Yes, I know what a casino is. Yes, I know that all the games are carefully designed to be stacked in their favor. But the idea that it would be morally wrong for me to look for a way to turn the odds in my favor within the rules of the game (i.e. without palming chips or influencing the machine with an electromagnet or anything like that) is new to me…
Do these rules that you assert disallow card counting by the dealer?
I doubt it, as the rules are designed to be in favour of the casino. Casinos exist to take your money, and provide an entertaining service at the same time. That service being mostly gambling, where you have a chance of winning money.
Cheating a casino is, morally, no different from, for example, buying a drink from a bar then topping it up from the tap when the bartender isn’t looking. There’s no reason it should be legally different.
Ok, it’s against the rules everywhere but Atlantic City, where the laws were specifically changed to force casinos to allow it.
That makes no sense. The dealer has to hit or stand based on hard rules; it makes no difference whether the dealer has been counting cards or not.
If I find a roulette wheel that favors a number am I cheating to play that number? If I’m playing blackjack and the automatic card shuffler used is accidently lining me up with 21s on every deal am I cheating? The casino is responsible for their machine’s errors, that is unless it errors in their favor, and then they legally steal your money (check the next slot machine you play, it will tell you that in the case of a malfunction you lose everything). If the casino was wronged it was by the manufacturer of the machine, and they can go sue that company.
In addition to everything else any law that considers this to be hacking has to be done away with. Authorized usage of a machine is not hacking (in the sense used here).
Nope. I’m still waiting for your cite that card counting is against the rules of blackjack anywhere. (By the way, I have a pile of case law references from Nevada from when I researched this exact issue years ago. I can dig them up if you like.)
So you’re saying that casinos are throwing people out for nothing? Or that they’re not allowed to throw them out for card-counting? They’d have been sued into bankruptcy by now if that were the case.
I read the full article the OP linked too (its’ long). And, well, whom ever programmed the machines screwed up. A screw up that was taken advantage of by two guys that had lost thousands from gambling addictions. The screw up was discovered because these two guys had gambled so much (and lost lots doing it).
Eh, the casinos should have ushered them to the door, banned them if they want to, fix the programming error, and quietly suck it up.
Instead, they put them through hell for finding a glitch in their system. To me, it would be like a boxer discovering that his opponent had a week left jab, and then take advantage of it.
Still trying to figure out what the glitch might be. I’m guessing that the machines where programmed to give a good win after a big win. Keeps the player at the machine. And the casino can win back the money. These two looked for a machine that had just paid out (4 of a kind on the screen), increased the bet and hoped for the next good win but where able to increase the stakes before the draw. Something like that.
As I understand it, they may ban you from playing at their discretion. There is no blackjack rule against counting cards. There is a casino rule against winning too much, and they are the ones who get to decide how much is too much.
No, it isn’t cheating. It is playing the game exactly as well as it can be played, which does not involve upping one’s bet after a winning hand is revealed.
Another poster put it exactly right: what these guys did is no different than the move where a gambler adds a $25 or $100 chip to his bet by palming it after a winning hand/number is revealed. The rewards are based on a bet that was never made.
kayaker asked whether such a rule was posted on the video poker machine. I have never been to a blackjack table where it is posted that I may not palm chips to up my bet after a winning hand; nor is it posted that I may not collude with the dealer; nor is it posted that I may not bend the edges of cards to help identify what is coming up next in the shoe; nor is it posted that I cannot use a lookout to peek at the dealer’s hole card.
So if I do all of these things and I am not caught – in effect, the casino allows me to keep winning – I suppose I have not cheated because the dealer and pit boss did not stop me while I was doing it? I’m failing to understand the difference between “the machine didn’t stop me from winning money this way” and “the dealer didn’t stop me from winning money this way.”
You’re talking about two orthogonal issues:
- What are the rules of blackjack?
- When may a casino throw out a customer?
In Nevada, the rules of blackjack are governed by the Nevada Revised Statutes, regulations and decisions made by the Gaming Commission, and applicable case law. Every casino table game has rules that are approved the gaming authority. If you invent a new table game, for example, you have to apply for and be granted a special provisional license before a casino can even put it on the floor to test it.
