Friday, July 15, 2016

Game Protection Post--How Bad Ass Casino Dealers Cheat Your Ass

Watch out!
Most casino gamblers believe that casinos do not need to cheat the customers because their profits are huge enough on the square.

What they overlook is that the vast majority of cheating in brick and mortar casinos is done by dealers in business for themselves who keep their casino bosses in the dark.

Suspicious gamblers, especially losing ones, will say that all dealers cheat at one time or another, and often bend their own bad-beat stories into horrific tales of being the victims of cheating dealers.

So what’s the truth?

It’s simply that casino cheating scams engineered by dealers or other casino employees are of a small proportion, but since there are so many casinos with so many tables, there are several episodes of dealer-cheating in all major casinos across the world—every day.

How do they do it?

They cheat in two basic formats.

One is to partner up with an “agent” to cheat their own casinos for individual profit. The other is to cheat legitimate players at their tables in order to replace the chips missing from their dealer chip racks.

That’s to say if Dealer-Peter is cheating the casino and dumping off those chips to his Partner-in-Cheating-Paul, he then has to cheat Poor-Innocent Mary out of her chips to balance out his chip rack and avoid suspicion.

5 ways Dealer-Peter cheats his casino and gets the chips to Partner-Paul
1       
P    Paul plays at Peter’s mini-baccarat table. On a baccarat score card provided by the casino, he charts the exact order of the cards dealt from the first hand out of the shoe until the last hand.

Peter then performs a false shuffle of the six decks of cards and puts them into the shoe. Paul, knowing the exact order that the cards will come out of the new shoe, bets accordingly and kicks the casino’s ass.

Peter and Paul divvy up the money outside the casino after Peter’s shift.

2       Paul next sits at Peter’s roulette table and buys in for chips. Peter, who has mastered the craft of roulette “section shooting,” by which he can control the ball so that it drops into a certain six-number quadrant on the spinning roulette wheel a fair percentage of the time, carefully monitors both the speed of the wheel’s revolutions and the speed with which he lances the roulette ball, and hits the desired quadrant more than probability would dictate.

Once again, Peter and Paul divvy up the cash over a cold one at the neighborhood tavern and play some live video poker.

3       Paul now strolls up to Peter’s blackjack table and takes a seat. He knows Peter will help him along in various ways.
        
a) Peter will “push” or even pay Paul’s losing hands.
b) Peter will overpay Paul when his hands do win.
      c) Peter will help Paul steer tens and aces to his hands off the top of the shoe through a method of controlled-shuffling whereby he protects the order of certain cards or clumps of cards.

      d) When dealing handheld blackjack games, Peter will take a surreptitious glance at the top card of the deck that Paul would receive on a hit, double-down or split. He will signal Paul how to proceed.

This time when the party’s over, they split up the booty in Peter’s apartment, which happens to have a blackjack table in the dining room so that Peter can practice his dealer-cheat moves.  

     
4        Paul takes a long walk to the other side of the behemoth live casino. Lo and behold, his buddy Peter is dealing a lively craps game, which is flowing along at an impressive pace. He hunkers in between two players along the human wall surrounding the craps table.

As is common with today’s craps tables, there is no supervising boxman seated at the middle of the table between Peter and the other dealer at the opposite end of the craps table.

a)      Paul makes a $50 bet on the Don’t Pass Line.
b)      The shooter rolls the dice and they come out 5-5 for a total of ten.
c)       Paul lays $100 double-odds against the shooter rolling another ten before he rolls a seven-out
d)      The shooter does roll the winner-ten and Paul’s bets lose.
e)      Paul quickly swipes his $100 double-odds bet off the layout before Peter can collect it for the house.
f)       Peter sees Paul do this but purposely ignores it.
g)      Paul loses only the original $50 Don’t Pass bet.
h)      The shooter rolls the dice and they come out 3-1 for a total of four.
i)        Paul lays $100 double-odds against the shooter rolling another four before he rolls a seven out.
j)        The shooter rolls the seven-out.
k)      Paul leaves both his winning bets on the layout.
l)        Peter pays them both.
m)    Paul wins $50 on each bet for a total profit of $100.

Paul continues swiping his losing odds bets off the layout in the dark, but leaves them intact when they win. Peter, knowing there is no one supervising him, just keeps paying Paul’s winners and ignoring the losers that Paul swipes off the layout.

This time the casino-cheating pair split up the profits at Paul’s house.
             
5       Finally Paul finds the brick and mortar poker room where Peter is dealing a $10-20 hold’em game. He sits down and immediately plays a hand. He receives his two cards face down and is delighted to see a pair of black aces. He tucks his cards underneath his chips in a predetermined way which signals the value of his hand to Peter, who immediately peeks at the top card to be burned before the flop.

