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Professional cheats are rare in gambling, it is very difficult to cheat for a living and you only have to look at pickpockets to see the evidence of this. I would say that over 99% of all wallets and purses that are lost are found by someone who then keeps the money without handing it in. Although this is technically theft, the person who found it never set out to steal that purse or wallet. They merely took advantage of an opportunity when it arose.

They would also not take a purse or wallet if they knew who it belonged to. But now imagine a pickpocket who deliberately goes out to steal these items. This requires nerve and skill which is something that must be practiced. Because of this then it makes the numbers of pickpockets far smaller than the number of opportunists that exist.

This is lucky for us otherwise we would be a lot worse off financially during the course of our lives. The most common type of casino cheat is the very low in sophistication opportunist. This is the one who looks for things like trainee dealers who may make mistakes or who may be vulnerable to certain gamesmanship or ploys to get paid out when they shouldn’t.

One such ploy is on blackjack where some players try to make it as vague as possible if they want a card or not. Or if they have say 18 and the dealer goes onto the next box and that player pulls a 2 or a 3 then the player can argue that their box was overlooked without them even being asked if they wanted a card or not. Everyone knows that the player would have stood on 18 and even the player themselves but this is just one sort of opportunist cheating that is quite common in casinos.

During my time in gaming both before and after I worked in casinos then I have heard of numerous cheating attempts with most of them being blatant silly attempts that were doomed to failure and probably did. But one such case that I heard about but never found out if this actually came to fruition involved placing an invisible resin type substance into certain numbers of a roulette wheel.

This substance hardened like varnish but was clear to the naked eye. What this meant was that the substance could be applied to certain numbers without it being visible. But the peculiar characteristics of this substance were such that it recorded drastically different bounce to the other non applied numbers.

So if you applied it to the red numbers and not the black numbers then it would be perfectly possible that the ball would stand a far greater chance of coming to rest in one or the other due to the differences in bounce. The only problem was in how to apply this substance to a roulette wheel undetected. This would almost certainly need to be done from the inside from someone who not only worked there but who worked after hours or who had access to not only the casino but also the CCTV cameras as well.

There are several people who work inside all casinos who have this sort of function from general managers to managers to security staff and receptionists. So it is possible to have an inside job done on a casino. If you can overcome these two factors of getting the substance and then someone working on the inside then a casino would be very vulnerable to being hit in this way.

There has always been one huge Achilles Heel with casinos when it comes to security and this is to do with staff collusion and inside assists. In this aspect then it is no different to online poker sites and the now famous “super user” accounts. At the end of the day, staff at many live casinos feel under paid or actually are under paid. So they above anyone else have the incentive to cheat and collude with punters.

A few years ago I was privy to inside information at the time about a team of Chinese cheats in London who were operating using hidden CCTV cameras. These people were eventually caught but the word on the inside was that these people took far more money than was revealed or that the casinos were aware of.

I feel that this is where the casinos are vulnerable; there is always a problem with regards the casinos coming face to face with highly intelligent and creative people. Casinos have gone more and more high-tech over the past few years and I feel that this has sort of protected them from the old time cheats of a few years ago. However it has also left them vulnerable to a whole new army of high-tech cheats who will be attracted to casinos like moths to a light because of the money that is on offer.

As always the really sophisticated cheats are one step ahead and always will be and the casinos are always playing catch up to these people. Only when they have been taken for a large amount of money do they then adjust and learn the new techniques.

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Myself and my partner had our first casino trip last night in absolutely ages and it felt sort of strange. I cannot remember the last time that we went to a casino but it was well before the World Cup started. A combination of the World Cup and the WSOP has led to me being far too busy.

I expected to play some blackjack last night but the tables were full all night and I never fancied standing behind. So instead I went and watched roulette and I found a dealer who I thought that I had a very good read on. Actually this reminds me of a very good book called “Read The Dealer” but that book dealt with blackjack.

