There is no problem getting small numbers of chips onto the casino floor. When I go to Vegas I buy chips and go from table to table. I take them back to my room and come down the next day to play. In Vegas a lot of the casinos are owned by the same company and you can use chips from one hotel at a different hotel a few miles down the strip. I see no problem introducing a few thousand dollars of chips into play. If you want to move large sums of money hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars I can imagine the casino noticing that you seem to cash out a lot of chips without winning them.
People do try this. I was in Vegas at the start of the month and someone tried to sell me $100 of chips for $75, he said he had to catch a flight. It seemed a bit dodgy to me so I told him I wasn’t interested. He then said “You’ll be getting $25 for free! The cashier’s just in there!”. I said, “Cash them yourself then” and walked off.
I didn’t look at them but for all I know he bought a stack fo those souvenir chips for $5 or something. He could probably make a living that way!
The question of gambling debts:
Legally, debts fall under contract law. I give you a pig, you give me $20; tit for tat. For money there must be consideration - it may be service, such as $50 for thsi job; or goods; or promise of whatever. Me saysing “I promise to gift you $100 on Friday” is not a contract for anything, therefore not a legally enforceable debt.
Gambling debts are (debatably) not an exchange of money for consideration, so technically would not be a contract; more like the “I promise togive you something” gift. this is one reason why historically they ahve not been enforceable.
Add to that the fact that since puritan days, gambling has been frowned on as a vice and the government saw no reason to encourage it. (Watch the movie “Barry Lyndon”; losing your fortune “gaming” was a common pass-time of the idle rich lords. The sandwich was invented by the chef of the Earl of Sandwich so he could eat without leaving the gambling tables…a bit too much dedication. etc.)
So, I guess even if a debt is now enforceable - if you have to go into debt to finance your gambling, well that’s a gamble for whoever lends you money. OTOH, if Nevada court says you owe money, it’s not up to California to say “no you don’t”.
Yeah, I always wondered about card counters. Obviously, having someone behind the opponent telling you where he stands is cheating. I can see the casinos saying even a counting computer in your shoe is cheating. But if you are just better at using you mind to play, what right do they have to ban you for palying better?
You may argue, “it’s private property, private business”, but the number of casinos is licensed, regulated, and limited by the state. -The analogy is, it’s more like the public airwaves where you are given a precious share of a limited resource; and therefore must abide by some rules, instead of treating it like your own domain.
Actually I wonder if the casinos push the myth of the “casinos vs card counters” to encourage people to come to Vegas or wherever and try their inept and futile “systems” to beat the bank; more money in the bank’s pockets.
I recall a news item about a lawsuit many years ago when Atlantic City first opened, where they were forbidden from banning people based on ability to play well (i.e. card counting). Not sure if they were able to change the laws?
Card counting is not illegal. Unlike cheating, which can land you in jail, card counters may be banned from a casino but not prosecuted.
And even that’s getting rarer these days. With continous shuffle machines, a card counter’s edge is almost completely blunted.
It’s partly a question of the popularity of counting. People knew how to card-count faro decades ago, but almost no one bothered to, so the casinos didn’t care. Blackjack is sexier, which means that counting blackjack is sexier, which made it more dangerous to the casinos.
Counting is considerably harder than it looks, at least for me. I’m practicing a bit, haven’t tried it at a casino yet. Right now, I don’t think I can do it under actual gaming conditions with any accuracy.
Reading its description, it must be the easiest game to card-count ever invented. You have one deck. You place bets on which card will come up. You deal that deck, one card per bet, until the deck runs out.
Wiki doesn’t say why Faro’s popularity waned. Do any casinos have it?
I only know that by the sixties the situation was more or less that the main reason Las Vegas casinos offered a Faro table or two was sentiment, as though it were an endangered species. “What a deformed thief this fashion is!”
I happen to work for a company that makes chips under 3 different brand names, one of which is considered by chip collectors as “the casino/poker chip”. We print our own inlays and decals and do no work outside the gaming industry which makes “Casino chip production is handled by the security printing industry, which also makes things like checkbooks and credit cards.” at least a half truth (we do have competitors that may do such things) and at most wholly untrue.
Most casinos don’t care about the small denomination chips. The $1 might get a single security feature. The $5, $10 will get one security feature. The $25, $50 would get 2 features. And on it will go up to the top denominations (Mirage’s $25,000 chips are pink) that will have all of the features.
If you walk into Caesar’s Palace and hand in 5 $100 chips, they will just verify you have 5 chips and hand you 5 $100 bills. If you walk in with one $10,000 chip they will call the pit(s) to see if anyone has left there recently with a chip that size and a general physical description. If the pit can’t verify you should have the chip, then they check it’s authenticity and security is seeing if they can’t figure out your identity. Smaller casinos will have smaller reserves and will check smaller transactions. Poker Palace on North Las Vegas Blvd in North Las Vegas will call the pit for $100 transactions.
All casinos have a second rack of chips. If counterfeits are found they will pull in the chips in current circulation and replace them with the backup rack. Anyone bringing in the old chips will get a good going over about where they got them.
The Stardust closed in 2006 and has been closed for just under 3 years, not 6 as mentioned by another poster.
That would be me relying on worn-out brain cells. Hmmm. That was in 1995 or '96. I wonder if there’s a list of Strip casinos that closed for good in 1989 or thereabouts.