By golly, he notes it’s a pretty red ace!

Instead of burning it, Peter holds it atop the deck and peels off the second card and burns it. Then he turns over the flop which contains the red ace. Paul goes on to make an aces full house and win the hand.

Paul continues playing with the artful dealer’s help and cleans up the poker game.

This final time, the happy boys cut up their ill-gotten gains at their girlfriends’ house (they’re sisters.)
  
Did we forget about Poor-Innocent Mary, the victim whom Peter has to cheat to hide the cheating-profits he made with Paul?

We did not!

So how does Peter cheat Mary?

The same way he cheated the casino with Paul, but in reverse.

When Mary sits at Peter’s blackjack table, he shortchanges her on winning hands, sweeps her bet on push hands, and just takes her losing chips when her hands lose.

Of course Mary might catch on and claim that Peter shortchanged her or took her chips on a push hand, to which Peter will apologize, make the correction--and then wait for the next “Mary” to hit his table.


The same vicious cycle continues on all the other games that Bad-Ass Peter deals in the casino.

Wednesday, July 13, 2016

Are Casinos Worldwide Under High-Tech Slot Machine Attacks?

High-tech slot attacks
Ever since a Russian high-tech slot machine cheat scam using smart phones recently came to light in Singapore (The FBI says this same plot has hit various US and Canadian casinos), casino operators are wondering how prevalent this problem is becoming with their machines.

They have good reason to be concerned.

The first thing that makes slot machines so appealing to high-tech cheats using equipment is that they do not really have to deal with the human element on the casino floor. Although slot machines are scrutinized by surveillance cameras and are somewhat patrolled on the floor, they do not receive the same human attention that table games do. This is because table games theoretically need supervison for every deal of the cards or roll of the dice while slot machines only need attention for jackpots and some other situations like malfunctions.

With that fact in mind, it is far less likely that a casino employee on the floor will catch on to a slot cheat using a smart phone or some other high-tech gadget at a bank of slot machines than at a casino table game. And it would also take casino surveillance longer to unravel a slot scam from video evidence than it would a blackjack or baccarat scam.

That said, in conjunction with the contined improvements in high-tech equipment that can be used to cheat or gain an edge in casinos, I do expect to see an increase in the commission of high-tech attacks on casino slot machines.

How can casinos fight this?

Firstly, by stepped-up patrols of their slot-machine banks and more routine reviews of surveillance video of slot-machine action, especially where big wins and jackpot wins have taken place.

Secondly, get floor staffs and surveillance staffs more educated as to how high-tech scams work.

Casino Cheat Couple use myChoice Card to Swipe $320,000 from Missouri Casino

Right Choice?
Daniel and Eileen Sheldon stumbled across quite a glitch in 
the River City Casino computer system while tracking their casino rewards via their myChoice card. They figured out that they could download unearned winnings and then simply withdraw the ill-gotten cash from their account.

During a three month period late in 2014, the pair allegedly downloaded false winnings from their myChoice card more than four thousand times!

That is a big number!

The total take was some $320,000.

The wife told police that she discovered the glitch in the River City Casino computer system quite by accident. Then she told her hubby and the pair decided to have a big myChoice party at the St. Louis casino. How exactly they were discovered has not been revealed, though there was sufficient evidence to charge both with crimes, each with significant bail bonds of $100,000.

My take: Although this type of computer-glitch-discovery-turned-into-illicit- profits is quite common across the financial world, it seems to occur more often in casinos than in banks or other institutions that deal with cash.

Why?


Your guess is as good as mine.

Monday, July 11, 2016

Check Out Some of My Original Blackjack Articles--Both Cheating and Advantage Play

As many of you must know by now, my biggest passion since retiring from active casino cheating several years ago is writing. I have now been writing for this blog more than a decade.

I have also written five books about gambling and cheating and many magazine articles.

I am now beginning to write online blackjack, baccarat and roulette articles as well.

You can read some of them on this very informative site.

Saturday, July 09, 2016

Why Poker Collusion Cheating is so popular

Who's telling who?
The vast popularity of Poker Collusion Cheating is growing every day. It may just be the most common form of cheating in brick and mortar casinos today. And note I said "casinos" and not "poker rooms". That's because poker collusion might be even more prevalent than bet-capping at roulette and blackjack.

Colluding at the brick-and-mortar poker tables is by far the most popular form of casino or poker cheating out there. And if you add online poker-collusion to the mix, you are talking about a staggering number of cheats, many of whom are professional. 

