Card Counter Tommy Hyland caught....AGAIN!

Face to well known!

What's the matter with this guy? He's been getting caught card-counting at Eastern Seaboard casinos so much over the past few months it makes my head spin!

Hyland, who just might be the most dedicated professional card-counter with the most longevity of all time, was recently booted out MGM's new Springfield, Massachusetts casino. Just a few months ago he received that same welcome in several New York State casinos. Of course Hyland has blackjack card-counting heat all over the United States and probably Canada as well.

You would think he should emigrate to casinos overseas...at least for awhile.

Here's an article recounting his MGM Springfield tossing.

Just How Bad can Casino Game Protection Get?

Why is there a dolly?

EXTREMELY BAD!

Don't just take my word for it. Simply take a look at this casino game protection training video released by an Asian TV station.

It appears to be a training class for a real casino staff or regulatory body, although I am not sure. The trainer is from the NSW Liquor and Gaming Control Authority, which indicates New South Wales in Australia, but all the attendees appear to be Asian, therefore I cannot pinpoint where this happened and for whom it was given.

In any case, I have never seen such an utter display of lack of credible cheating knowledge by a game protection trainer. The woman shows nothing but low-level scams, and does a hesitating job at best. She then makes the incredibly naive statement that the dolly "will certainly stop people from putting bets on top."

She means to say pastposting or capping bets, which respectively is making a new bet after the winning number has been determined or adding chips to an existing winning bet.

The correct lexicon aside, her statement is so false that making it puts the casinos she trains at much higher risk and vulnerability to professional cheats who already feast on casinos lacking proper game protection training.

This is because the best professional roulette cheating teams only do exactly what she tells her students cannot be done--pastpost maximum straight-up bets on the number-- UNDERNEATH the dolly. I myself pastposted $100 checks straight-up underneath the dolly hundreds of times. So this terrible piece of misinformation being fed to its dealers is just one example of why some casinos remain the professional casino-cheats candy stores of the world.

I urge whoever hired this trainer...IF YOU DON'T WANT TO HIRE ME TO TEACH YOUR CASINO REAL GAME PROTECTION, AT LEAST HIRE SOMEONE WHO HAS A CLUE!!!

By the way...now that we're speaking about the roulette dolly, how many of you know that before the mid 1950s it did not exist on American and Asian-style roulette wheels? Just like with French-style roulette wheels that never used the dolly, dealers simply pointed to the number and verbalized it with "red-black, even-odd," etc.

Now that you know this, how many of you can guess why the dolly was invented?

Online there are many accounts of this, but most of them are inaccurate. Some say that it was to help people remember the last winning number in order to facilitate their betting patterns for upcoming spins. Others say by the dealer removing the dolly after all the winning bets are paid, the players know when they can begin their betting for the next spin.

Although these reasons are partially correct, they have nothing to do with the one reason the dolly was invented. In fact, the ubiquitous roulette dolly has a colorful history, and I am actually a descendant of it...so to speak.

Prior to 1955, there were no such dollies in existence. Roulette dealers would simply point to the winning number on the layout, announce it, and then begin sweeping the losing chips off the layout and the process of paying the winners, first the outside winners then the inside winners.

The early and mid-fifties were the heyday of roulette pastposting (placing late bets), especially straight-up on the numbers. In fact, it was like a roulette cheating epidemic. The biggest roulette pastposting cheats at the time were Henry Classon, a cheating ancestor of mine, and a mute gentlemen named Mumbles, both inducted in the Casino Cheats Hall of Fame.

This pair terrorized casinos in Las Vegas, Reno and Puerto Rico to the point that a fed-up pit boss named Kiki Vargas at the Americana casino in Puerto Rico decided to do something about it: he invented the roulette dolly.

His idea was that if the dealer placed the dolly atop the chips on the winning number or on the naked winning number, roulette pastposting cheats would no longer be able to manipulate those chips or place ones on the number that weren't there before the ball dropped.

BOY WAS HE WRONG!

But in spite of that, casinos across the world have been using the roulette dolly ever since.

MGM National Harbor Dealer Pleads Guilty in New Casino's 1st Big Baccarat Cheating Scam

High-Limit Baccarat Pit at MGM

It was a combination false shuffle/digital camera scam, where the baccarat dealer exposed part of a baccarat deck so his cohorts playing at the table could photograph it, and then protected the slug of cards by performing a false shuffle.

The scam netted more than $1 million.

