Cheating in casinos is considered a felony under the laws of many states. However, there are two ways cheating is carried out in casinos – players cheat on casinos and casinos also cheat on players. Did you not know that? Many casinos trick the players to prevent them from winning and there are many ways they carry out this unethical trick.
- Do Casinos Cheat At Roulette
- How Casinos Cheat Players
- Do Casinos Cheat With Roulette
- Do Casinos Cheat In Baccarat
Some gamblers refuse to accept that the casino has an advantage. Instead, they use different means to circumvent the house edge and bring in profits.
- Inside jobs, chip grab-and-runs and craps cheats are the largest ongoing headaches for casinos and casino regulators. And it's the most basic scams that can be hardest to catch.
- Do Online Casinos Cheat? Although many of today's online gaming casinos are just as tightly regulated as those in Las Vegas, there are more than a few that are scamming people out of thousands of dollars every day.
- What those fraudsters and slot cheats would then do is to send players to casinos all over the world and start playing slot machines on which there was a random number generator that could for all intents and purposes be cracked.
- So casino operators can't cheat in terms of rigging the RNG. But they can do so in other ways (we'll get to that shortly). Take note that if you never win a jackpot, you'll stop playing slots and the casino business will go out of business.
Here are the two main routes for making this happen:
Advantage play is perfectly legal. You won't get sent to jail for card counting, but you will get kicked out of the casino if caught.
Cheating is entirely illegal. Gambling establishments will detain you and contact law enforcement. The courtroom will late decide your fate.
Of course, some cheaters are very clever at avoiding detection. But as you'll see below, casinos have plenty of ways to catch these swindlers.
Staff Members Monitor the Games
The pit boss, the dealers, and the floor supervisors all work in conjunction to catch cheaters. Upon seeing anything suspicious, they can alert security.
Dealers are on the front lines in the casino when it comes to catching scammers. They're closest to the action and, as a result, can spot fishy play.
Floor supervisors and pit bosses walk around to monitor the action. During the rounds, they may notice something irregular and uncover cheating.
Of course, most casino cheats get away with their scams for a short while. Therefore, no employees may be quick enough to catch them in the act.
However, pit bosses and dealers stand a decent chance at spotting blatant cheating, such as one pulling cards out of a sleeve or stealing chips off the table.
Casinos Run the Numbers
If a casino cheater is any good at their craft, they'll evade casino detection for a while. In fact, a gambling establishment may not have any idea about they're being ripped off.
However, casinos have the advantage of reviewing their numbers and figuring out where are they're taking heavy losses.
If management reviews the numbers and finds that they're getting beaten badly in a specific game, they know that something is up. Here's an example on how they might figure out that the casino is losing serious money:
- A casino wins 10% of all money gambled at a craps table on average.
- They review the numbers and find that they've lost 5% in craps over an entire month.
- Management theorizes that one or more players are sliding the dice.
Do Casinos Cheat At Roulette
The numbers alone won't tell a casino who, if anybody, is cheating. They can at least use the data, though, to start on the right path towards catching potential cheaters or advantage players.
As I'll cover later, greed often gets the better of a cheater. They take advantage of casinos again and again before finally getting caught.
Surveillance Provides Help From Above
Casinos surveillance has cameras in nearly every corner of their gambling floors. They especially focus on areas where cheating might occur.
Table games are hotspots for where cheaters operate. The latter can use a variety of illicit means to bilk games like roulette and blackjack.
As mentioned before, employees may not always catch this cheating. However, surveillance gives security an opportunity to go back and review the footage.
With hours' worth of footage, a casino can take as long as they need to determine where they're being scammed. They have the ability to watch and rewind the tape countless times if need be.
Not even surveillance footage catches everything. It does, however, give casinos the benefit of hindsight when identifying potential grifters.
RFID Chips Help Casinos Follow the Money
In recent years, casinos have been employing radio-frequency identification (RFID). Gambling establishments use this technology in chips.
RFID chips allow casinos to track chip movements. The house uses these chips for the following purposes:
- Track gamblers' betting habits and specialize their VIP rewards
- Improve marketing efforts
- Track robbers and stolen chips
- Catch advantage gamblers
- Catch cheaters
The last point is key to this discussion. Through the use of RFID chips, casinos can track customer win patterns. Upon noticing somebody winning at an unbelievable rate, they can pay closer attention to the situation.
