Casino Life Issue 123 Volume 14

Page 25

Optical Warfare At The Gaming Table By Terry Roses, High-Tech Gaming Consultant with Ed Newman

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hether it’s dice, slots, roulette or poker, everyone is hoping they can find a way to put the odds in their favor in the gaming room. A simple Google search will bring you all kinds of advice from how to throw the dice in craps to how to distract a dealer at a blackjack table. Most of those tips being proffered are pretty harmless to the casinos, usually giving people a false hope that they’ve found an edge. On the other hand, because of the stakes, there are many others who push boundaries and actively work up new ways to cheat and, if able to not get caught, to win. It is gamers of this latter type, the cheats, that surveillance teams are on the lookout for, because they can be a threat. The focus in this article will be on card games. Cheating at poker and blackjack comes in a wide variety of styles. Card mechanics are those who use sleight of hand and manipulation. There are muckers who switch cards or conceal cards. A majority of cheats, perhaps as much as 75%, do so by means of placing large nearly invisible marks on the cards. This will be explained shortly. 15% of cheating involves sophisticated marking that requires optical devices. Finally, and this is what has alarmed today’s casinos, there are new, futuristic high-tech sensing devices and poker analyzers which if unchecked will continue to become more of a problem. Catching cheaters who use high-tech methods has increasingly become a challenge to surveillance. The old

Terry Roses, High-Tech Gaming Consultant

ways of gaining an advantage at cards are slowly being replaced by cheaters using sophisticated optical devices such as contact lenses, eyeglasses, modified cameras, and poker analyzers. These optical readers are used to detect invisible inks, analyze poker hands and see near-infrared marks on cards. Today’s surveillance expert is faced with the daunting task of trying to keep ahead of all of this technology.

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