The dealer, Ming Zhang, worked with a group of players with whom he shared the proceeds from the scam. I don't currently have details on how the scam was detected or if any other casino employees may have been involved.

Zhang will be sentenced on January 31, 2019.

My take: Where there is baccarat...there will be big baccarat scams.

Listen to UK Supreme Court Justice Deny Phil Ivey's Appeal in $12 million Baccarat Edge-Sorting Case

Phil doesn't look to happy listening to this

GREAT RULING AND THOROUGH EXPLANATION!

My take: This judge leaves no doubt as to what Ivey planned and did...and he got what he deserved!

It wasn't a Casino-Cheating Murder!..Good thing!

Scene of accident not murder

Yesterday I blogged about this case where a Mohegan Sun Pocono casino dealer who had led casino authorities to a huge $400,000 free-slot-play credit scam was found dead in a creek near that casino. There was speculation that the dealer, Matthew Crane, might have been murdered as a revenge payback for causing the convictions of three people, two of whom are currently in jail.

I stated in my blog account of the case that I thought it was highly improbable that this really was a payback murder, based on my analysis of who the three convicted casino cheats are. One was vice president of player development at the casino, another a cocktail waitress there, and the third a gambler who frequented it.

It turns out that an autopsy has determined that Crane died of accidental drowning, nothing more.

I'm glad to hear that it was not a sinister case of killing someone of casino-cheating.

Did this Casino-Cheating case lead to murder?

Casino Dealer found dead

In 2016 a Mohegan Sun Pocono dealer named Matthew Crane blew the whistle on a $400,000 free-slot-play credit scam using the theft of personal information that sent three people to prison, one of them Robert Pelligrini who was the cassino's vice-president of player development at the time, another a casino cocktail waitress named Rochelle Poszeluznyj, the third a gambler who frequented the casino named Mark Heltzel.

Well, tragically, Crane's lifeless body was found yesterday in a creek in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, not far from the casino where he worked. Although the police have not given details as far as a cause of death, nor stated that it was a homicide, it is easy to make that assumption based on the fact that Crane was an informant who helped send three people to federal court and plead guilty to various federal crimes in connection with the case.

Pelligrini received a federal prison term of 32 months, while Heltzel got 18 months and Poszeluznyj six months house arrest and two years probation. Allegedly Crane led casino authorities to the scam because he had been dating Poszeluznyj while she was also involved in a romantic relationship with Heltzel, which caused him to be jealous.

Pelligrini and Heltzel are currently in prison, so they could not have physically murdered Crane, but of course that doesn't mean they were not somehow involved in it, if, of course, it was a murder.

My take: This one is difficult to call. The prison sentences were not too lengthy and neither incarcerated man has a history of organized crime involvement, as least none that has been reported by the press. Poszeluznyj was described at trial as being a student who was also holding down two jobs. Taking all this into account, I find it improbable that any of these three initiated or participated in a murder-for-revenge scenario.

But stay tuned...I am sure something very interesting will surface with this case.

Playing Card Manufacturer Released from Liability in Ivey Edge-Sorting Case

Off the hook!

The Borgata Hotel and Casino has dropped its claim of expressed warranty breach against Gemaco Inc., the card-maker who supplied the cards Ivey and his partner Cheung Yin Sun edge-sorted to beat the Borgata casino out of some $10 million, which a New Jersey court ruled they had to return.

To read more about edge sorting and the details of the edge-sorting scam Ivey and Sun used to be casinos, simply search out more articles on this blog by entering "Edge-sorting baccarat cheating scam" or "Phil Ivey baccarat scam."

Two Roulette-Wheel-Clocking Pioneers Inducted into Casino Cheats Hall of Fame

Richard Jarecki

Richard Jarecki and Joseph Jagger, two tremendous pains in the asses to European and American casinos who assaulted their roulette wheels by simply clocking their performances to note imperfections they could exploit, have been inducted to the Casino Cheats Hall of Fame.

Both with extremely colorful histories, they are the 32nd and 33rd casino cheats to be bestowed with this honor.

Joseph Jagger

Should casinos have the right to prosecute a patron who stumbles upon a computer glitch and then uses it to gain free slot credits and cash out large sums of money?

Major Redeeming Credits Case

This article stems from the recent ruling of three appellate judges in a Singapore slot-machine credits case. A Hong Kong woman in the casino playing slots stumbled upon such a glitch and ended up maximizing the casino error to the tune of nearly a million bucks!

