Fourty-one consecutive hands the dealer didn't get a clue? I don't feel real bad for the house.
Posted on 08/21/2012 5:05:53 AM PDT by grundle
ATLANTIC CITY — At first, it seemed like a coincidence, the kind of thing that happens from time to time at a casino, where the same number or same sequence of cards happens twice in a row.
But when the players at an April game of mini-baccarat at the Golden Nugget Atlantic City kept seeing the same sequence of cards dealt, over and over and over again, their eyes grew wide and their bets grew bigger, zooming from $10 a hand to $5,000.
Forty-one consecutive winning hands later, the 14 players had racked up more than $1.5 million in winnings — surrounded by casino security convinced they had cheated but unable to prove how.
In a lawsuit against a Kansas City playing card manufacturer, the Golden Nugget contends the cards were unshuffled, despite being promised to be pre-shuffled and ready to use.
It is so basic to the concept of gambling that it often goes without saying: the cards in the deck need to be shuffled before anyone uses them. But in the case of the Golden Nugget, the gamblers did nothing wrong, and deserve to be paid the nearly $1 million they still have coming to them, according to their lawyer, Benjamin Dash.
But in a lawsuit filed against the 14 gamblers in July, that is exactly what the casino seeks, citing state gambling regulations requiring all casino games to offer fair odds — to both sides. The casino's lawsuit asserts the gamblers and the casino both began the game believing it was legal and proper — until the players kept winning over and over again.
The Golden Nugget said it flooded the area with floor persons, managers, supervisors, surveillance and security officers, believing they were watching "a sophisticated swindling and cheating scheme" in progress.
(Excerpt) Read more at nj.com ...
So the casino gambled that the cards would be
pre-shuffled.......and lost?
Irony is cool.
There are such swindlers in casinos.....CNBC's "American Greed" series ran the story about a Vietnamese group that swindled casinos out of millions.
They were very sophisticated, using electronics, and hordes of accomplices in the scheme, traveling from one casino to another ........was going great except for one huge boo-boo.
They hired people to participate---but one of them was an undercover agent who caught the ringleader on tape.
This is a little like Kamikaze pilots suiting Mitsubishi.
In one notorious casino swindling case-——the dealer was the swindler.
At first, casino security could not figure out how he was stealing.
They studied videotapes over and over-—then noticed the dealer was wearing a large watch——he would slip $100 chips under the face of the watch and walk out with them.
Accomplices would cash them in.
Yep, the cards were shuffled back into order,,,
thats how good they are.
Um, doesn’t this casino have those card shuffling machines, or doesn’t the dealer shuffle the cards? Did they open a new pack of cards with each hand or something? Sounds to me like the procedures of the casino are to blame here.
If you read the article (I know, a FR tradition encourages commenting without reading), you’ll see the casino buys the cards from the manufacturer pre-shuffled. The card manufacturer delivered unshuffled decks of cards.
-PJ
Anybody can win blackjack by using memorized Monte Carlo non-successive damped sequence algorithms. I did this in Reno for 3 months- Then they blackballed me at all the casinos. So I taught my friends how to do it and they all cleaned up.
Indeed. Being a professional nerd, I'm amazed at the fact that anyone could trust an online casino. Even if the casino is entirely legitimate, and tries its best to run an honest house, the chances of them having decent random number generators with a true source of randomness (like, say radioactive decay), is vanishingly small.
However, the article also stated that the dealer dealt the same sequence of cards over and over again. Not sure how that would have happened unless they didn't shuffle between games or, instead, used a new deck each time (all of which were unshuffled).
I'm not an expert on how casinos operate, so maybe it is common practice to open a new deck of cards for each game.
Pre-shuffled cards? Is that really that much of a time-saver? Plus I’ve never seen a game that doesn’t have a time out for shuffling by hand. The only exception was the Bellagio that had these toilet seat looking gizmos attached to the 6 deck shoe where the old cards are deposited, shuffled and put back. No game stoppage.
If the contract says cards are supposed to be delivered pre-shuffled and the weren’t that’s a valid suit. Of course the dealer should have caught this before the gamers did and shut down the table. The players definitely didn’t do anything wrong.
Usually casinos only go part way through a deck, helps keep counters at bay since the second half of the deck is predictable by the first half. Depending on the game and the shoe (some shoes get loaded with one deck some with lots) it could 1 deck 1 game. Probably not with baccarat since there’s no strategy, probably closer to 1 deck 5 or 6 games, but then if the next deck runs the exact same pattern (again it’s a no strategy game, all games deal the exact same number of cards in the same order, easy to spot a pattern develop). And in casinos you never reshuffle, used cards are trash, they usually actually nick them in some way so they’re easily identifiable as used.
Fourty-one consecutive hands the dealer didn't get a clue? I don't feel real bad for the house.
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