The Tech Used to Catch Vegas Cheats 321
Black Jack writes "Interesting piece on silicon.com about the technology used in Vegas for catching the cheats. It goes into detail on a number of things from facial recognition and RFID to some CIA-developed systems for background checking staff. Surprised they're so open about what they do! ...or is this just the stuff they admit to?"
Not giving much away (Score:5, Insightful)
It's one thing to say you do something, it's an entirely different thing to say how you do it. For example, saying that you have an RFID chip in every casino chip is one thing. Having a monitoring system that can quickly and automatically identify a RFID position and movement anomaly among millions of active casino chips is something else.
Not surprising at all. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Not giving much away (Score:5, Insightful)
They want people to know - deterrent value (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe they show you on purpose. (Score:5, Insightful)
It shoudln't suprise you. It's the same reason the police officers drive around in very obvioulsy marked cars while on patrol. (Except for undercover cars of course, but they are doing a different type of work) While driving for instance, when you see a policeman pull up behind your car the first thing that comes to my mind at least is some form of "am I doing anything wrong at this point in time?" and that's kind of the effect they're after. They want you to know they are there and patroling hopefully keeping you from doing something you shouldn't because you just saw a cop.
I think the same thing goes for a Casino owner. The more that you know about the measures they are using to keep you away, the more likely you are not to try to cheat in the first place. There is also a show on TV currently on Court TV [courttv.com] called The Takedown [courttv.com]. It's a team of prior casino cheats and thieves that are now hired to go and test the security in casinos by beating them at their game. Interesting show, even more interesting concepts.
Not really.. (Score:3, Insightful)
They can still have excellent security while being totally upfront about it. It's only certain governments that feel the need to hide everything about "security" in the shadows.
This is also good customer friendlyness. If I go to a casino and there's a big sign that says they do facial scanning to catch cheaters, I have no problem with their scanning and I'll still go in. If they do it sneakily and I find out later, I'll feel violated and never go back to that casino.
Re:Fucking terrorist blackjack card counters! (Score:4, Insightful)
I think it is only legal if you do it by yourself, with no help from any electronic/mechanical device, like a system conceiled in your shoes or something like that.
Re:'cheat' is realative (Score:3, Insightful)
People are fortunate today- back in the bad old days here when the Mob still ran things, you wouldn't just get escorted out the front door and told not to come back.
Re:Awesome (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't worry. They'll be caught in the real world when the buildings they design collapse, or the machine they design breaks apart and kills someone, or when they can't design a functioning 4-bit comparator.
Re:'cheat' is realative (Score:3, Insightful)
Most reasonable people would agree. Casino operators, however, are very adamant that it is cheating, I guess on the grounds that it eliminates pure chance from the equation, and it's cheating to use your brain. Or something. Although they've recently adopted measures to make card counting far more difficult, in the past a skilled enough gambler could exploit the odds (possibly as part of a group) and win big. Casinos don't want any skill involved, just dumb luck - otherwise they'll always be paying out to a few professionals.
Personally, this sort of attitude just makes me really, really want to fuck with them. Another ten years or so and you'll have professional gamblers armed with nanotechnology and remote computers analyzing every move. I can't wait.
Re:Redundancy (Score:2, Insightful)
Not redundant at all. Las Vegas is an *entirely* different world.
Re:scare off the wanna be's (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Not giving much away (Score:5, Insightful)
Its not about making it impossible, its about making it extremely hard.
Their house, their rules (Score:5, Insightful)
Honestly, I agree with you: it's dumb to throw out players just because they can play better than you allow yourself to. (The percentage comes mostly from the fact that the dealer must hit on 16 and soft 17 no matter what the count looks like. A smart dealer would have a huge advantage, with the player having a chance to bust first, but they don't want to make it a skill vs. skill contest.)
In Atlantic City, it's actually getting harder to find a straight 21 game. They have a lot of variants of it, and although I haven't done the math I bet they eliminate your percentage in the game. Your percentage is small and it's not that hard to eliminate it with a few rule changes. But I guess the Vegas houses feel strongly about the traditional game.
Still, it would be a lot cheaper to change the game than to try to catch people based on what's in their heads. (Or in their shoes, if they're using an illegal computer. At least there they're trying to restrict the game to skill, including memory, although again a rules change could eliminate the advantage of having a computer.)
I suspect that they like the fact that people know that there's a percentage to the player in 21, even though most people don't know how to get it. And unless you're playing on a team it's hard to make money fast at it. (If you can play well enough to get a 1% advantage, you win an average of $1 per hand at the $100 table, which comes out to perhaps $30 an hour. Real money, certainly, but a lot of work for it.)
So if there are 6 players at the table and 5 of them are losing because they don't play the game very well, and they can catch you if you're making the big money playing on a team, it may still be to their advantage to leave the rules as they are. I've never heard of them messing with a small-time card counter, even though it's obvious they're counting.
Sounds dumb to me. There's a lot more vigorous cheating going on (stealing chips when people aren't looking, for example) that's easier to catch.
Article ignores crackdowns on legal card counting! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Card Counting is NOT Cheating!!!! (Score:4, Insightful)
This perhaps offers the best insight into why the casinos are so hot to catch counters quickly. Catch a cheater and he's going to jail, and the casino can probably collect nice damages.
Catch a card counter... and do what? Ask him to leave? Not give him any more comps? He's not doing anything illegal so the casino won't be getting any money back. Better catch him quick then, before he relieves you of $50,000 at the blackjack tables.
