Cheating is a fairly rare sight on casino gaming floors. But comb the news headlines and you are bound to find evidence of it taking place in plain sight. Whether it is the result of collusion between players and live dealers, poor oversight, or a cheater’s ingenuity, there are enough instances of cheating to keep casinos on their toes.

Casinos for their part have an array of solutions to combat and get cheaters caught. From the Eye in the Sky surveillance system to employing former cheaters or, in the very least, card counters, the arsenal of casinos‘ anti-cheat inventory is growing, although not all casinos get it right.

Regardless, people who are caught cheating at casinos face a wide array of consequences. They will almost certainly be banned from the premises, and possibly face civil and criminal charges depending on how they managed to cheat.

Also, potential cheaters will be glad to hear that the days of burly enforcers dishing out Hollywood-style roughdowns are long gone!

Top 10 Most Common Casino Cheating Techniques

To help you understand how cheating at casinos works better, we have outlined the 10 most common techniques used by people.

1. Card Marking

Cheats would try and find away to mark cards.This could be by coming in physcal contact with the cards or have someone plant the right cards. Card marking is still one of the most common casino cheating techniques, but it is not without its risks.

2. Past Posting

Past posting is another risky form of cheating that pays off if successful. Essentially, the player attempts to distract the dealer, or have someone else distract them, while they place a bet closer to the end of the round, and thus give themselves an unfair advantage.

3. Hand Mucking

Hand mucking is just another term used to mean switching cards. Like Milas explained, this is a very common practice, and players may actually use it to put in a card they need to win a hand. It is a risky practice, but one that pays off a great deal if successful.

4. Collusion

Collusion is surprisingly popular. Just recently, two VIP hosts at Live! Casino in Maryland was charged with theft. However, collusion can happen in other ways, too, when a gambler and a live dealer know each other and agree to alter the natural flow of the game to benefit the player.

5. Loaded Dice

Loaded dice is a cheating technique in which a die is weighted to specifically favor certain outcomes. It is rather difficult to pull off, but it happens, as some sleight of hand experts can switch dice very quickly and usually without raising an alarm.

6. Roulette Wheel Bias Exploitation

As mentioned earlier, it is possible for players to spot roulette bias by observing the roulette numbers that come up.

All numbers on a European roulette wheel should appear approximately 27 times over the course of 1,000 spins.

If a specific number or small group of neighboring numbers shows up significantly more often, for example, 50+ times, while others appear far less than expected, this could be a sign of a roulette wheel imperfection or bias.

However, to rule out normal variance, you’d typically want to analyze at least 5,000 to 10,000 spins before concluding.

7. False Shuffling

False shuffling is acheating practice that involves the dealer and aplayer colluding. The dealer will stack the deck in such away as to give his co-conspirator the edge by dealing him or her the right cards, or boosting the odds of better cards coming their way.

8. Chip Capping and Pinching

Chip capping is just another way to say past posting. Essentially, players will quickly change their bets after they see the outcome. It may sound almost too difficult to believe, but the truth is that expert sleight of hand can do this in the blink of an eye, which makes it very hard for anyone but someone watching a video footage to prove that the player cheated.

9. Using Devices

Some devices can help you cheat casinos. For example, a laser that can determine the speed of the wheel and ball can give you a fairly accurate prediction about what sectors the ball would most likely land in. Card scanners are another popular option, although they are rather difficult to fit at a physical table without being noticed by everyone else.

10. Hacing Eletronic Machines

Hacking machines is ahard but feasible way to cheat your way at acasino. Essentially, someone with the right skillset, usually technological prowess and access to inside information is able to exploit some imperfection in the game’s software before it is flagged and properly addressed by the companies responsible for the games.

Is cheating in casinos common?

There is no real way to track how much casino cheating there is going on. Industry insiders say that casino cheating is rare but persistent, meaning that people will keep coming to gaming floors and try to cheat their way to victory.

Yet, it’s hardly just regular folk who try this, as well-organized criminal rings may do as much. just ask Niko Tosa whose methods continue to befuddle the industry – did he cheat or was he able to consistently win millions of pounds playing roulette without even looking at the table?

