Cheating At Roulette May Be Legal In UK

nuke-alwin writes, "A hidden device that appears to give an advantage to roulette players may be legal in the UK when the gambling industry is deregulated next year. The device — which consists of a small digital time recorder, a concealed computer, and a hidden earpiece — uses predictive software to determine where the ball is likely to land. It has been tested by a government lab, which found that 'the advantage can be considerable.' It will be up to casinos to spot people using such devices."

Casinos wont permit them

[Phil246]

They may be legal but it doesnt mean casinos have to let you in with them, or to allow you to continue playing should you be caught with one.

Dubious article.

[Chaffar]

What I don't like is the fact that the article is assuming that the roulette wheel is biased. I personally don't know how much effort is put into making these wheels, but I'm pretty sure that casinos would never want it to be biased since it can only be in the gamblers' advantage.

Yes I know that there is friction, impurities in the building material that should be taken into consideration, but to claim that these would affect the outcome of where the ball will land in such a significant way isn't convincing. After all, the ball is being released by a HUMAN while the wheel is turning the other way, and the wheel's starting point varies every time a new gambling round is launched (the wheel isn't placed in a predetermined way before being spun).

I smell a scam.

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

method

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, casinos have a very simple method to sense if you are cheating: you are winning.

Re:Oh, casinos will know

[antifoidulus]

No there is no skill for roulette, but the payoff for one game can be considerable, many, many times what you can win in blackjack(provided you pick a number, not a color). Therefore you don't need to win nearly as many times to make significant amounts of money without raising lots of suspicion, and you can always go hit up lots of casinos in one night before anyone catches on.

Re:Casinos wont permit them

[Tony Hoyle]

Precisely.. why should cheating at roulette be a matter of law? If they catch you they can eject you. If they don't.. well that's their problem - nothing the state should be worried about.

Re:Oh, casinos will know

[Kierthos]

Yes, they do. And it's not sometimes. It's pretty much all the time, these days. They might be competing with each other for tourist bucks, but they all have a mutual vested interest in not being fleeced themselves. If someone is caught cheating, they are usually arrested for it, not taken out back so a couple of goons named Guido and Nunzio can kneecap them. And if you're arrested for cheating in a casino, your name and picture goes in a wonderful database that is made available to all the major casinos (you know, in addition to, say, a prison sentence), so if they catch you again, they can check and find out that, yes, you've done this before or no, you haven't.

I believe that if you're convicted of cheating in a Las Vegas casino, and thereby banned, you can be hit with another felony charge for gambling in that, or any other casino in Las Vegas (or possibly across the whole of Nevada), regardless of whether or not you were cheating the second time.

Re:I feel divided

[LordKronos]

On the other hand, of course, people aren't expecting to play against a combination of human and machine...

I've never played cards at a casino, but it was always my understanding that, unlike you sitting around the kitchen table with your buddies, blackjack in a casino isn't played against the other players. It's basicly multiple 1-on-1 games of player-vs-house, all played at the same time. The only effect that another player "cheating" would have on you would be which cards you get. However, that's all random. The other player taking an extra card because he knows what the count is could help you just as well as it could hurt you. His extra card could end up being the card that would have busted you, and instead you get exactly the card you need.

Re:Worth a try

[julesh]

If you fidgit from foot to foot regularly, it's a simple matter to press your foot down slightly.

Casinos are aware of this, and will routinely throw out any roulette players who repeatedly shuffle or wobble on their feet.

Re:Easy way out

[julesh]

The primary reason this doesn't get done at the moment is that it opens the house up to accusations of cheating: it's very hard but not totally out of the question to influence which area of the wheel the ball ends up in. Allowing bets to placed after the ball is released removes any suspicion that this might be happening.

Prediction is not cheating...

[Dr. Zowie]

... influencing the outcome of the game (e.g. with a magnet) is cheating. There's nothing in the rules of Roulette that says "The gamblers shall not attempt to predict when and where the ball lands" -- or, at least, not the last time I checked. Roulette is simply flawed in an era when palm-sized computers are ubiquitous. Similarly, blackjack can be beaten by card-counting, but card-counting is not cheating, it's good memory.

Re:Oh, casinos will know

[Kierthos]

Depends on how much you win and who you are.

I mean, if you win 20 hands of blackjack in a row, but don't make more then a couple grand, the casinos aren't likely to care even if you are card counting, because you're winning so little in comparison to what you could be raking in. The mistake a lot of card counters make is going for too much, too quickly.

Also, you can win a shitload of money if you're famous. No casino wants the rep of "We banned Ben Affleck because he won 500,000 at roulette." Of course, if you're no one special, they, like any other business, can always ask you to leave and not return, and have you arrested for trespassing if you come back.

