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We have all seen movies where the house manipulates
a game to its own advantage (remember the roulette wheel in "Casablanca"?)
or a cowboy walks into a big casino and somehow manages to leave coolly
with a million or two due to something more than luck. These scenes
are fun to watch, but what is the real story on cheating in casinos?
Who does it, how do they do it, and do they get away with it?
Cheating players usually use one of three basic methods:
palming (extremely risky), signalling, or smearing (these latter two
are generally considered to be less obvious). Palming is widely known
and well understood, e.g. pulling an ace from the sleeve at a crucial
point in the game. However the sleight of hand required to pull this
off undetected is of a very high standard, like that of a professional
magician. It goes without saying that casinos employ staff whose sole
job at a given time will be to watch the players, and of course all
the action is also recorded by closed-circuit television with powerful
magnification for scrutiny both in real time and after a suspected
cheater has been identified. Card boxes are also changed regularly
and checked upon removal from play to ensure that no cards have been
palmed. Casinos are more worried by "smearing", where a player
smears a substance on to a particular card so that it can be recognised
later. However, if a player can see it so can the dealer, though stories
abound of ingenious cheats using substances visible only under a special
light shined from a finger ring or other device! Finally, the most
popular method of player cheating: signalling. Although this requires
at least two people to work together, thus doubling the potential for
detection, the signalling itself can quite easily be made very hard
for the casual observer to spot (tapping a ring finger to indicate "diamonds" is
definitely out). Fortunately for the casinos, their spotters develop
a sixth sense after a few years in the business, which enables them
to tell just who is fidgeting and who is signalling. The chances of
successfully cheating a casino are very, very slim.
It does not hurt to know as a player what the tell-tale
signs of house cheating are, though you are far more likely to see
them in small unregulated establishments than in serious casinos in
big gambling venues like Atlantic City or Las Vegas. House cheating
occurs most commonly in a card game where the dealer deals by hand,
as these conditions are the most opportune for chicanery. Some of the
methods which can be used by a dealer are similar to what is open to
a cheating player, for example card palming or smearing. However the
house should be able to arrange this more professionally and discreetly
than a cheating player, such as by marking the high and low cards with
very subtle braille-style indentations. Of course, a dealer can also
combine foreknowledge of the cards with the ability to palm and substitute
them to far better effect than a player possibly could! The dealer
has a larger and more private area available to him at his side of
the table, where he may utilise mirrors or other reflective devices
which allow him to get a peek at the "face down" cards. Sleight
of hand plays its part here, too: if the dealer can see what is on
the cards at both the top and the bottom of the deck, and possibly
even the second card from the top of the deck, he then has two or three
cards to choose from whenever a player requests a hit.
The easiest cheat for the house is manipulating the
cards when they are collected, because once this is done they can be
played normally by the dealer without any extra pretence. A very common
cheat in blackjack is for the cards to be picked up at the end of a
round in alternating order between low and high values. The cards are
then placed into the shuffling machine which is set to perform a phoney
shuffle. The cards look like they are being shuffled, but actually
remain in exactly the same order as that in which they were collected.
A player will then be guaranteed not to have anything close to a blackjack:
neither on his first two cards, nor with a twist, and to be bust on
the fourth.
The paradox of the casino cheat is that systematic
cheating - whether by the house or by players - will always be punished
eventually, no matter how well concealed. Any player who starts to
win big is watched very closely. Regular players will notice that they
seem to have bad luck in casinos where the house cheats, and the casino
will almost certainly lose far more in revenue (not to mention its
licence and reputation) than it could gain by cheating as customers
take their chips elsewhere. Whether you are the house or a player,
the odds of cheating successfully are stacked against you. So it seems
that in the casino at least, cheaters never prosper!
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