She did so by enlisting the help of two people to help her cash out the money to stay under the radar, thus preventing the casino from realizing the computer malfunction for as long as possible.

She and her two recruits were subsequently arrested and charged with conspiring to dishonestly misappropriate a large sum of casinos funds.

At trial, her lawyer argued that the case was no different than someone finding a wallet on the casino floor and keeping the money, which did actually happen in the same Singaporean casino, and ended with the acquittal of the person charged in that case.

But in this case, obviously involving lots and lots more money, the court convicted the woman and her friends of the charge and sentenced them to prison terms. The guilty parties appealed but to no avail.

The whole argument is based on, or at least should be based on, the woman's state of mind when she first came upon the glitch. She obviously had no premeditation on her mind at that moment, and only later decided to take advantage of the glitch, moving into a "conspiracy" once she brought the proposition to the two other participants.

One thing to note here is that the two other participants entered into the "conspiracy" with premeditation to take advantage of the glitch, which doesn't necessarily mean they were guilty of a crime but does mean they were never just stumblers onto a get-rich-quick scenario.

You can look at this case similarly to the Phil Ivey baccarat edge-sorting case, where he and his partner came upon defective cards in casinos and then premeditatedly used those defective cards to win millions from several casinos. In two major jurisdictions where Ivey pulled off the feat, neither charged him with a crime, in spite of his forethought to swindle the casinos out of the millions.

That said, you might think the woman taking advantage of the Singaporean computer glitch is even less guilty of a crime than Ivey was judged to be. After all, she did not come to the casino thinking of scamming it out of money, whereas Ivey and his partner did.

Also, some might believe it's just plain-old human nature for any person, or perhaps I should say "most people", to look upon the situation as serendipity and thus milk it for all it's worth. Therefore, you may think the casino is responsible for their own error and should not have the right to prosecute people who happen upon it and take advantage...especially so far as the woman is concerned.

I guess you could look at the situation somewhat differently once she got the two other people involved, seeing it as the furtherance of a conspiracy...but did that conspiracy ever really exist in the first place?

So you might still say the woman should not have been charged.

I also guess that you could look at the case of the two other people she recruited differently, since they entered the situation with the intention of ripping off the casino--if you want to call it that.

Here, you may not be so sure, but then again, how could you accuse the recruits of a crime if you're not accusing the woman who first stumbled upon the opportunity to commit the crime...if you want to call it that?

I realize all this sounds a bit discombobulating to say the least!

What do you think?

Wait a minute! Do we have another Father of Modern Roulette Wheel Clocking?

Is he the first father of modern roulette wheel clocking? 

Just a week ago I wrote an article about Richard Jarecki, the father of modern roulette wheel clocking who passed away at 86 years old after a lifetime of clocking biased roulette wheels for a living while he moonlighted as a doctor, researcher and scientist.

But suddenly an article has appeared in the UK Daily Mail newspaper claiming that a broke Victorian textile boss in the 1880s is the real father of beating casinos out of fortunes by clocking biased roulette wheels.

The man's name was Joseph Jagger, and according to the newspaper's account Jagger beat the storied Le Grand Casino of Monte Carlo out of 80,000 pounds back in 1881, which is the equivalent of 7.5 million pounds today.

According to a new book by Jagger's great-great niece Anne Fletcher, who happens to be a historian, Jagger was facing debtors prison after failing to pay off a series of loans he had taken while his textile business was going bankrupt. He then, as a last-ditch attempt, borrowed money from family members and friends and hightailed it to Monte Carlo, heading right for the roulette tables.

Taking advantage of a lifetime of working with textile wheels, Jagger was convinced he could survey all the roulette wheels in the casino and determine which ones had a bias in their revolutions. He knew that at the time no wheel of any kind could spin perfectly; there had to be a tilt in each one. So he spent an entire month, twelve hours a day, sitting at roulette tables and observing and recording the spins of every wheel in the grand casino.

Then he finally made his move, beat the casino for a small fortune, returned home to the UK, supposedly bought 30 houses, one for himself and his family, the rest for his friends, and lived happily ever after.

Le Grand Casino is said to have refurbished all its roulette wheels in Jagger's wake.

My take: Well, I don't know whether to believe this father-of-modern-roulette-wheel-clocking story...but then again, I don't know if I believe the first father-of-modern-roulette-wheel-clocking story about Richard Jarecki either.

But I ask myself one question: Didn't anyone working at Le Grand Casino in Monte Carlo notice the guy sitting at roulette tables twelve hours a day for a month without ever making a bet???