Dealers can be read in roulette in a similar way and any experienced gaming operative who is telling the truth will tell you. However it does require certain circumstances for this to happen. I struggle to read any dealer who reverse spins constantly and if that is company practice then I would never bother to even try.

But in this casino then the practice was to always spin in the conventional direction of clockwise on right handed tables and anti-clockwise on left handed tables. I didn’t play for high-stakes and only in £1 chips but I did win two consecutive £1 bets on the number. I passed some of my winnings back but ended up winning £75 which paid for our meal and the drinks for me and my partner and so I was very happy with the evening.

When you go into a casino for the very first time then the experience can feel a little daunting. There will be bright lights, the atmosphere and the feeling of being somewhere entirely alien. However you need to remember one very important thing and this is that the casino actually want you to be there. At the end of the day they need income to provide them with the means to fund their considerable running costs whether that comes from other sources like the bar or the restaurant or the gaming floor.

Your first port of call inside the casino will be the reception area where you will be greeted with a friendly face. In the UK then you will need to apply at least 24 hours before you will be accepted. This allows the casino time to check you out and to also give the customer a cooling off period. On your first visit the reception staff (in the UK) will take your picture so that they have visual identification of you for their records and also for security reasons as well.

But going to a casino is basically no different than going to any other night club in so much as the people that go have their own individual reasons for going. Some people who go to nightclubs do so for the after hours drinking, others go because of the dancing, while some may go for reasons to do with meeting the opposite sex or it could be a combination of the above.

It is exactly the same with casinos; you could go to have a drink from the bar after normal pub hours are over. Or you could go because you wanted a meal or to socialise with others. Many go of course for the gaming entertainment but the fact of the matter is that there are numerous reasons to go to a casino above and beyond mere gaming.

When you go into casinos these days then you will find many different types of clientele. The average person is there to simply have a good time and to maybe buy a few drinks and then spend a few dollars on the roulette tables purely out of entertainment. This probably represents about 75% of the people who frequent casinos and the number of times that they visit is maybe once or twice a week with many of them far less frequent than that.

Then we have a far smaller number of more serious players who we can call “regulars”. These people form the “bread and butter” of the casinos main revenue stream and in the UK then this is mainly from areas like the Chinese community. I would estimate that this makes up for about another 20-23% of the total database of customers. The remaining few percent are taken up with what I call the casino undesirables although many of these people can still be profitable for the casino.

This group of people make up the hardened gamblers and problem gamblers who have issues with how much they lose and also the other more shady types of character. These can be anything from opportunist cheats to people actively looking to cheat. Then we also have the hangers on who are looking for some punter who has struck it big to latch on to for the evening. There have been many a time that I have seen punters target people with money and toss them “tips” for numbers that they think will come up.

When those numbers do come up by pure chance then they are hoping that the punter will throw them a scrap like a few chips in the hope that they view them as some “guru” or lucky charm. This are mainly the three major groups of punters that frequent casinos and this will apply to anywhere in the world as a rule.

Someone asked me the other day if making money from blackjack was still feasible in 2010? The answer is yes but two things need to be in operation for this to happen. If you are a conventional counter then you obviously need shoe games to make the entire thing work at all otherwise you simply will not be able to count.

Electronic shufflers will also cut down your action so you simply will not be able to spread your action between several casinos over a rather small area. So the mere presence of just one single electronic shuffler impacts on the conventional card counter as it cuts down on their theatre of operations.

The second alternative involves cheating games that have electronic shufflers. These tactics or many of them are not even grey area……they are cheating plain and simple. But I am aware of people who do this and so any casino executives reading this blog need to take heed.

The games with automatic shufflers can be attacked from other areas and to doubt whether this is so then we only have to look at the house edge. At blackjack then it is around 0.5% for the house. This means that the house will win 0.5% of your action. So let us say that your average bet size is $15 and the dealer is dealing 60 hands per hour.