Re:'cheat' is realative (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Cheating (Score:5, Insightful)
No, they aren't. Sure, if you play Keno, your odds suck. But if you play basic strategy (not hard to learn) and find a decent Blackjack game (NOT 5:6, etc.), the house edge is frequently below 0.5%.
And cheating is cheating. If you don't like the house edge, don't play. Stealing chips from a casino is exactly the same thing as stealing real money.
Remember, the cameras aren't just there to prevent you from cheating - they are also there to prevent the house from cheating. The NGC is, thankfully, a bunch of hard-asses who will pull licenses if the casinos don't play on the straight and level.
In Vegas, the games are fair. Sure, the house has the edge, but the deck isn't stacked and the slots really are random.
Playing BS Blackjack at $10 a hand, with a decent game (house edge 0.5%) costs only $.05 a hand. At 100 hands an hour, that works out to $5 an hour. It's every bit as cheap as a movie, and you get free drinks. Moreover, if you play for a few hours, you can probably get a comp for the buffet.
Know how much you're willing to lose (and stick to it), know which games to play (and what the house edge is), know the rules, know the basic strategy, and have fun.
Open (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:They want people to know - deterrent value (Score:3, Insightful)
I've worked for a few different Las Vegas casinos doing data analysis. My job was more to do with maximizing profits rather than catching cheats, but it did involve analysing a lot of the same or similar data. In many ways casinos are indeed remarkably advanced in this, but in many ways they aren't. It's a surprisngly conservative industry in many ways. I suspect much of this is boasting rather than actual practical systems that they make serious use of.
Jedidiah.
Re:Who's the cheat? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Not giving much away (Score:5, Insightful)
Bob at machine 3 played a chip with the same id as Ted at machine 5.
Bob at machine 3 played a chip with the same id as Kim at machine 9.
Bob at machine 3 played a chip with the same id as Joe at machine 43.
I wonder who has the counterfeit chips.
A better scam would be to counterfeit enough chips for a bucket and then switch an innocent person's bucket for one full of counterfeits.
Casinos *do* talk to each other about players (Score:4, Insightful)
But if you're playing blackjack as a *business*, you need to be able to keep playing. Casinos do talk to each other about problem players, and while they're more concerned about actual cheaters (dealers in league with players, counterfeit chips, etc.), if they're seeing the same players winning too often at games that are rigged in favor of the house, they're going to keep track of who's doing it and stop them. And it's usually groups of players, not just individuals - making money off card counting is usually a team sport, with division of labor between the different players to try to maximize information collection and exploitation while reducing visibility. So you may have some of your players betting at lower levels and doing the counting while another player does the high-roller bit on the tables that have the right odds.
Re:Who's the cheat? (Score:3, Insightful)
Without a reasonable amount of data to analyse there is nothing I can tell you about slot machine layout that is going to be of any reasl significance. I can tell you that you'll loses money the slowest on the video poker games near the middle of the casino. I can't tell you how to make money though.
Besides, I don't gamble in casinos. I know how they work, I know the odds, and I know exactly how much money they make. Casinos don't need to legally bar me from gambling, showing me their average actual hold and turnover is more than enough to stop me ever playing their slot machines.
Jedidiah.
Re:Card Counting is NOT Cheating!!!! (Score:3, Insightful)
From the point of view of the casino, they don't really care whether you go to jail or just get asked to leave, so long as you're not card-counting (successfully) in their casino anymore. The tech they're talking about here still achieves that goal.
Re:Awesome (Score:3, Insightful)
Thanks,
Leabre
Re:Making Your Own Tokens (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Not giving much away (Score:2, Insightful)
Then RFID chip readers at the exits, and they can find someone trying to steal chips.
A Few Small Issues Here (Score:4, Insightful)
among the millions of stupid players
At its crudest level this would stop the appearance of counterfeit chips and would also catch players trying to sneak an extra chip onto their stake upon winning.
You mean these readers are good enough to read the RFID's of chips stacked directly on top of each other? There must be some sort of random delay to prevent collisions. Be interesting to know more about the technology of reading a lot of simultaneous RFID chips in close proximity to each other.
a player laying $5 bets while sitting with $100,000 of chips in his or her pocket. This is certainly no cause for concern in its own right but such behaviour would in the past have caught notorious card counters waiting for the odds to fall in their favour or getting their eye in and honing a system.
Oh, card counters are nororious now? Last time I checked, card counting is not illegal. Casinos will certainly try to keep you from doing it, but it is a skill for an Advantage Player, and not a cheat. It's only PR that tries to tell you otherwise, but the bias in this article is already apparent.
And btw, since when are casinos entitled to know the contents of your pockets? Time to get out the aluminum foil for the pockets.
Subsequent players, one replacing the other at a table, whose bets vary greatly in size but whose chips originate from the same batch could also be identified as potential partners in a system.
I'd say any cheat team will quickly learn to acquire their checks (casino-speak for chips) separately soon enough.
Carol Pride, CIO of Caesars Palace, told silicon.com that many casinos favour chips and playing cards marked around the edges with invisible inks and barcodes, enabling optical monitoring of their movement and authenticity.
Great! The casino's are marking my decks for me now. Well, if a tv camera can see it, then there will be a way for me to see it too. It's not an invisible ink if they can read it.
Say what they want, but there are very few people serving jail time for cheating a casino in this country.