Non shuffled card deck results in 1.5 million casino loss
philly.com
philly.com
In Vegas, they'll often distribute little pads of paper and pencils you can use to take notes on past hands, and mini-baccarat tables often have electronic signs showing the player/banker/tie outcome of several past hands.
(This is funny because the game is memory-less.)
The folks who manage the games must have discovered that when they encouraged players to bet superstitiously, players stayed for longer and bet more.
How deliciously ironic for a casino to encourage people to try to find patterns and bet on them, and then lose and sue after they finding a pattern that worked!
When a casino has an unexpectedly large payout, and they can't prove that it was the result of cheating by the customer or an employee, there is only one reasonable thing to do: pay up, and advertise the win loudly and widely.
If you're in the business of suing your customers, there are several results: 1. You stop having so many customers. 2. Even if successful in court, you don't make back anywhere near what you lost. (Customers don't have much money, in general. You already know the ones who do -- you call them whales.) 3. The regulatory commission looks at you more carefully.
The only way to avoid getting fired is to both prove that the people who won cheated and that their cheat was something you could not have protected against.
I never really did mean to bet my car, can I have it back, please!
"Why sure, of course you can. Our mistake :D!"
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Who at the casino thought that suing their customers was a good idea?
My first business lawyer gave me that advice early on and it was sobering to think through the implications of that.
The best solution is if free access representation was high quality.
A simple way of doing that might be to give parties the option of their choice of n randomly selected representatives drawn from any practicing lawyer, funded via a fraction of punitive damages redirected to a fund locked to that purpose.
Apparently the pit boss knew something was up but didn't stop the game. Which squarely puts the fault in the casino. The casino could easily have closed that table.
ahem:
by passing money to fellow gamblers in order to place bets in excess of posted betting limits.
They posted a bet, and also gave some of their money to another player to post another bet, effectively circumventing the betting limits on individual players. That's not necessarily an obvious behavior. And if the casino didn't know the decks were rigged, why would they close the table and risk angering a bunch of high rollers?
And if the casino didn't know the decks were rigged, why would they close the table and risk angering a bunch of high rollers?
To not have to pay out lots of money if something is wrong. But I guess they could just wait to see if the players don't end up giving it all back in the end.
I think that a "rigged deck" assume someone knowingly did something. In this case, from the story, this was an accident and not intentional.
Of course even if the deck was rigged (say someone at the manufacturer turned off the shuffle process) while it would be defacto rigged I'm not sure it would be dejure rigged because there was no connection between the gamblers and the person doing the rigging.
Do playing card manufacturers that sell shuffled decks make some sort of call on when a deck is not shuffled "enough". Knowing this information would allow more efficient models to be made for card counters, etc..
Its like only stupid people can play blackjack and if you are clever enough to beat it, then you are cheating.
Put simply according to them the game is fair only if you lose and casino wins.
Not true. There is no law (in the US) forbidding card counting. However casinos will kick you out (or most likely politely ask if you might want to play something else) if they believe you're counting cards effectively (they have no problem with people who count cards badly). But this has no basis in law and isn't an accusation of cheating. It's just the casino exercising their right to remove anybody from the casino floor for any reason they feel like, much like they have the right to remove you from the casino floor if they don't like the way you're dressed for example.
On a semi-related note...
I've been wondering with more and more Casino games going digital, is there anything requiring the systems to use realistic odds?
The last time I was in a Casino I had great success (15x return in 90 minutes) essentially betting against the field of players on a large video roulette machine. I was curious and simply bet opposite whenever the board became particularly "unbalanced". The idea being that the machine had some kind of of average return to maintain and that it would avoid big bets (relative to what it was earning) in light of that.
1: http://gizmodo.com/5867314/57-million-winner-loses-prize-aft...
2: http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_14795166
3: http://abcnews.go.com/TheLaw/story?id=3772215&page=1#.UE...
In almost every regulated gaming jurisdiction (let's leave US Indian Casinos out of this for the time being), a third-party lab is hired to evaluate the code, look for backdoors, and verify the odds that are specified with the PAR (Probability and Accounting Report) of the machine being tested.
In the case of your roulette machine, that code was verified to make sure the random number generator created a valid distribution of numbers. If you had won a large enough jackpot (as those players did in your links), the gaming board technician would have been called in to verify the game's program code against a known verified version of the system as signed off by the third-party lab. When the checksums don't match...no jackpot. That's why every slot says MALFUNCTION VOIDS ALL PAYS.
That being said, there can still be bugs in the program code. When a machine is listed as paying a max of $2500 and a player wins $1,597,244.10, there's definitely a bug. Casinos, since they own the place, will err on their side and send you home without the jackpot. That's just the way it is. The manufacturer will get an earful and probably lose their positions on the casino floor until the bug is fixed.
Oh and look at your second link. The jackpot was "42 million". Wanna bet it was $42,949,672.95? (Hint: What is 4294967295 in hexadecimal?)