Harry Milas, amagician and adab hand, has been employed by casinos in the United Kingdom to try and spot cheaters who use sleight of hand to tinker with cards and shrothand the casinos, and he argues that, to the contrary, cheating happens more often than casinos would like.

Why do people try to cheat despite the risks?

People cheat for a number of reasons. They want to win money and get rich. Others make it for the adrenaline rush. Others still do it both for the thrill as well as the financial stimuli. However, it is not just regular people who enter casinos to cheat.

Criminal syndicates do, too, as pointed out by Milas. Despite the risks carried by cheating, the penalties are potentially small in comparison with the potential financial gain, and you would need to commit serious crimes to actually go to jail.

Most people bet that the casinos will simply escort them out if they are caught cheating, but this is not always the case. The high-profile case of Phil Ivey, a poker legend who also has a soft spot for Punto Banco, saw the player in a row with both casinos in the United Kingdom and the United States.

The reason? Ivey had used a technique called "edge sorting," which allowed him to figure out what cards were coming next. He was denied his winnings in the United Kingdom in 2017 and settled with the Borgata in 2020, ending a six-year feud. Did Ivey cheat? Both casinos that sued the player alleged that Ivey had indeed cheated.

How has cheating evolved, from mechanical tinkering to digital methods

Cheating has also come a long way. In the past, most cheating would happen in land-based casinos, but the truth is – afair bit of cheating is still rooted in physical properties, simply because it’s easier to pull it off.

However, digital heating has also become popular. Live dealer casinos, for example, need to make sure that their studios have acompletely level flooring. Even the slightest incline could create wheel biases that cheaters exploit online by recording millions of game round across online casinos across the world and then start betting to win.

Cheats have now moved onto other practices, too, including botting, which has been particularly successful in online poker, as shown by recent cases exemplifying the extent of the issue.

Famous casino cheating cases

There are many outstanding casses of successful cheats in casino floors, and they have been well documented. Not all cases are explicitly ?cheating" per se, but the people invovled used complicated schemes to make them happen and arguably win millions of dollars from playing various games – from slots to roulette, to blackjack & more.

MIT Blackjack Team

The MIT Blackjack Team was ateam of students from Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technologies, and other instituions of higher learning. The polymaths would train together to figure out how to effectively count cards, using spotters and then beating casinos at blackjack, and out of millions of dollars throughout the 1980s and 1990s.

The team trained rigorously for years, using their deep understanding of mathematics to gain a statistical edge. Many of the people who hit the floors had to operate under assumed identities to avoid detection, but eventually, the casinos caught up and turfed out the team, putting an end to 20 years of unprecedented success for blackjack players. The story of the MIT Blackjack Team has been made into one of the best Netflix movies about gambling, ?21".

Richard Marcus and the ?Savannah"

Richard Marcus is afamous casino cheater who is remarkable for his daring strategy which involved an expert sleight of hand. You may think that anything that involves physically tinkering with chips at atable would be difficult to pull off and go unnotied? Well, not really!

Richard Marcus would put down abunch of low-value bets and then discreetly move ahigh value chip in between so as to not make it immediatly clear what he ha done. If the result of around would make hi win big using his high value chip he would leave it as is, but if he would lose – he would retrieve it quickly and unnoticed.

Remember when we mentioned that many of the people who work with casinos to stop cheaters from succeeding are actually the very same people who trried (and usualyl succeeded) at cheating the casinos? Well, Marcus is done with his gambling days and he now consults casinos on how to spot his fellow cheaters.

Tommy Glenn Carmichael, who rigged slots

Read up on any source, and you will come to the very same conclusion – you cannot rig online slot casinos or slot machines for that matter. Well, you hold on to that thought until you have heard the story of Tommy Glenn Carmichael.

ATV repairman, Carmichael was open to knowledge, and he developed aknack for physical and digital slots and knew how to exploit imperfections in their mechanicms to win time and again.

