Oct 14, 2014
These were the top 7 ways the casinos cheat with their players. As meager these tricks may sound, but the casinos save and make a lot of money by using these simple tricks. Although there are. Often people ask me if casinos ever use rigged roulette wheels with magnets. The truth is some wheels do have magnets, and some casinos do cheat players. However, it is extremely rare. Generally it doesn’t happen in a government sanctioned casino because if they were caught, they would lose their gambling license and face heavy fines. The Unglamorous Part of Cheating at Casinos. Cheating at casinos has been the plot of many movies. From Rain Man to Casino to Ocean’s Eleven, cheating is made to look like it’s easy and without consequences (except for the scene in Casino where a cheater is caught hammer time!). If you cheat in a casino, you will probably be caught.
Instances of casino cheating are very rare, but they can and do happen. Here are a few schemes casinos have used to screw unsuspecting blackjack players.
- Cheating a Casino Card Game The most popular form of cheating in a casino involves having a quid pro quo arrangement with a dealer. Players that have gotten away with cheating a casino have often worked with an inside person to tell them what to expect.
- That didn’t even slow Carmichael down, though. He was caught cheating early in his career, but he used his 5 years in jail to learn about (and invent) other cheating techniques and tools. His approach to figuring out ways to beat a slot machine was simplicity itself.
Most of us associate blackjack tricks with advantage play techniques like shuffle tracking and card counting. There is good reason for that, because players are much more likely than casinos to try to use subtlety to tip the scale in their favor.
The casino’s motivation is to take money out of your pocket, but when it comes to blackjack their methods are straightforward and transparent. The dealer will be happy to explain the rule variations and house edge for their blackjack table, so you know exactly what you’re getting yourself into.
However, there have been cases of casinos getting caught using dirty tricks to take extra money off unsuspecting players. Here are a few dishonest maneuvers used by casinos in the past:
Removing cards from the deck
No self-respecting casino will ever try to pull this move, but in the past there were high-profile cases of casinos in Vegas and elsewhere getting nailed pulling tens or face cards from decks, literally stacking the decks against unsuspecting players.
All the casino needs to do is remove a ten, jack, queen or king from the deck and the instances of player blackjacks decrease significantly, meaning fewer times that the house has to give a 3:2 payout. And pulling one or even two cards from a deck most likely won’t be noticed by anyone.
Selective shuffling
During most blackjack games the dealer will shuffle once a certain amount of cards have been dealt from the deck (50-60 percent on average). However, if the dealer or pit boss notices that a certain player (whom they assume to be using a card counting system) is winning too much, the dealer will reshuffle on the spot.
They also may do this is they notice that a lot of low cards but few high cards have been dealt, meaning that players will have favorable chances at winning up upcoming hands. In the worst cases the dealer will reshuffle after only 2-3 hands.
This isn’t considered to be outright cheating but it should be, as it essentially gives the casino the right to adjust the house edge when it looks like the cards have tipped in the players’ advantage. If you’re playing at a table and you catch the dealer doing this, you have every right to voice a complaint.
Sleight of hand
This is a pretty nasty trick that has been known to happen, usually in poorly-regulated gambling jurisdictions. The dealer has extremely quick hands and notices that the player has had a few too many frosty umbrella drinks or is simply not paying attention, so rather than dealing the card from the top of the deck, the dealer intentionally hands out a bust card.
Selective shuffling, sleight of hand, hyper-shuffling, … fair?
This is most commonly done by the dealer pulling a card from the bottom instead of the top. Sometimes the pit boss will also instruct a cocktail waitress to distract the player in the middle of a big bet, thereby preventing him from seeing the dealer use a sleight of hand maneuver.
Hyper-shuffling
This isn’t considered to be outright cheating, but when the dealer is a “speed demon” the house edge always increases. Shooting through hand after hand allows the casino to make more money over the course of the night, and it also makes things easier for the dealer to play tricks.
Dealing hands extremely quickly means that the dealer can sometimes fudge the rules without the player noticing; for example miscounting a hand here or dealing a card from the bottom of the deck there. A few minor errors per hour add a lot to the casino’s take over the course of a night.
The faster the cards are dealt the harder it is for the player to follow along. For that reason, most casino strategy experts advise blackjack players to stay away from tables at which the dealer looks to be working extremely fast.
Why would a dealer cheat?
Dealers make a living from salaries and tips, and more winnings for the casino don’t necessarily mean more money in their pockets. So why would a dealer cheat in the first place? One explanation is that casinos keep detailed statistical records of their winnings at every table and with every dealer, and thus dealers are under pressure to impress their bosses.
Some older Las Vegas dealers have anonymously told journalists that back in the day when many casinos were mob-run dealers would be required to run scams against players. Refusing to do so meant kissing their jobs goodbye.