Basically, it boils down to whether or not it would be a bigger hit on the casino's image or the casino's bank. If you're cheating big-time and cleaning up big-time at it, the casino will take you down (no, not take you out) the first chance they get.

Re:Oh, well that's OK then...

[GNUALMAFUERTE]

Just knowing on which quarter of the roulette the ball will fall is more than enough. You don't just go and put everything in one number. Putting money in consecutive numbers is a common practice. If you know it's going to fall arround 17, then three persons working togheter may place their bets on 17 and consecutive numbers.

Without help, you can win. Reducing the possible ressults to a 25%, or even 50% is good enough for most players. Thay may not win an all bets, but at the end of the night, they will get out of the casino with a very large ammount of cash.

Re:Casinos can thwart this easily

[TCQuad]

The appearance of impropriety. Once the ball has been thrown, all the input from the dealer is done. If the ball is thrown afterwards, the casino could theoretically cheat or use a dealer with really good technique to try and sway the wheel in their favor (spin the wheel the same way, throw the ball the same way, the only variable is where you start in terms of what half/quadrant the ball falls into).

It would be the same as if the dealer in blackjack only dealt himself one card, face up, and then waited for the rest of the table to play through (either busting or holding) before dealing himself the second. Technically, the odds are the same but, from the player's perspective, the possibility of cheating or underhanded play is greatly increased.

Re:No problem for Casinos

[Cochonou]

As with blackjack, the non-random roulette winner is fairly easy to spot. Placing bets that cover a particular segment of the wheel (the best computers right now can narrow it down to about 5 sequential positions) is a somewhat odd bet. When a pit boss notes someone winning by making a series of "segment" bets, he can simply refuse their action (and of course, take their picture and distribute it to other casinos).

Why would you have to place your bet on a sequential segment of the wheel ? It would seem to me that if you just played each time on a single number in the interval that the computer predicts, you would still tremendously increase your chances of winning : 1/5 instead of 1/37 ! Therefore, statistically you would still have a net gain at the end of the game, and would not get suspected.

Casinos can change the rules and eliminate this

[SPickett]

This isn't the first system invented that can beat the house. Before card counting was invented and described in Edward O'Thorpe's book "Beat the Dealer," he had discovered and capitalized on a couple side-bets with positive expectation he found in Bacarat. The casinos simply eliminated them. When card-counting arrived, casinos introduced multiple decks (which don't eliminate the edge, but does decrease it) and early shuffling. Early shuffling costs them money by decreasing the hands played per hour, but they can employ it only when they suspect a counter at the table. A simple solution for removing the edge for roulette is for the coupier to re-touch the center wheel once after closing the betting, either accelerating or decelerating a little. Easy to do, effective, and no decrease in the amount bet/hour.

Re:Doesn't sound right...

[Paul Jakma]

You're missing some salient facts:

a) Fraud is a criminal offence, prosecuted by some representative of "the people". Breaches of contracts are not criminal acts, they are not even "illegal", but each side may sue the other under civil law to have the terms of the contract enforced and/or redress.

I.e. you seem confused about law, and appear to be mixing up different parts of it.

(At least, above is generally true in English jurisprudence and its derivatives, such as Canada, Ireland, the USA, etc.. - approaching half the world.).

b) Casinos in the past *have* retained winnings of customers who "cheated", and the *customer* sued and *won*. In both the UK and in Spain (well, i didn't read who sued who in the spanish case, but the Casino lost either way).

c) UK courts have ruled that using skill, without influencing the game in any way, is *not* cheating.

d) If you'd read the article, it covers why the UK super-casinos are not keen on overbearing measures, such as contracts, to try counter "clever players" - it would do them more harm than good. Would you gamble large amounts of money if the Casino made you sign a contract to say it could arbitrarily not pay you if you won?

When will slashdot learn that US jurisprudence (or common practice), particularly region-specific in a region uncommonly beholden to some industry, has 0 bearing on the rest of the world? Particularly when the story is about *some other part of the world*???
 

Re:Card counting and cheating.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, counting devices are illegal and will land you in serious trouble with the NGC. Counting is legal, however the Casino has the right to ask you to leave at any point (at which point your presence is considered trespassing). So those who can count successfully need to be careful about letting the casino realize that that's what they're doing. The key word there is successfully. Even one counting mistake per hour will result in the house maintaining its edge. For that reason, casinos like to encourage the perception that counting is easy and that it always works. The reality is that it's pretty difficult to keep an accurate count at all times and even more difficult to exploit your advantage without it becoming really obvious to the casinos.

Most people will be better off just learning perfect basic strategy and instead learning how to maximize the number of drinks you get per hour. Blackjack is probably the only casino games where the house edge is small enough that you can make it up in drinks (paying above cost, but less than you'd pay anywhere else in Vegas).