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Having worked in the casino industry on the inside as a Croupier, Inspector and trainee Pit Boss then I was in that industry for quite some considerable time. So it annoys me sometimes when certain ignorant people have some rather extreme views of the gaming and the gambling industry.

A few years ago a proposed “Super Casino” was planned for the town where I live. It actually made me laugh at the time how so many people were getting hot under the collar about this proposed event. They cited increases in problem gambling and prostitution amongst others. I saw documents from local residents which showed clear misunderstanding about what casinos actually were and their role in the community.

I also find something inherently wrong in being preached to by people many of whom have never even set foot inside a casino in their entire lives. Casinos first and foremost are places of entertainment and they do provide many thousands of jobs nationwide. This also knocks on into other areas as well and casinos plough an awful lot of money back into the economy.

But drugs and a dependency on drugs drives a large part of the prostitution industry and young people who become dependent on drugs need income in which to buy them above and beyond what they could earn in a normal day to day job.

Young boys turn to burglary and other types of theft while the girls turn to shop lifting and prostitution but the driving force behind prostitution is the drugs industry and not casinos or any proposed “Super Casino”.

In one of my recent posts I touched on the subject of cheating in casino stud poker. Usually when there are big odds to be found then these games tend to attract the cheats. This has nothing to do with the house edge but the actual pay-offs that are obtained when you can get away with a cheating move in this form of casino gambling.

The best game for this is roulette where you don’t have to get away with many moves to walk away with a substantial pay-off. The 35-1 and 17-1 top pay-offs are like beacons to cheats. But in CSP too then you can get big pay-offs.

50-1 for a straight flush and 20-1 for quads are big odds as is the generally offered 8-1 for a full-house. Of course unlike on roulette, big hands get noticed on CSP and you need to remember one very important thing, casinos can and will delay payment until CCTV has been checked and it would take a very naive casino to blindly pay a huge bet on a straight flush and there are not many naive casino bosses around.

I have known some pretty poor shift managers in my time but never a General Manager. Card marking is another threat to casinos although in my experience, the cards are not checked well enough. As is the case, small casinos with little action and small turnover can be got at because they don’t perceive any threat from punters playing for small amounts.

As usual collusion is yet another problem and a dealer can easily pay an empty box for its ante when they have no hand and then claim a mistake even when they got caught or if the supervisor spotted it.

Casino bosses are more than aware of collusion incidents and the CCTV and surveillance is as much for the staff as it is for the punters.

See you soon

Carl

Several hundred years ago, the Caribbean was the centre for piracy on the high seas when people like Blackbeard was feared all around that area. The word “Caribbean” also applies to the casino version of poker as well where the players get dealt five cards that have to beat those of the dealer.

I explained a little about how this game worked yesterday but there are numerous poker cheating moves that are available on this game in live play. Of course if you read any poker material on cheating then a fair number of the moves would involve the dealer.

In the case of CSP then this does not apply obviously as the dealer is working for the casino and despite the thoughts of some, casinos do not cheat. They have no reason to in the overwhelming number of cases so lets put that particular view to bed right now and move on.

But……one such move that is cheating and that is for players to inform other players of their cards. This would certainly not be allowed in real poker but I have worked in several casinos where the players were allowed to blatantly look at each others cards.

Let us say that a table full of CSP players discussed their hands or had a series of hidden signals to determine certain cards. Each player gets dealt five cards and in those thirty five cards that were dealt to the players, all four kings were out and three of the aces.

The dealer had an ace showing, now not only do the players know that the dealer cannot make a qualifying A-K hand to beat their non-pair hands, they also know that the dealer cannot make a pair of aces. This then means that to qualify then they must make a pair out of their remaining unseen four cards and not five.

This is far more difficult to do so in this instance the players could play whatever hands they had. This is one form of cheating but I will be expanding on other forms in later posts.

See you soon

Carl

Back when I worked in gaming, one of the weakest spots or the most vulnerable when it came to cheating was Casino Stud Poker or to call it by its other name…..Caribbean Stud Poker.

In this game the players are dealt five cards and so is the dealer. You have already placed what is called an “ante”. If you have placed say $5 on the ante box and you look at your hand, you then have to decide if you want to play the hand or not.

If you do then you must place double the ante on the “bet” box behind it and so you would have to place $10 in this example. If you don’t want to play the hand then you must concede the $5 ante and lose it.

The kicker behind this is in the odds that you get paid for the hands that you make. But in a real live casino setting, there are several players sitting within a very close proximity to each other.

This presents the casino with several security issues and the main one is in not letting players have the opportunity to take cards out of play. This is easily checked simply by the dealer checking the number of cards that are remaining.

But there are far weightier problems as well and I have seen players actually place stronger hands on the boxes of players to their left or right who had bet more money. This can be difficult to spot when done quickly and using mis-direction.

Also card marking has been a problem as well in recent years although casinos tend to try to combat this problem by checking the cards every hour. This though presents the problem of them having to wait a full hour before the pit boss or manager can inspect the cards.

In my opinion though, many of the card marking techniques that are in operation today would get by an average pit boss and I will be looking at some of these in further posts.

See you soon

Carl