These days, however, there is very little incentive for a casino to cheat. For one thing, regulatory bodies like the Nevada Gaming Control Board and the New Jersey Gaming Commission are serious about auditing casinos and cracking down hard when wrongdoing is found.
Just as important, casinos need to look out for their reputations. In the internet age word spreads quickly, and if a player thinks they got cheated the casino stands to lose a lot of business. Cheating can and does occur (as this article makes clear) but it is most likely extremely rare.
Tags: advantage play, blackjack tricks, card counting system, casino strategy, Nevada Gaming Control Board, New Jersey Gaming Commission, selective shuffling, shuffle tracking
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For as long as casinos have been around there have been people trying to cheat them. Casinos dedicate a lot of resources to catching cheaters, and they are usually pretty good at doing so.
However, throughout history there have been a few cases of people who have won fortunes by cheating.
Many of these have been caught eventually, but some of them have gotten away with it completely. Of course, the most successful cheaters are those that we have never heard of and never will.
On this page we will look at some of the famous cheaters and the methods they used to cheat, scam, or hustle casinos out of substantial sums of money.
Tommy Glenn Carmichael
Carmichael is one of the most successful slot machine cheats, although he has spent time in prison for his crimes. He began cheating slot machines in 1980 when he used a metal device that was inserted into the coin slot and then triggered a payout.
When the big casinos started updating their slots with newer machines, Carmichael found his device no longer worked with them.
As a result he moved to the smaller gambling establishments in Las Vegas that still used older machines. He was eventually caught and sentenced to five years in prison.
This sentence failed to act as a deterrent though, and Carmichael resumed his cheating upon his release in 1987. Slot machine technology had advanced during his spell in prison and therefore he had to change his methods.
Carmichael bought one of the new machines and set about designing a new device that he could use to cheat. He came up with something that has since been called the monkey paw, or slider.
The principle was the same as his original device; it was inserted into the coin slot and caused the release of coins from the machines. He used it successfully until technology advanced again and he once more had to refine his methods.
He bought one of the new electronic slot games and again developed a way to beat them.
It worked so well that Carmichael made money from selling it to other cheaters, as well as using it himself.
Perhaps inevitably, Carmichael was eventually arrested for using the wand in 1996. Charges were dropped on that occasion, but he was arrested again in 1998 and once more in 1999. He pled guilty to running an illegal gambling enterprise and was sentenced to more prison time.
He is now banned from playing in casinos, but he does work with them producing anti-cheating devices.
Richard Marcus has been labeled as one of the greatest cheaters in the history of gambling. That isn’t unreasonable, given that he made a lot of money and never got caught. The only reason anyone knows about his cheating exploits is because he chose to write a book about his life after he had made enough money and stopped cheating.
Marcus named his method of cheating the “Savannah,” and it was in theory quite simple. It took an awful lot of courage and a fair amount of skill.
It was very similar to the past-posting cheating techniques that had been used, but with one key difference. Traditional past-posters would add chips to a winning bet using sleight of hand, but Marcus did it the other way round. He would remove chips from a losing bet.
He would go up to the roulette table and place a couple of chips down as his bet. The top chip would be a $5 chip, or some other small denomination, but underneath would be a higher value chip.
He placed the top chip in a way that the bottom chip could not be seen. If his bet lost, he would grab his chips (which you are not actually allowed to do, hence the drunken act) and fling them at the dealer. During this move he would swap the higher value chip for another $5 chip.
If, however, his bet won then he would make a big deal of celebrating. Invariably the dealer would be a little confused, assuming he had just staked two $5 chips. At this point Marcus would point out the fact that the chip underneath was more valuable.
Because he had legitimately placed the bet, even if surveillance was checked by casino security they would find nothing wrong. He was effectively cheating on his losing bets rather than his winning ones, and it’s winning bets that tend to be scrutinized.
Using this method he was able to win thousands on his winning bets and lose only a few dollars on his losing bets. Because of the way it worked, he managed to avoid being caught. He now works against the cheaters, consulting for casinos, and teaching them how to avoid being cheated.
In 1995, Reid McNeal hit a Keno jackpot at Bally’s Park Place Casino Resort in Atlantic City, for $100,000. Suspicions were immediately raised when McNeal showed very little emotion following the win and asked to be paid in cash.
As jackpot wins of a certain size have to be verified by state gaming officials under New Jersey law, an investigation occurred as a result.
The investigation led back to Ron Harris, a computer programmer working for the Nevada Gaming Control Board. Harris was responsible for finding bugs and flaws in the software of electronic gaming machines.
It transpired that Harris had been using his position to access and modify software in slot machines to pay out substantial wins if a precise sequence of coins were inserted. With his accomplice he had successfully cheated thousands of dollars and gone undetected.
Using his predictions his accomplice, McNeal, could be guaranteed a jackpot win.
