Casino Cheats - Working The Grey Area
Between the cheats and the honest players of online casinos and land-based casinos, there is a grey area inhabited by players who are breaking no laws, but are treated as sworn enemies by the casinos. We look at one UK casino coup that paid off - eventually.
Everyone recognises an honest player - they pay their money, they take their chances and, if they're lucky, they walk off with their winnings. And everyone recognises a cheat too.
Betwixt & Between
But in between the two is a class of gamblers whom the casinos would love to brand as cheats but can't, because the law says they are doing nothing wrong.
Until recently the most famous example was the blackjack card counters - gangs of quick-witted mathematicians who reversed the casino's edge by performing complex mental arithmetic around which cards had gone and which were left in the deck.
From the time the first team of baby-faced MIT grad students appeared and started cleaning up in this way, the casinos have been banning them and finding ways of making their lives difficult. But they can't prosecute them, as the law says they're not interfering with the game in any way - they're just using their brains. With cards 'shuffled' after each hand, this is something online casinos do not have to worry about.
Card counting is a method that pushes on an open door - of all the casino games, blackjack is about the only one where skilful play can reverse the house edge. But in 2004, the successes of the counters were eclipsed by an audacious coup in the most mathematically unforgiving of all games: roulette.
When the story broke in March of that year the headlines were astonishing. Three punters had won more than £1m at the Ritz Casino club in Piccadilly - and then promptly been arrested. Adding fuel to the mystery, police didn't just confiscate the cash, they also took their mobile phones.
The accusation was that the trio - a 32-year-old Hungarian woman described unofficially by police as "chic and beautiful" and two "elegant" Serbian men - had used lasers hidden in mobile phones to scan the roulette wheel as it span. The data was beamed to a microcomputer that calculated broadly where the ball would end up, based on the rate at which it was slowing. The information was then returned to the phone screens quickly enough for the trio to place bets on the likely winning numbers.
On the first night they won £100,000, on the second they won £1.2m. The casino gritted its teeth, paid up - and called in the police to investigate them as cheats.
For most of 2004 the trio were on police bail, unable to leave the country and reporting regularly to a station while detectives pieced together the details of their operation and tried to find a law under which what they were doing was illegal.
In December the detectives admitted defeat. A Metropolitan Police spokesperson said the case had been stamped "no further action", while the casino refused to comment. Not only were the three suspects free to go home, they could take their winnings with them. What they had done was certainly against the spirit of the game; most people would probably call it cheating but, crucially, it wasn't illegal.
A Whole New Grey Area
Legal experts suggested they had got away with it because they hadn't actually interfered with the game in any way. A whole new grey area had opened up and casinos around the world would need to find a way to stop it happening to them - without alienating customers who had innocent reasons for keeping their mobiles by their side during play.
Retired casino cheat Richard Marcus wrote in his blog American Roulette, "I am curious to see how the gaming industry reacts to the scam pulled on the Ritz. It is quite easy to make such a laser scanner scam illegal, or to clearly establish its status under current law. But considering the ubiquity of cell phones, it will be interesting to watch casinos try to deal with modified cell phone devices without overreacting against legitimate casino patrons. In the meantime, congratulations to the guys who beat the Ritz!"
