and simple. But this is exactly what people do when they beat shuffling machines. Strictly speaking of course we are not talking about beating shuffling machines at all but blackjack games with shuffling machines on them which is not the same thing.

So in a sense here what we are talking about is exploiting the dealer by way of errors. These could be accidental errors or manufactured errors but it is the manufactured errors where the skill really comes in. I do not recommend even attempting to find the information out to go down this path and I am certainly not going to tell you because it would not lead to a long career. Casinos know who their opportunist players are after a while and you are going to get a bad reputation. Also and this is key, is the fact that you will still be beating the game. Casinos log their punters in how much they win and lose and so you will still have many of the problems of a card counter.