McNeal duly won the jackpot at Atlantic City but, as we have described above, that was the beginning of the end for the two cheats. Harris was sentenced to seven years in prison, and released after serving two.
Throughout the history of gambling scams, women have typically been used to cause diversions while their male accomplices carry out the actual scandal.
Ida Summers was different; she certainly used her beauty and charm to distract pit bosses and dealers, but she also did the cheating herself.
Back in the 1960s she became known as the Vegas Vixen for her ability to cheat Las Vegas casinos.
This involved using sleight of hand to remove and add cards to the table when required. She then progressed to adding whole decks of cards that were prearranged to ensure the house lost. These decks were known as cold decks, or coolers.
Although successful for a while, Summers was eventually caught and arrested. Gaming officials in Vegas had become suspicious here, and together with the FBI, launched an investigation.
Seeing as she only received probation rather than a custodial sentence, it seems her looks and charm may have had an effect in court too.
French woman Monique Laurent, along with her crew consisting of family and friends, managed to win over $1 million from the roulette tables at Deauville Casino. Their winning had nothing to do with luck.
But rather thanks to some sophisticated equipment and the help of a rogue roulette dealer. Considering the scam took place in 1973, it was somewhat advanced for the time.
Laurent had her crew use a roulette ball that had been tampered with to insert a radio receiver.
With 90% accuracy she could make the ball land in a group of six numbers. Other members of the crew would place the necessary bets and collect the winnings.
The casino sensed something was wrong, but they couldn’t work out what the problem was. They had the roulette wheel checked and monitored the table and the dealer, but they found nothing wrong. Laurent and her crew therefore continued to rack up the winnings.
They were only caught eventually as a direct result of Laurent’s beauty.
The owner of the casino took something of a shine to Laurent and made romantic overtures. She rebuffed him and he didn’t take it well. He began to suspect her of wrongdoing when he noticed that she was always at the roulette table costing the casino money.
She was always seemingly alone and only appeared to be placing occasional bets. Working out that the cigarette packet might be involved he asked Laurent for a cigarette and the game was up.
Louis Colavecchio is a counterfeiter who used his skills to manufacture incredibly accurate reproductions of slot machine coins. He then used these coins in many American casinos with initially great success.
His operation was on a grand scale and he was producing thousands upon thousands of coins.
When he was eventually arrested in 1998, following an investigation after casinos had started to notice sizable surpluses of the coins in their inventories.
Law enforcement seized his stash of coins and the tools used to make them. Such was the volume of this equipment they had to rent storage facilities just to house it all.
When Colavecchio was released in 2006 he resumed his activities, but was arrested again after just a few months. He brokered a deal to reveal the secrets of his operation so that casinos could avoid being stung in this way again.
How To Cheat In The Casino
Nikrasch, also known as Dennis McAndrew, is another slot machine cheater. In fact, he is arguably the biggest known slot machine cheater in history. It has been said that he posed a serious risk to the integrity of the whole slot machine industry.
Together with his crew, it’s believed that Nikrasch made over $15 million using his sophisticated methods.
There has been a lot written about Nikrasch, particularly about his downfall, and much of it’s speculation. It’s widely believed that he was set up by someone who knew about his operation, but he himself has admitted that he does not know who or why.
He was arrested in 1998 while trying to cheat his way to a huge jackpot in a Las Vegas casino. Subsequently, he agreed to exchange some of his secrets in return for a reduced sentence.
Nickrasch had served time in prison before, having been convicted in the 1980s for his role in cheating the mechanical slot machines of the time. As a master locksmith with mechanical expertise, he had developed a method for forcing payouts from these machines.
Following his time in prison he returned to Las Vegas and soon began planning a return to his cheating ways.
By this time, though, slot machines were very different. The technology was now computerized rather than mechanical and the machines were vastly more difficult to manipulate.
This didn’t stop Nikrasch however, and he began to work on developing new methods for beating them. He did indeed come up with an advanced system for doing so.
His new system required a crew of people, which Nikrasch recruited using his contacts. He would visit a casino and, with members of his crew covering him from video surveillance and security personnel, he would break into a machine using an untraceable method.
After he left, another member of his crew would then come and win the jackpot: seeming legitimate. It’s not known for sure how many times Nikrasch pulled this off before he was caught. Equally, no-one knows how long he might have been able to get away with it if had he not been set up.
Casino Cheating News
Although Brennan is a thief rather than a cheater, he deserves to be mentioned here for the simplicity and apparent success of his heist. Brennan was a cashier at Stardust Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas.
Cheating Casino Slots
In 1992 as he was leaving work, Brennan decided to fill a bag with half a million dollars in cash and chips. He calmly walked out of the casino and has never been seen since.
There have been rumors that he was killed by an accomplice who didn’t want to split the proceeds, but there has never been any evidence to back this up.
The common belief is that he is still alive, somewhere in the world, enjoying his ill-gotten gains.