This means that you are placing $900 in action per hour with the casino expected to take o.5% of it per hour over the long run if you are using good basic. This equates to an hourly rate of -$4.50 per hour. But yet your average bet is nearly four times that amount at $15. You can see the potential here because a cheat or a player in even slight collusion with a dealer who was getting away with one bet per hour would not be losing -$4.50 per hour but making $10.50 per hour.

Over the years I have seen some major changes come about within Sheffield where there are three land based casinos. These are the G Casino and Napoleons in the town centre and Napoleons at Hillsborough. Years ago when I first started in gaming, the G casino was called Grosvenor and Napoleons at Hillsborough was called Bonapartes.

Each casino has had its turn as being the premier casino in the city. Back in 1990 up to 1996, it was Napoleons in the town centre that was the premier casino in Sheffield. Often the venue for local celebrities, footballers and even snooker players when the World Championships were in town.

Then when Bonapartes moved to a new expensive casino in Hillsborough in 1996, that then became the number one casino in Sheffield. That situation lasted until recently with what is now the new Grosvenor casino or G casino as it is known. This multi-million pound development has made the G casino the premier place to be in Sheffield in terms of casinos in Sheffield.

So each casino has been number one in terms of status within the past 14 years but it is clear that the status of the G casino as the number one casino in Sheffield will be here to stay for quite some considerable time as the city centre Napoleons is restricted with how much more development it can undertake.

It is interesting to see these events take place because it highlights one very important fact of gaming and that is the fantastic competition that there is to capture the biggest slice of the market and that will continue long into the future and as long as there is gaming anywhere in the world.

While casinos are not evil places, they often attract people looking to cheat. This is an unfortunate side effect but fortunately the number of people who cheat are well in the minority. In my experience the vast majority of cheats are nothing more than opportunists that take advantage of something if and when the time arises.

For instance, there is a world of difference between someone who finds a wallet and then keeps the money inside it without handing it in and someone like a pickpocket who actively goes out and steals one.

In one instance one person has the money by default and is still technically stealing while in the other, the individual has actively planned the act. In a similar way, it is like the act of murder and manslaughter. Both involve the taking of a human life but only one was deliberate.

It is the same with cheating inside casinos. I believe that at least 99% of any dishonest activity stems from opportunists. Maybe someone was paid a bet that they shouldn’t have been paid and said nothing but whatever the cause, very few players actively plan cheating moves in my opinion.

But that is taken from the total population of people who inhabit casinos and 1% of that population still accounts for an awful lot of people. The last casino that I worked at had around 22,000 members and 1% of that figure comes to 220.

While only around 5000 of that total were active core regulars, that is still 50 people who actively go out to look to cheat. So that is an awful lot of people and if those 50 people each cheat the casino out of £200 per week then that is an amazing £10,000 a week being lost to cheating.

Someone asked me the other day about entering into a blackjack game in mid-shoe without knowing what the count was and how this affected your edge. Firstly what you have to remember is that if you enter a game in mid-shoe then what we are dealing with here is cards unseen.

So we don’t know if the count is plus or minus and in the absence of such information then we have to take a long term view of this and this means only one thing. The number of pluses that we cannot see will equal the number of minuses and so theoretically we can now treat the count as zero.

This is great for cover plays and especially in casinos with more than one table open. No card counter moves from table to table and bets sizable bets unless they are being signalled in by non counting team members. But let us say that you have a 20/1 bet spread of $5 to $200 and you enter mid-shoe. You could enter at say $20 and then downgrade the bets if your initial count is negative.

But also, going in at $20 allows you to double up and get to $100 very quickly and thus $200. Going from $20 to $40 to $80 to $160 looks like you are merely chasing losses or letting winnings ride. This can be achieved if the count goes immediately positive after entering.

However if the count goes negative then you can merely switch tables and enter mid-shoe again which makes you look less like a counter. So as long as you understand that entering mid-shoe makes no difference because cards unseen means that you can take the count to be zero then you will do fine entering mid-shoe.