How Casinos Cheat, Part II: Heads I Win, Tails You Lose

In the previous post, I made the point that sleight-of-hand wizards working in bust-out joints are largely a thing of the past, and that the casino industry has found a much more efficient way to extract money: on a mass scale, offer lousy games that make it easy for degenerates to give their money to the casino. This solution is more lucrative, and requires no creativity, skill, or hard work. So it is the perfect solution for the casino industry.

Offering lousy games is not cheating of course, and probably we would all do it if we operated casinos. My point is only that offering lousy games is a simple solution to the objective of getting all the money, and that old-school sleight-of-hand has been rendered unnecessary and obsolete.

Now, there is a way that casinos cheat these days. The method first came to my attention in the first age of Internet gambling. There was a casino called goldenjackpot, I believe. They offered a blackjack game with poor, but countable, penetration. Santi and I decided to play it with the most accurate system we could, and had mixed results. We had some winning sessions, but the dealer just seemed to have an inordinate number of blackjacks. That phenomenon, the context of unregulated (offshore) Internet gambling, and other software glitches made us question the legitimacy of the game. We knew that our brief experience with the game was statistically inconclusive, and we considered attempting to collect data systematically.

Before we could embark on that project, we got an answer to our question “Is the casino cheating?” The answer was a resounding yes, but their move was not the one we were expecting. We had tried to get some of the cash from our account, clicked the Redeem Funds button, sent the redemption email, and all that. Then we waited. No response. We sent a followup email. No response. Maybe eventually we got a reply that said our redemption was being processed; I’m not even sure now if we got such an email. In any case, the final result was that we were not able to cash out even one penny from the site. In asking around, we heard that other players had the same experience. In fact, we could never find anyone who had ever successfully cashed out at this casino.

So that’s the trick! That’s how modern casinos, even the brick-and-mortar ones, cheat you: they just don’t pay. They are basically free-rolling against you. You gamble. If you lose your money, bye, bye, come again soon (idiot). If you win, the casino just doesn’t pay.

There are variations on how they do it, but here’s a typical example (true story): Whee_lchair and I crush the Maxim for around $24k. In order to justify not paying, the Maxim accuses us of a host of crimes, including using a device, structuring, etc., etc. When an investigation by the Gaming Commission says that there was no crime, the Maxim then declares bankruptcy, but states in the chip redemption plan filed with GCB that the only purple chips outstanding are those that were stolen in a cage robbery. Now, casino inventory documents filed with the court showed that the only purple chips outstanding were the ones that we won, and we had a copy of the surveillance video that showed us winning them. There was no police report on file of this supposed cage robbery that the Maxim mentioned in its letter to the GCB describing their chip redemption plan. So they tried to not pay off on our $20k in purple. We ended up getting a judgment against them, but the bankruptcy court authorized payment of only 50 cents on the dollar.

How about a casino that’s still in existence, like the Eminem Land. We beat a game with another crew for $225k (while the cocky boss is gloating that “You need a 10:1 spread to beat that game [the 6:5 single-deck]!”), and when the other crew went to cash out $8000, the Eminem confiscated the chips and refused to pay. I believe they refused to even give a receipt for the confiscation. The casinos say, “We cannot verify your play—you have no proof that you played” despite the fact that Nevada law says that the burden of proof is on the casino to prove that you didn’t play.

Likewise, the Free_mont, Tre_asure Bay, Bo Ravage, Isle of Crapi Bilocksee, QQQQ, Moneray Bae, Hairuhs LV, and many other casinos have refused to pay and sometimes confiscated the chips. I have dealt with gaming agents who have said, “We cannot make them pay; we can only advise them to pay.” What nonsense is that?? GCB absolutely can make them pay.

So basically the casino stiffs you, forces you to go through the commission, then still stalls, regardless of the commission’s findings. They force you to give up your identity, file complaints, wait, sometimes file lawsuits, and jump through a dozen other hoops. Their hope is that you will die or give up during that process. To encourage you to give up, they sometimes threaten you with a list of bogus criminal accusations. At some point, they basically offer to drop criminal charges if you will walk away from the money! Wow, what a deal!

In Nevada, the Gaming Control Board even helps them with this. We have a document, that we obtained through legal discovery in our lawsuit, that is a communication between See_tsars Paliss and the GCB saying that card bending cases are very difficult to prove, “but use the prosecution as a pretense” to recover the money (about $18k) on behalf of the casino. They used the word pretense. This document was so damning to the casino’s defense that they fought mightily to get the incriminating line with the word “pretense” redacted in the version of the document that was presented to the jury, and, unfortunately, they succeeded in that. So there’s evidence that the GCB, which is a significant government organization in Nevada, was involved in a conspiracy to cheat two guys out of $18k, a paltry sum of money to such a major corporation.

So when a casino loses to you, they accuse you of cheating and then refuse to pay. They know it’s often not worth your time and exposure to sue them. The problem with the U.S. is not that it’s a litigious society; the problem is that it’s not litigious enough! Even if the casino is ultimately forced to pay, the move was still a free-roll for them. In their worst-case scenario, they have to pay you only the amount that you were due from the beginning. GCB never penalizes them by even a penny for having refused to pay.

They’ve got some variations on the move, too. If you have a slot ticket, they’ve now shortened the time window to cash the ticket, to as little as 90 days in some places. If you have chips, they might change their chips, and then force you to produce documentation if you happen to be holding onto any of the old chips. If you’re American, and gamble at a tribal casino, forget about it. One tribal casino recently stiffed a guy on a progressive jackpot (not even the tribe’s money!—unless they’re stealing from the pool), because they said the dealer spread the cards from right-to-left instead of left-to-right, or some nonsense. I once saw a dealer try to claim a guy had fouled his paigow hand because he had put the two-card hand in the five-card box and the five-card hand in the two-card box!

Another variation of the move is to pay a guy, and then sue him to get the money back! What a joke! The Boor_gotcha thought they had the best of Ivey. They thought Ivey was the fish; they were wrong (and there were free, online industry newsletters that warned casinos of the move). Of course, the Boor_gotcha has always been a cocky joint, so I’m sure the Ivey incident was so embarrassing to them that they needed to clean it up by badmouthing Ivey and suing to get the money back. They have also backroomed and barred APs, despite Atlantic City’s no-barring law, so it shows how classy they are.

I know that most casinos hate me, but the thing is this: I have no love for degenerates, and really don’t care if casinos use whatever legal means to separate degenerates from their money. I even think that Las Vegas can be a fabulous vacation destination for some people. And there’s no doubt that the fabulous properties like Borgata and Cosmo (the lobby displays are great, especially the library-books one!) can offer a unique entertainment experience. But, I’m an old-school gambler—in my book there’s no lower form of cheating scum than someone who welches on a bet. In the movie Rounders, despite being a violent Russian gangster, Teddy KGB is shown to have class when he tells his goon, “He beat me—straight up—pay him. Pay dat mee-an his money.”