One thing I'm still not clear on. In the case of a machine that suggests it is simulating something physical, are the machines required to implement realistic odds or just accurate to what's official stated?
Do virtual card games have to maintain a proper virtual deck? Do virtual slots that suggest 20x20x20 reels have to implement 8000:1 odds?
From what I recall, card games are a very special animal in the eyes of the gaming board. When you simulate dealing from a deck, there must be a deck of 52 cards in memory. You cannot just pick random numbers from 1 to 52. I believe every hand must have a freshly shuffled "deck" as well.
The way video poker machines manipulate their odds is through the payout. Watch veteran players when they approach a machine. They'll note that some machines offer slightly different payouts for lower wins, and that's where the odds grind out. You can't change the probability of a full house, but you can change how much is paid back.
Slot reels are a loophole. Because you can't see the entire reel, how do you know it only has 20 stops? What if it has 20,000? This concept (known as the Telnaes patent, US #4448419) enabled virtual reels and much much larger payouts than the 8000:1 jackpots before this invention.
Later on, the invention of bonus games and etc kind of ripped up the virtual reel idea. But the math operates on this principle as far as the PAR sheets are concerned (i.e a certain set of stops on the reels starts a bonus game with another known set of odds).
The argument I was trying to make was an ethical one: By accepting the gambler's money, the casino should take responsibility for the state of the machine at that point, thus incentivizing them to be diligent. To void a jackpot, they should have to prove fraud by the gambler or their associates to a court of law.
Case 3, as joezydeco pointed out, gave out more money than was possible as printed on the machine.
I'm sure there are thousands of cases of jackpots not being given out for bugs, so I tend to think they should assume responsibility for the bugs that aren't in their favor, and pay out the maximum as printed on the machine.
Combine this with the fact that Nevada doesn't allow out of state lawyers (and passing the Nevada Bar requires a considerable investment in time), and as a consequence the only counsel you can get to sue a casino amounts to the sort of low-budget lawyer you might see advertising on a billboard.
If I had enough money and brass, I'd hire a bunch of promising attorneys from out of state, relocate them to vegas, get them certified in Nevada, and then create a firm specializing in suing casinos. I'm sure there's a fortune to be made (if you don't get bought/killed by organized crime)
Strictly speaking, it would only be imposing a condition on an order from a judge if they had exhausted all of their appeals and just said "Drop all the other charges or we won't pay you."
In that scenario, it would clearly be illegal.
I don't understand why a casino feels like it's legally entitled to a profit even when it fails to perform the simplest possible action to maintain an edge: shuffle the cards!
Same situation here. Blaming the card company and the customers and doing all this suing is a lot of work compared to shuffling the damn cards. It's a bad protocol. If they always shuffled, this kind of thing couldn't happen.
"The gamblers unlawfully took advantage of the Golden Nugget when they caught on to the pattern and increased their bets from as little as $10 to $5,000 and by passing money to fellow gamblers in order to place bets in excess of posted betting limits"
Where was the pit boss to shut those players down when the bets were coming in that large? Or did the casino believe these players would eventually lose most of it back and relax the table limits while this much money was in play?
Casinos are allowed to break their own rules regarding betting limits. Unless the state/jurisdiction has a limit, it's up to the house to decide when/if a bet is over the max. If a large enough player shows up at a $5K table and wants to bet $10K, you can be sure that he'll be allowed to play.
(N.B., no analogy is really going to help us too much here, because the outcome will depend on the specifics of state law regarding malfunctioning gambling machines and any agreements made by those particular gamblers to get into that particular casino. So anyone who tells you they have any idea what will happen is either a gambling law expert or making it up. I just thought the car dealership thing was an interesting example.)
My point was mostly that mistakes are often forgiven in business.
Whichever way the legal ruling goes, once the gamblers discovered the mistake, they were, in my mind, cheating by exploiting it.
Imagine the opposite scenario. By my understanding, a deck full of face cards benefits the gambler in blackjack. If a dealer notices that his cards are missing say, the jack of diamonds, it would be wrong of him to keep dealing knowing that the house had a better advantage that intended. Surely players losing money in such a situation would want their money back.
Again, the analogy isn't perfect, but I can see the casino's point of view... even if the decision to sue customers is short-sighted.
It is enlightening that you cannot come up with the "opposite" scenario without actually breaking the game. Here allow me to come up with the opposite scenario for you: an ordering that does not favor the player, which by the way, happens basically EVERY HAND. That's why the house basically always wins, because these games are designed to have the odds against the player. By shuffling the cards the house is actually ensuring a higher likelihood of unfavorable outcomes.
That is what is so upsetting about these cases to me: the fundamental reasoning this all comes down to is that people are "not supposed" to win these games, thus winning must be cheating. If you design a game with the odds against the player, then spend tons of money outsourcing the randomization of cards to guarantee no card counting etc, and then encourage superstitious playing to keep people hooked and losing more money -- then on top of all this the player still wins, sue them?