Hot streaks happen, and some lucky gamblers haul in massive amounts of money. However, these same win streaks eventually come to an end.
The casino holds the edge in every game and fully realizes that nobody will beat them night after night—at least not legitimately anyways. They can easily separate an anomaly from the average hot streak.
In the latter case, a gambler's luck eventually runs out if they keep showing up. Meanwhile, a cheat will keep winning thousands of dollars each time that they play.
Casinos don't catch such anomalies with normal chips. RFID chips, on the other hand, give them an additional weapon in spotting weird win patterns.
The House Takes Advantage of Cheaters' Greed
Most cheaters aren't experts in this discipline. Otherwise, they'd use their smarts and skills to become legitimate professional gamblers, rather ripping off the casino.
Cheaters may start out with the intentions of scamming the casino a few times before quitting and banking their profits. But once the money starts rolling in, few crooks can resist the temptation to stay out of the casino.
I've seen plenty of dealer-player collusion scandals where the cheating team simply didn't know when to say when. They were successful the first few times and continued using their advantage to make more and more money.
Cheating is entirely illegal. Gambling establishments will detain you and contact law enforcement. The courtroom will late decide your fate.
Of course, some cheaters are very clever at avoiding detection. But as you'll see below, casinos have plenty of ways to catch these swindlers.
Staff Members Monitor the Games
The pit boss, the dealers, and the floor supervisors all work in conjunction to catch cheaters. Upon seeing anything suspicious, they can alert security.
Dealers are on the front lines in the casino when it comes to catching scammers. They're closest to the action and, as a result, can spot fishy play.
Floor supervisors and pit bosses walk around to monitor the action. During the rounds, they may notice something irregular and uncover cheating.
Of course, most casino cheats get away with their scams for a short while. Therefore, no employees may be quick enough to catch them in the act.
However, pit bosses and dealers stand a decent chance at spotting blatant cheating, such as one pulling cards out of a sleeve or stealing chips off the table.
Casinos Run the Numbers
If a casino cheater is any good at their craft, they'll evade casino detection for a while. In fact, a gambling establishment may not have any idea about they're being ripped off.
However, casinos have the advantage of reviewing their numbers and figuring out where are they're taking heavy losses.
If management reviews the numbers and finds that they're getting beaten badly in a specific game, they know that something is up. Here's an example on how they might figure out that the casino is losing serious money:
- A casino wins 10% of all money gambled at a craps table on average.
- They review the numbers and find that they've lost 5% in craps over an entire month.
- Management theorizes that one or more players are sliding the dice.
Do Casinos Cheat At Roulette
The numbers alone won't tell a casino who, if anybody, is cheating. They can at least use the data, though, to start on the right path towards catching potential cheaters or advantage players.
As I'll cover later, greed often gets the better of a cheater. They take advantage of casinos again and again before finally getting caught.
Surveillance Provides Help From Above
Casinos surveillance has cameras in nearly every corner of their gambling floors. They especially focus on areas where cheating might occur.
Table games are hotspots for where cheaters operate. The latter can use a variety of illicit means to bilk games like roulette and blackjack.
As mentioned before, employees may not always catch this cheating. However, surveillance gives security an opportunity to go back and review the footage.
With hours' worth of footage, a casino can take as long as they need to determine where they're being scammed. They have the ability to watch and rewind the tape countless times if need be.
Not even surveillance footage catches everything. It does, however, give casinos the benefit of hindsight when identifying potential grifters.
RFID Chips Help Casinos Follow the Money
In recent years, casinos have been employing radio-frequency identification (RFID). Gambling establishments use this technology in chips.
RFID chips allow casinos to track chip movements. The house uses these chips for the following purposes:
- Track gamblers' betting habits and specialize their VIP rewards
- Improve marketing efforts
- Track robbers and stolen chips
- Catch advantage gamblers
- Catch cheaters
The last point is key to this discussion. Through the use of RFID chips, casinos can track customer win patterns. Upon noticing somebody winning at an unbelievable rate, they can pay closer attention to the situation.