The art of two players covertly sharing information on their hole-cards and then using it to bet, raise and re-raise to induce opposing players to either call or fold is just too easy to do. It entails nothing more than perfecting a silent but visual language usual involving chip and card-formations on the table. In big-action cash-games in Vegas, top-notch collusion pros hustle high-rolling tourists out of tens of millions annually.

And even more than blackjack hole-carding, poker collusion is extremely safe inasmuch that no one can ever be prosecuted for it. In fact, only in the most obvious situations is a poker-colluder ever approached by poker room employees and asked to leave.

Online poker games are a little tougher because of all the anti-collusion programs that can go back and analyze every hand, card by card. Collusion patterns can be detected, but the most skilled of cheats will reduce their colluding and manage to stay under the anti-collusion radar for the most part.

Why is Blackjack Hole-Carding such a popular cheating method?

Did someone catch the hole-card?
Imagine being able to cheat in a casino without really cheating. Sounds like a pipe-dream, right?

Wrong!


It actually exists on the blackjack table. And it is the number one from of blackjack cheating by skilled and professional blackjack cheats. 

There have been numerous discussions and debates whether or not hole-carding is actually cheating, some of which have ended up in state and federal courts. Despite the fact that there have been arrests of card-cheats for hole-carding blackjack games, not one has ever been convicted. In fact, there have been cases of false arrest stemming from these incidents where casinos ended up paying damages to those they arrested, in effect making them double-victims of the same scam.

The reason blackjack hole-card cheating is not really cheating is because the hole-carders are doing nothing to alter the deal and motion of the game. They are simply taking advantage of a weak dealer when he slides and tucks his hole-card underneath his up-card. 

Even after casinos greatly reduced the number of handheld blackjack games in which hole-carding was ridiculously easy, skilled cheats still manage to position themselves around and behind a blackjack table to get a good line of sight at a portion of the hole-card´s face to determine its value. Then one cheat (the reader) signals the value of the hole-card to his partner(s) at the table who use the information to alter their hand-strategy decisions

How profitable is blackjack hole-carding? 

Well, that of course, depends mainly on the percentage of hands the reader can glimpse the hole-card. If he is successful every time, the cheats have a 13% advantage over the casino, which is huge. In reality, that utopia is never reached, but if the reader manages a 25% accurate read-rate, the advantage is still healthy enough. The key is not to make mistakes reading. It’s far better for the team to play basic strategy when the hole-card is not readily defined.

And there are other ways to enhance the hole-carding edge. Most Skilled blackjack cheats already have substantial knowledge on card-counting and other legal advantage-play techniques such as ace-steering and identifying clumps of ten-valued cards and aces. So when a good team goes up to the blackjack table with the main hole-carding plan of attack, they have other weapons in their arsenal to fully take advantage of favorable situations. 

So when you take a good look at blackjack hole-carding, you can see why skilled blackjack cheats swear by it.

Thursday, July 07, 2016

Is This a Bad Attempt at Savannah?

Bad attempt at Savannah?
Holiday weekends usually bring out the cheats, as they do the legitimate players, and this past July 4th weekend in the US was no exception.

But apparently there was one exception to the normal cheating moves seen across roulette layouts.

At the Sands Bethlehem casino in Pennsylvania, a roulette cheat named Lalit Taneja, of unknown national origin, tried a roulette "pinch" move that may have been a silly attempt at my famous "Savannah" pinch move.

A pinch move is when the cheat removes a losing bet from the layout without the dealer noticing it.

But unfortunately for Mr. Taneja, a supervisor did notice his attempt to remove what was a losing bet of four $500 chips beneath two $5 chips, $2,010 in total, from the third-section box on the outside of the roulette layout. Apparently, Mr. Taneja tried to hide the bet from the dealer by placing other much smaller bets with his arm extended over the $2,010 bet just as the ball was beginning to drop. Then when it lost, he raked back the big bet which he thought nobody saw.

The covering of $500 chips with $5 chips is very reminiscent of my Savannah move, although it doesn't appear that Taneja tried to hide the $500 chips under the $5 chips as I did with Savannah. He went through this complicated action of trying to hide the bet while making other bets with his arm slung over his big bet.

I gotta wonder why he went through all that when it is so simple to hide the $500 chips underneath the $5 chips the way I did with Savannah.

Perhaps he never saw or read about the Savannah.

In any case, Mr. Taneja is busted and sitting in jail. Perhaps someone can send him a copy of my book "American Roulette" and he could read about what he should have done.

First High-Tech Casino Cheat Using Smartphone to Cheat Slot Machines Goes Down!