Please.
With regard to it being "certain enough", consider whether you would have done the same thing as these people. I can tell you that had I sat at that table, I would have not continued betting higher and higher with the possibility that the next deck is not in my favor and thus possibly losing everything. It of course looks certain in retrospect knowing the whole story of how they were actually unshuffled -- but when you are actually at the table, without this knowledge -- it is again just a chance. You have no idea how many decks come from what company or anything thats going on to result in this. For all you know it might have just been two decks that had the same order due to some weird malfunction. I am sure in the history of gambling lots of people have thought they've seen a pattern recur, bet a lot on it, and LOST -- again, to the favor of the casino.
In other words, consider it from a game theory perspective -- the casino's "long term" winnings absolutely rely on this kind of behavior from patrons. If patrons were to think to themselves "uh oh, something is fishy and this might be unfair, better stop betting" every time they thought they had spotted a pattern or had a system, then the casino would lose tons of money, since they are 99.99% of the time wrong. Casino's winnings fundamentally rely on greediness. That's the basic point I'm trying to make: you can't have it both ways, you can either have greedy patrons who almost always lose everything because of it, or weird bizarro-world patrons that are looking out for the casino.
That said, I still don't think I could keep the winnings knowing, in retrospect, that I had won them unfairly, but I think you are right about the casinos needing to sometimes suck it up and take a loss if that's the game they're going to play.
EX: Value ~6,000$ sale price 14$.
http://cleveland.cbslocal.com/2012/03/31/man-finds-picasso-o...
2) An alternative scenario: what if a car dealership simply mis-priced a car? They're holding a rare race car but the owner asked his know-nothing nephew to appraise it, who was busy texting his girlfriend and absent-mindedly wrote down $500. If you buy this car and the owner realizes his mistake the next day, can he ask for the car back?
2. As far as I know, the situation does not apply for mis-pricing. Some information here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mistake_%28contract_law%29
It seems the situation is basically if a mistake is made that still seems reasonable (pricing a car for $19000 instead of $20000), it must be honored. If the mistake is completely unreasonable (pricing a car for $20 instead of $20000) it does not have to be honored. But a mistake in business knowledge (pricing a $20000 car for $2000 because you think that's all it's worth) still has to be honored.
It takes an offer and acceptance.
If the price tag says $15,000 for the car, and you enter into a contract which the dealer signs then the dealer has to sell you the car. The same as if you make a mistake in your calculations and sign to purchase the car.
Now in the case where perhaps a dealer employee had changed the price and it could be proven that you knew that there would be some legal concept that allows the dealership to get out of the contract.
It's not illegal to count cards but the casino can tell you to leave, and it you don't you are then trespassing.
Since the cards were never shuffled at the plant - the
casino doesn't shuffle them again - the same patterns
kept repeating in game 802
Can someone explain?
The article mentioned superstition, but I've never played baccarat myself.
You also have the problem of players possibly marking cards (bends, folds, tiny nicks, spots) for later use. In the casino's eye, it's a lot cheaper to use new preshuffled decks in every shoe and drop the expensive ShuffleMaster machine.
I mean, at the start of a shoe, draw the first three cards, if they are consecutive, then shuffle the decks or or burn the entire shoe. You end up shuffling or destroying an insignificant number of shoes by pure chance, but you don't lose 1.5 million dollars when you find out too late the guy pressing the shuffle button at the factory for $7/hr decided to take an extended lunch.
The whole situation came up because the playing card manufacturer forgot to shuffle the cards before packaging. So all the cards came in the same pattern out of the box, which I'm assuming is determined by how they were cut from the sheet or whatever is done. There's no mention that they came out in suit/count order (like the packs most people normally buy in stores).
The mini-baccarat game seems to take 6-8 packs and combine them into a large shoe. The pattern would not have been obvious after the first 52 cards but when the next 52 showed up in the same order, that's when the betting started going nuts.
Right now the cost of a deck is negligible, but if the card manufacturers start being on the hook to the tune of millions of dollars for a handful of decks not being shuffled, pre-shuffled decks are going to get more expensive, as additional QC and insurance that the card manufacturers have to buy get passed on. Eventually it'll turn back into a real cost/benefit analysis: do we make enough on casino customers losses in this game to justify $10/pack or $50/pack decks?
And this reminds me of someone else who figured out a pattern and cashed in:
"Someone in Kansas City allegedly had forgotten to turn on the automatic shuffler before the cards got shipped out. Since the cards were never shuffled at the plant - the casino doesn't shuffle them again - the same patterns kept repeating in game 802. The players noticed, kept on betting and upped their wagers."
"They saw a pattern and didn't know how long it would last," said Feldman, whose clients are Asian and speak little or no English.