Hot streaks happen, and some lucky gamblers haul in massive amounts of money. However, these same win streaks eventually come to an end.
The casino holds the edge in every game and fully realizes that nobody will beat them night after night—at least not legitimately anyways. They can easily separate an anomaly from the average hot streak.
In the latter case, a gambler's luck eventually runs out if they keep showing up. Meanwhile, a cheat will keep winning thousands of dollars each time that they play.
Casinos don't catch such anomalies with normal chips. RFID chips, on the other hand, give them an additional weapon in spotting weird win patterns.
The House Takes Advantage of Cheaters' Greed
Most cheaters aren't experts in this discipline. Otherwise, they'd use their smarts and skills to become legitimate professional gamblers, rather ripping off the casino.
Cheaters may start out with the intentions of scamming the casino a few times before quitting and banking their profits. But once the money starts rolling in, few crooks can resist the temptation to stay out of the casino.
I've seen plenty of dealer-player collusion scandals where the cheating team simply didn't know when to say when. They were successful the first few times and continued using their advantage to make more and more money.
Again, casinos frequently look at their numbers to see if anything strange sticks out. Assuming they see a certain roulette table taking heavy losses, for example, they might start reviewing the footage for signs of magnets or past-posting.
If every cheater were smart, they'd quit while they were ahead before casinos become wiser. Most aren't, though, which is why they continue their crooked ways until getting busted.
Casinos Help Each Other out With Databases
Gambling establishments have been networking with each other ever since the 1980s, when the MIT blackjack team terrorized the industry. Of course, the MIT blackjack team was counting cards, which is a legal advantage gambling method.
However, casinos don't just network with one another to catch advantage gamblers. They also do so when it comes to identifying cheaters.
Of course, cheating teams are often good at wearing disguises. If they're smart, they'll also avoid signing up for VIP programs or doing anything else to surrender their identification.
In some cases, though, gambling establishments will catch a cheater through database information alone. Aside from helping casinos identify scammers, databases also serve as a deterrent from a cheater ever walking into a casino again.
Conclusion
Cheaters can gain the upper hand on casinos initially. They may even get away with a caper if they're smart and quit early enough.
However, casinos have plenty of tools at their disposal for nabbing cheaters. Their employees, surveillance, numbers, and RFID chips all help expose cheating scandals.
Even with these tools, though, gambling venues aren't guaranteed to spot swindlers. But they have an excellent chance of doing so if the same cheaters get greedy and keep showing up.
If you've played a card game in a Las Vegas casino, you've probably had your cards shuffled by an automatic card shuffler. These mysterious black boxes do their job, quietly and effectively, making sure the cards come out randomly, to protect both the casino and the player. Mostly the casino.
We were given a rare glimpse into the inner workings of an automatic card shuffler at a Strip hotel during some routine maintenance. Our mind still hasn't stopped being blown.
Automatic card shufflers are complicated. Like Las Vegas prostitution.
The shuffling machine's a lot more complicated than we'd imagined. Wheels and gears and belts and motors move the cards around with robot-like efficiency, dispensing them based upon the game being played.
The machine we saw the innards of was being used at a three card poker table, so the cards were coming out in batches of three.
We grabbed some sweet video of the automatic card shuffler in action. Which we're pretty sure we weren't supposed to do. We're not a big fan of rules. It won't take long for you to learn this about us. Let's watch.
Amazing stuff, don't you think? It's like capturing footage of a Sasquatch, or something even more rare, like video of Criss Angel solving a math problem.
How Casinos Cheat Players
Most automatic shuffling machines you see in casinos were made by Shufflemaster, a company now called SHFL Entertainment for reasons lost on us. In the SHFL offices, there's a wooden prototype of their first automatic shuffler, from 1983, made mostly of wood.
Imagine a global company being based on wood. You know, like Playboy Enterprises.
Do Casinos Cheat With Roulette
The history of card shufflers is riveting, so naturally, you won't find it here. Go here if you care to learn more.
Do Casinos Cheat In Baccarat
We're endlessly fascinated by how casinos do what they do. And you?