Bet he never thought his smartphone would film this!
An Eastern European mobster who is the first person convicted of using a smart phone to cheat casinos has been sentenced to 22 months in a Singapore prison for his role in cheating slot machines at the Resorts World Sentosa and Marina Bay Sands casinos last June.
Forty-year-old Radoslav Skubnik, a Czech national, copped out to several cheating charges in front of a Singaporean judge, who surely has seen his share of casino and slot cheats before him. Skubnik admitted that he used his smart phone to get an advantage on the casinos’ slot machines.
The case was much more complicated than that of simple casino and slot machine cheating. Skubnik was part of a criminal gang that preyed upon casinos worldwide. The gang attacked slot machines throughout Europe, in Macao, and even in the United States, mostly at tribal casinos whose employees might not have as much slot machine protection experience as their Las Vegas and Atlantic City counterparts.
According to the prosecutor, Skubnik and two Russian accomplices, forty-year-old Vladislav Logachev and thirty-three-year-old Andrei Egorov, used smart phones to film the slot machines’ play patterns and then uploaded the information to a complex server that analyzed and decoded it before sending it back to the cheating slot players.

With this information, they were able to gage upcoming large payouts.

Singaporean police reportedly recovered $125,000 in slot winnings from the guilty parties. The two accomplices, Logachev and Egorov, have not yet met their fate although they are charged with similar crimes

It came out in court that the three slot machine cheats were educated in their art in Russia and then sent all over the world by mob leaders to raid casinos’ slot machines. 

This goes well with Eastern Europeans’ history of high-tech casino cheating. Back in 2004, in what was the first well publicized high-tech casino cheating case, a group of Hungarians and Romanians used lasers to clock roulette wheels in London casinos, although they were never charged with a crime.
My take: Hooray! Chalk one up for Singaporean gaming agents, they finally nabbed a high-tech casino cheat team. But watch out for these Eastern European high-tech cheats…they’re extremely dangerous to casinos’ coffers!

Dealer Insider Trio Busted For Roulette Pastposting Cheat Scam at Iowa Horseshoe Casino in Council Bluffs

Dealer placing bets?
A floor supervisor and his ace roulette dealer teamed up with a patron to cheat their Iowa Horseshoe casino out of some thirty grand.

Their roulette cheat scam was rather basic if not altogether amateurish. The dealer and the supervisor simply looked the other way as their cohort roulette player made late or pastposted bets on the layout.  On many spins, the dealer himself pastposted the bet or added chips to a winning bets after they had won.

The dealer most likely had some of the cohorts chips palmed during play and simply dropped them on the winning number as he swept away the losing chips. This is not a new scam and usually gets discovered by casino surveillance long after its inception.

In this case, the roulette cheat scam fell apart when another roulette player not involved in it became aware of the hanky-panky taking place on the layout. He alerted another supervisor who, unfortunately for the crooked supervisor and dealer, was not in on the scam. Surveillance was then notified and a three-month investigation gathered enough evidence to charge the guilty parties.

Roulette supervisor Jonathan Rumery, 28; roulette dealer Jonathan Waugh 24; and roulette patron Cody Schroeder, 28, were all charged with cheating at gambling and conspiracy to cheat at gambling.


My take: Well, the “Jonathan Brothers” had a pretty good run for an Iowa casino cheat scam, but now they´ll never work in another Iowa casino again, and probably not in any casino. And to boot they´ll probably get some county jail time to think about it.

Wednesday, July 06, 2016

Are you cheating yourself by Splitting Aces in Blackjack?

Should you?
All serious blackjack players know the basic strategy and card-counting decisions for splitting pairs, and it’s pretty hard to go against them.

Many say impossible.

 But I disagree in two cases, and both are among the strongest pair-splitting cases etched in stone:

 Always split Aces.

 Always split 8s.

 Is my reluctance to always do so based on odds?

 Absolutely not!

It’s based solely on what seems to happen each time I make either of those plays.

Splitting Aces:

If you’ve got a pair of Aces against a dealer’s stiff up-card, then splitting them is of course a no-brainer. But when you’ve got them against a dealer’s up-card of 7,8,9,10 or Ace, you need two successful hits for a chance to win both hands if the dealer already has a made hand, quite difficult when you’re permitted just one card on each split-Ace.

I prefer just hitting Aces with the opportunity to hit again…and again. With each Ace counting as 1 or 11, I like my chances of making a pat hand.

Splitting 8s:

Basic strategy says always split them. I sure as hell don’t like the looks of that when I see the dealer’s up-card is 9, 10, or Ace. If he’s got any ten-value card in the hole, my goose is cooked—twice!

But what the heck do I know?