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Comment by dopamean | Hacker News Reader

I played 2/5 NLH at the Venetian in June of 2015 and had my phone on the table most of the time. I had earbuds in and would check twitter and text friends playing at other tables between hands. No one seemed to have a problem with it and I wasn't the only person doing something like that. I never thought it would be a problem actually.

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The cheating device in this article also required a marked deck. So as long as the house isn't in on it, this cheating method wouldn't work in casinos.

The article did mention that some anonymous sources claim to be using these devices in Vegas casinos, so I wonder of there are some corrupt dealers in cahoots with the cheaters.

If you had a rigged deck and sleight of hand, you could probably slowly replace the casino cards with the rigged cards. In Blackjack I imagine you'd only need 10 cards in the deck to make it +EV. You could even have one player plant, the other take advantage in teams.

You could coat your fingers with infrared ink. Each card would naturally have a different pattern imprinted on the back depending on how you touched it.

How would the mapping from random pattern to card be established?

Well there's the rub. It's certainly technically possible if the device described in the article is. Tagging the cards with "smart dust"[0] might be easier, and harder for the casino to detect.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smartdust

Except that smart dust does not exist. That Wikipedia page needs to be rewritten. It's vague and misleading.

s/smart dust/very small RFID chips/g

There is a reason RFID chips are the size they are. The smaller they are the closer the scanner has to be to energize their antenna. Either that or you increase the power but the power needed goes up exponentially with distance. I don't see this working. At least not with today's tech.

Through play. Camera would need to recognize card type from capture of card face up. This plus the back of same card would link the unique signature and the card value.

Been done :)

http://www.theverge.com/2013/9/28/4780914/cheaters-used-infr...

If the rigged cards ever make it into a deck (of the multiple decks used) it won't match what the shuffler has set in software it will be rejected.

There is a list of manufacturers and all are different almost like money from different countries we have a PDF of card types we program into the shufflers. We're lucky if we get it working well with genuine cards lol

edit: cards not cars

There was a British show called The Real Hustle where the cast basically performs real world scams on people filmed with hidden cameras. One year, they went to Vegas.

In one of their most brazen scams, they gathered a crew to swap the card shoe at a casino table. It's amazing how much damage nerves of steel, team work, and a split second distraction can lead to.

This particular scam starts at about 22 minutes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ixUvZjIK_Ms

The expert at the end does mention it is likely bribing dealers and camera operators would be the most likely scenario since the payout is large enough to make it affordable to do.

A manual shoe? I've never seen one of those in a while I guess some casino use them. Shufflemaster (Scientific Games) makes the One2Six shuffler that's common and it weighs about 30 pounds the bigger model iDeal has a camera to read the cards and it records each one in the order it's ejected.

I have to laugh at all the card manipulation half the time the cards warp and bend due to humidity so they are replaced often.

Dealers have so many eyes and cameras on them I can't see anyone trying this unless they were desperate.

Ballsy and dangerous coördinating that many people to execute something like this. Cool show with the play-by-play shot well / from multiple angles to explain it all. Will check out more of it.

_coördinating_

Completely, unabashedly unrelated, but I honestly can't remember the last time I saw dieresis in the wild. Is this a regional thing?

It was probably a typo, meant to be a - and typed a diaresis instead. Lots of keyboard layouts have easily accessible diareses.

That's how It's spelled in The New Yorker, for example.

The New Yorker is precisely where I saw & adopted the dieresis way back when. It's also simpler to type on vkeyboards than a hyphen -- click-and-hold vs switching layouts and back.

http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-curse-of-t...

Most poker rooms don't like it when you talk on the phone if you're in a hand, or if you speak a different language, especially if it's a big game.

Otherwise, people don't care that much, as long as the conversations are pretty short. "Hey man, I'll be done in half an hour" wouldn't raise an eyebrow.

English is mandatory in nearly all casinos at poker tables it's the universal poker language even in defiantly French Quebec.

Probably because most casinos cater to American visitors

Exactly. I'm in Vegas right now and at almost every table there's at least one player with earbuds in.

That being said, casinos are very strict about not letting you have a phone at BJ tables.

I'm not a gambler, so wondering why this is? Because you can see every card at some point? Is this to stop the phone from doing so and keeping a count?

Because you're playing against their money, not other players' (say like in poker).

It's to prevent card counting.

I was in Vegas for Defcon over the last two years. Casinos would get uptight if we used our phones at the table at all.

The cash dropped from tourists is probably worth the annoyance.

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