“Known” is more problematic. The universe is filled with asymmetric information. One person may know something, but another person does not. In this case, the spotter is accused of knowing the card, but the rest of the people do not know the card. When interpreting the statute, what is the standard? The passive phrase “is known” is clearly ambiguous. Since a frame of reference is not explicitly specified, I would argue that the most sensible frame of reference is to say “… outcome is [publicly] known.” When the dealer flips over the hole card, then the outcome is publicly known, but until then, it is not, so there is no violation. The casino lawyers will argue that the frame of reference should be whether the outcome “is known” by the party making the bet, rather than “is publicly known,” but that approach will lead to contradictions, as we will see below.<\/p>\n
When faced with ambiguous wording, as in this catch-phrase’s use of the words “outcome” and “known,” judges and juries do look at context. At one time, someone actually wrote the statute, and it got through the legislature. So when that happened, what were they talking about, and what scam were they trying to control? Then, once the statute was in place, how was it applied over the years? What were the other cases where the statute was called into play?<\/p>\n
In the case of making a bet after the outcome of a bet is known, you’ll probably find that nationally, the statute is meant to prevent “bet capping” in table games, tampering with a slot machine after a jackpot hits, and “past-posting” in sports and horse racing. In fact, the phrase past-posting is now used as a synonym for bet capping or “pinching” in table games, though the phrase derives from horse racing scams, an example of which is shown in the movie The Sting.<\/em><\/p>\n Were the Nevada legislators imagining hole-carding when they wrote the statute? I doubt it. Nor was my lawyer aware of any public case where the catch-phrase was applied to hole-carding. And for good-reason: It’s a bogus argument, and hence destined to fail before any smart judge or jury.<\/p>\n Let’s look at the realistic aspects of spotting the hole card. As I wrote in Exhibit CAA,<\/em> you will find that spotting mistakes can sometimes be quite unpredictable. (Otherwise, you wouldn’t make mistakes.) In fact, any card, even a picture card, can be mistaken for any other card, even a small card. Spotter signals “paint” (a picture card in the hole), and then the dealer flips over a 3! Yes, it happens a lot.<\/p>\n It’s so common, in fact, that we call it “Paint Syndrome.” I warn my students of this phenomenon. There comes a stretch in the session where every card looks like paint. Fatigue and lighting contribute to Paint Syndrome, as does card design. Suppose that the lighting is dim and the dealer’s angle is a bit unfavorable for the spotter, and the hole card is a 3. Without a pip pattern extending to the edges of the card, the spotter might basically see the white part of the card. The lack of a pip pattern there means that the spotter sees no contrast. While we know that in bright light that part of the card is white, the information that is actually going to the spotter’s brain is “I am seeing a space that is all one shade.” Since the casino lighting is dim, and the card is facing downward, the card is in its own shadow, and that one shade is interpreted as “dark\/ink.” The brain thinks it’s a picture card because it thinks it is seeing a card that is all black, even though the card is actually all white in that region. If the spotter can pick off a pip, then the brain can normalize the exposure meter better and realize, “Aha, the pip is dark, and so the rest of the space that is lighter than the pip is white, so the card must be a small card or ace because of all that white.”<\/p>\n I saw the same phenomenon in a museum exhibit that showed various images of the moon and how they would look white or gray depending on how your brain normalizes things. Another exhibit shows that when presented with a green card with a hole punched in alignment with your blind spot (where the optic nerve connects to the retina), your brain will fill in the hole with green, making the card appear to be solid with no punched hole. Or vertigo, where your brain actually sees the room spinning, even though it isn’t.<\/p>\n The point of all this is to say that the spotter might think the card is paint, but he’s wrong. I’ve had teammates tell me, before the card was publicly revealed, “The card is X. I’m 100% sure,” or “I have no doubt.” And then it turned out they were wrong. It happens quite a lot, and it’s why many rookies lose; they are overly confident about the information, and then play their hands incorrectly as a result.<\/p>\n I can guarantee that every veteran spotter has bought insurance and the dealer turned out to have the ace of spades in the hole, or the 9 of spades in the hole. So I would argue that the outcome is not<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0“known” by the spotter, even when he thinks he knows!<\/p>\n Finally, let’s consider a few of the cases where the casino’s silly interpretation of “outcome is known [by the party making the bet]” would criminalize many bets that are clearly legal. Suppose you hold KK in Mississippi Stud. You make a 3X bet on 3rd Street. Then a K is revealed on the board. You make a 3X bet on 4th Street. Then the case K is revealed and you make a 3X bet on 5th Street before your irrelevant kicker is revealed. At the moment you made your 5th Street bet, you held KKKKx, and you knew exactly what payoff you were going to get on your 5th Street bet. You were going to make 40:1 on a bet that was 3X your Ante. So you would win 120X your Ante on 5th Street.<\/p>\n How about Ultimate Texas Hold ’em? You hold the Js 2d, so you check all the way to the river, and then the board has the As Ks Qs Ts. You know you have the royal flush when you make a 1X Play bet, which will pay 1:1 regardless of the dealer’s hand or whether the dealer qualifies.<\/p>\n Similar examples occur in Let It Ride, variations of Three Card Poker, live poker, and video poker. In general, in any poker variation where bets are permissible after some cards are revealed as part of the game, there will be opportunities to make bets when the bettor holds the nuts — the best hand possible at that moment. In some of those cases, the payoff for that hand will be specified in advance.<\/p>\n There are also examples among hands known to be losers. In Let It Ride, if your first four cards are 9872, you can confidently retrieve your middle bet, knowing there is no river card that can salvage the hand. Or, if your opponent in Texas Hold’em bets on the river with AAAA2 on the board, you can confidently fold your pocket 22.<\/p>\n In blackjack, suppose a casino offers doubling on any number of cards. You hit T6 and pull a 5 for 21. You now have T65. What happens when you double down on the three-card, hard 21? The outcome of the bet is known. You will lose your original bet and the additional double-down bet. Insane? Yes! Illegal? No!<\/p>\n With all the casino cheating going on these days (see my previous two-part post), casinos have stepped up their game. Not only do they cheat you by not paying when you win, but they strengthen the move by enlisting the local district attorney to extort you. The way it works is that the casino doesn’t […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"spay_email":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false},"categories":[29,2],"tags":[39,586,54,1261,94,1259,224,145,474,248,1260,196],"yoast_head":"\n![\"Facebook\"](\"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/gambling-with-an-edge\/wp-content\/plugins\/social-media-feather\/synved-social\/image\/social\/regular\/96x96\/facebook.png\" "\\"Follow")
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