He would educate himself about anything new that would happen in the slot development world and stay in lockstep with developers who didn’t realize it at the time, but their products weren’t as cheat-proof as they would have loved them to be.

Much like other remarkable casino cheaters, Carmichael would eventually quit and become a consultant for the gambling industry, developing ?The Protector, "a device he created to prevent others from cheating in the same way he had through the use of ingenious devices, such as the ?top-bottom joint," ?monkey paw," and ?light wand."

How do casinos countermeasure cheating?

Casinos have come a long way in ensuring that they are better prepared to address cheaters who are increasingly inventive, daring, and quite frankly – elusive. Casinos have developed a number of measures to ensure that no one breaks the rules, including technology, staff training, and strict rules.

• The Eye in the Sky: The Eye in the Sky is the collective term used for the casino surveillance system that scrutinizes players in real-time. In many instances, the people working in these rooms used to count cards or even try to cheat casinos and they are very good at what they do.
• RFID chips and digital tracking: Chips are tracked automatically through radio signals allowing the casino to flag deviations in expected probability and outcomes for individual tables, and then deploying experts to have acloser look at what is going on.
• Collaboration with regulators and authorities: Casinos are keen to exchange information about known cheats and bar them from entry, and they similarly liaise with authorities and other watchdogs to ensure that their floors are kept free of such individuals.

This is hardly all. Many casinos will use several other measures to ensure that they lower the chances of cheaters actually taking advantage of the casino. Live dealers may request a change of cards.

They may shuffle the decks at random intervals to make it harder for card counters (although card counting is not cheating by most casinos‘ standards!). Trained floor supervisors are even another safeguard against casino cheaters, as they will look for suspicious behavior such as chip manipulation, signaling, or collusion.

Can you cheat at online casinos?

Cheating online casinos is different in nature. Earlier, we mentioned roulette wheel bias, which can be tracked more easily online, because cheaters are able to monitor virtually all online casinos in the world and try to determine if their software and technology is misfiring.

However, beating slots the same way Carmichael beat mechanical slots (even though that had software installed) is another matter. The Random Number Generator used in such slots cannot be manipulated by external factors or the casino.

So, how do players cheat online casinos? There are ways still! Bonuses and multi-accounting can theoretically allow players to win against casinos by amassing bonus funds and turning them into real money payouts.

Another highly successful strategy is botting, but it is not applicable to casinos – rather, it targets online poker websites, and bot networks can end up beating a lot of players out of cash, as they have already done repeatedly. Poker platforms have been racing against bots, but this has proven a Herculean task at best.

Should I cheat, and is it worth the risk?

Cheating can be fun in a sense. Will the dealer spot you past posting? Can you convince an insider at the casino to help you pull off a scheme? These may sound like tempting offers, but the truth is cheating is never worth it.

The people who have been capable of cheating the casinos eventually ended up working with the casinos – they sought to make money, yes, but they were also mavericks. You may even call them professional gamblers, even though they used schemes to beat the casinos.

Still, the schemes they deployed were completely novel and unseen, and that is why they worked so well for them. Casinos just couldn’t fathom what a person would do to win so much money, and how they would achieve it. It took the casino floors decades to catch up, and with today’s technological advancements, cheating casinos is a tall order at best.

As to whether it is worth it? No, definitely not. You can face bans from casinos for life, much like Mikki Mase has been banned from every casino in the world. Worse, you can be fined and even face jail time depending on the level of your transgression!

Don’t Cheat – Have Fun Instead!

As you can see, many methods may still work when you try to cheat a casino. You could even succeed in pulling some of them yourself, but the truth is that the people who have succeeded at cheating casinos were more or less geniuses in their own right and dedicated their lives to figuring out how casinos worked and how they could beat them. Cheating can be fun in theory, yes, but in practice, it’s just a lot of stress, and not that fun as you imagined it would be!

To sum up, you should never cheat your way at acasino. To have agood time at any casino, you simply need to try and play at trustworthy websites.

Try this list of top online casinos to get started!

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