The gaming rules and case law in Nevada have repeatedly upheld the rights of players to engage in advantage play, as long as they are only using their brains.
However, being private property, casino management may eject customers for any reason they see fit. They can kick you out because you smell bad, or because you are harassing the cocktail waitress, or because they just don’t like you. Nevada casinos are not required to let you play, and may choose to deny you that opportunity for any reason, including that they think you are a card counter.
ETA: Now, it may sound like this is a nitpicky distinction, but this issue is of vital import to people who try to legally make money at casinos. Taking advantage of a game’s design to shift EV into the player’s favor is a time-honored enterprise that has been repeatedly upheld by the regulatory agencies and the courts as legal and ethical.
But the discussion is about which behaviors constitute cheating, and which behaviors constitute legitimate attempts to win within the rules of the game. I don’t think anybody here is claiming that it would be OK to, say, pull a hidden card from your sleeve when playing Blackjack, or to use an electromagnet to mess with the electronics of a slot machine. Those are clearly tactics which everybody agrees are “outside the rules” and forbidden.
In this case the question is whether exploiting unintended behavior of the software in a slot machine, constitutes “playing by the rules” or “cheating”. I say it’s the former. Slot machines are even more inherently favoring the casino than Blackjack or Roulette is: at least with the latter two, you can analyze the rules of the game and calculate exactly how badly you are being fleeced.
With a slot machine, the casino is basically saying “here’s this nice box with blinking buttons on it, you can press them and maybe we will give you a small amount of your money back, every now and then. We’re not telling you the exact rules by which we determine whether or how much to pay out, and we’re not telling you the exact rules by which your button-presses affect it. But you can safely assume that the pay-out percentage will be considerably less than 100% no matter what you do. Good luck, you’ll need it.”
And then somebody spends a whole lot of time (and a whole lot of their own money) on experimenting with different combinations of button-presses, and eventually he finds a particular combination which actually gives him an advantage which the casino did not intend, and now he is “cheating”? Sorry, not buying it.
Not quite. As I understand it, the machine offers a number of different games. And it allows you to play at different denomination levels; e.g. you could play for $1 and go for a jackpot of $800, or you could play for $10 and go for a jackpot of $8000.
The bug allowed you to play at $1 until you got a win, then switch to another game, play that other game at $10 once, then go back to your original game where the prize would still be waiting for you, but now it would pay out as if you had been playing that original game at the $10 level as well. And there was a further exploit which sometimes allowed you to take advantage of a previous jackpot even if it had already been paid out at the original denomination.
I’m skipping a few details here, but I’m pretty sure I got the gist right.
Huh. Ok, it was hard for me to follow in the article. I prefer to lose my money at video poker, and basically spend $20 for 4 ‘free’ beers and call it a night.
No, Steophan, laws were not changed to force Atlantic City casinos to allow card counting. An Atlantic City casino thought it had the right to remove a player because he was card counting, but there was no such law to permit this. Please provide proof of your assertion. I encourage you to read the Judges’ decision:
Steophan, please also provide proof that the law that supports your assertion that card counting is against the rules everywhere but Atlantic City. Here is what I have come up with concerning the relevant law in Nevada. Please note up these cases to see if their ratios are still the cat’s ass. Until you or some other kind Doper does so, I suggest that these cases may very well still be the law in Nevada.
Quite apart from the Steophan issue as to whether or not card counting is illegal, I think that both the Martin card counting case, and especially the Childs handle popping case, are well worth reading in full, and then applying to the video poker matter.
No they didn’t.
Thanks. As you can see, I know Jack squat about black-jack (or any sort of gambling for that matter). As close as I have come is playing bridge.
However, one of the countermeasures which casinos employ against card counters, is to count the cards themselves (using a computer and image recognition software; it’s not something which the dealer does next to her other work) and see if a player starts betting higher when “the deck is hot”.
Ok Dio.