Very interesting article - thanks for pointing me to it. Now I’ve got some additional reading.
my Federal Jurisdiction class was a while ago, so I’m no doubt rusty… Sections 91 and 92 are a lot easier to apply. 
I’ve heard it said that casinos actually like card counting: They like the idea that people convince themselves there’s a way to “beat the system” when the reality is that it’s very hard to do at a level that actually cuts meaningfully into profits, and easy to detect.
Desert Inn and Landmark closed in 1990.
Casino’s like card counters that are not greedy. They consider it a marketing investment. A winner creates excitement and excitement separates the suckers from their money quicker. A card counter could probably get away with taking in $5000 to $7000 a session, if they spaced their sessions out. Take in too much money and you get escorted off the premises and your name entered into the properties black book.
The news item I recalled from early Atlantic City days, similar to the Windsor article, was that the casinos could not ban someone from playing just because they were good at the game (which is essentially what card-counting is).
Casinos get a state license. If they are hard to obtain and limited in number, then the casino is like a radio or TV station getting a share of the public airwaves - it has a special limited privilege on a scarce resource. It should not be allowed to simply make up its own arbitrary rules as to who is admitted, but should allow anyone and everyone to play, unless they break the law.
Not sure what the various states gaming commissions rule about this… Obviously catering to easy to fleece losers has not hurt business in Vegas.
I agree - I suspect the game is harder to beat -especially nowadays, and the myth of the card-counter being so dangerous to casino profits that he must be banned - is probably something encouraged by casinos to lure inept wannabees into the casino for more easy profits. I wonder if they helped finance the movie “21”?
I doubt it. Card counters really can beat the odds, because good counting and best play can actually tilt the long-term odds in the gambler’s favor. No other game does this, although I understand Craps is pretty close. Today, they often use multiple decks, but there are limits to this and even with it some people can count appropriately.
Secondly, card counters sometimes operate in teams and find ways to pass information. Their gameplay works over the long term, and often doesn’t . I’m not sure if they can be banned for this in Atlantic City, because they aren’t playing against each other. I understand Vegas casinos will still kick people out for any counting. Subtle counters can win over the long haul, but they have to find ways to avoid casino security watching them. This usually means no sudden, huge raises.
First of all, card counting is grueling and hard to do. You can improve your odds only a tiny bit and that means playing for hours and hours for tiny gains. Like the casinos, you’ll be down, then up, then down, but in the end, you will have that slight 1/2% advantage. Casinos can do okay with this because they have thousands of pigeons… I mean patrons, so they can do well with tiny margins. When you count cards, it’s just you.
You’ll also get flack from other patrons for playing wrong and the casino will toss you out if you make too much of a rukus. It is far from a fun time activity, and many who say they count cards simply don’t know what is involved, or quickly get bored with the activity and try another strategy. Therefore, most Casinos probably won’t kick out the average person who attempts to count cards.
However, casinos can and will simply not let you play. In New Jersey and Nevada, it’s their right to refuse to allow patrons to play, and they all cross list such people, so if you’re banned in one casino, you’re banned in them all. There are a few people who tried to make a living out of it which means they have to play for eight or more hours per day. If a casino thinks you’re onto something, they’ll ban you – even if they’re not 100% sure you’re counting cards.
What a casino cannot do (which may be your confusion) is to deny you your winnings for cheating which they tried to do several times with early card counters. They lost in court, but the court still allowed them to ban particular people from playing. So, if the casinos do kick you out, you can collect your winnings. And, they can arrest you for trespassing once you’ve been banned.
The big difference between counterfeit currency and casino chips is that you have to go back to the experts in their house to cash in or use casino chips. Currency is accepted everywhere, and there are very few experts. So it is apples and oranges here. Aside from both of these being felonies and morally wrong, attempting anything with casino chips is just asking to be caught.
I was in Vegas in August (2009). I forgot to cash in 2 chips (1-$100, 1-$25) from Treasure Island. TI is owned by MGM-Mirage. It’s adjacent to The Mirage. At some point later, I went to the cage at The Mirage and cashed in 1-$5000 chip, a few $100 & $25 chips. I asked them if they’d cash in the TI chips too. They would not cash in the $100 chip. IIRC, they offered to cash the $25 chip. I don’t know if the reason for denying me was that it was a $100 chip or it was the multiple trips to the cage in rapid succession, always going to the same cashier.
For the $5000 chip, there was a very long delay. I don’t know what was going on, but it involved a supervisor, a couple trips by staff away from the counter, and some forms of ID being requested. I’ve cashed in $9000 in $1000 chips in Atlantic City without any delay or security procedures.
I suppose I had a few signs of potential fraud… not that I was committing any, but enough to trigger some basic double-checking.
By federal law, casino chips cannot be used as money outside the casino that issued them. I don’t think you could ever pay for your Slurpee with a $5 chip, but it wouldn’t be too far outside the ordinary for friends to offer chips in lieu of cash. High stakes poker players will swap $10k+ chips to settle debts amongst themselves.
They weren’t checking on the validity of the chip. They were filling out a Suspicious Activity Report (SAR) as per the Bank Secrecy Act of 1970 (or BSA, or otherwise known as the Currency and Foreign Transactions Reporting Act). It was triggered by quick multiple trips to a cage. Casinos fit into the broad category of “financial institution”.
If the casino lets them. All it takes for card counting not to work is to run the game with a lot of decks shuffled together in the shoe, and to never go very deep into the shoe before reshuffling and starting again.