[Editor’s Note: The following answer is penned by none other than Arnold Snyder, publisher of Blackjack Forum, a trade journal for professional gamblers that dates all the way back to 1981. Snyder, well-known as one of the world’s foremost blackjack experts, is the author of the classic Blackbelt in Blackjack, The Big Book of Blackjack, The Blackjack Shuffle Trackers Cookbook, and the novel Risk of Ruin (the latter two published by us at Huntington Press). He’s also the content provider for ToplessVegasOnline.com.]
Robert Griffin was a young private investigator who arrived in Las Vegas in 1963 right after Ed Thorp published Beat the Dealer, which introduced card counting. The casino’s initial countermeasure, switching from hand-held single decks to four-deck shoes, worked until Thorp brought out a second edition of Beat the Dealer, with his Hi-Lo counting system, which was effective against any number of decks. The casinos were desperate.
Griffin stepped in to fill the void. In 1967, he and his wife Beverly began producing a book of mug shots and IDs of every card counter who'd been barred from a Las Vegas casino. When card counters began being ejected from casinos in which they’d never played, the existence of "the Griffin book" became known.
By the 1980s, the Griffin Detective Agency basically owned a huge market and nearly every major casino in the country, including, it’s rumored, illegal ones subscribed to the book.
The way it worked in those pre-digital days was as follows. A casino contacted the agency when it suspected a player of being a card counter. A detective showed up to evaluate the player. If you’ve read Ben Mezrich’s book Bringing Down the House or seen the movie, one Griffin detective, Andy Anderson, is portrayed as a "silver-haired" man who doggedly pursues the MIT blackjack team. (Anderson has identified himself as the detective on whom the character was based in Mezrich’s novel.)
The problem was that in their zeal, detectives working for the renamed Griffin Investigations made little to no distinction between card counters and cheaters. (Non-card-counting "associates" were also banned, simply for being seen with counters in a casino.)
Thus, it was inevitable that in April 2000, two advantage players, Michael Russo and James Grosjean, were detained and arrested on information supplied by Griffin to Caesars Palace, which accused the two of cheating at Three Card Poker. Represented by gambling attorney Bob Nersesian (author of our recent book The Law for Gamblers), Russo and Grosjean successfully sued both Griffin and Caesars for libel in June 2005 and were awarded punitive damages.
Almost immediately, in September 2005, Griffin Investigations filed for bankruptcy.
Griffin is still in business, though my understanding is that the company's services are used by far fewer casinos than in the heyday of card counting 20-30 years ago. The Griffin book is no longer a physical "book"; it’s now an online subscription service known as Griffin On-Line Database (GOLD). The company also maintains a large database of jackpot winners that purports to assist casinos in recognizing "potential fraudulent activity."
Other services, such as Biometrica Systems, are now more popular with the casinos and do essentially the same thing that Griffin does.
There's no legal practical way to find out if you're listed in Griffin, Biometrica, or other such services. But here's a perhaps extra-legal and impractical story for you.
Back before Griffin became an online service only when I was publishing Blackjack Forum as a quarterly print magazine, moles who worked in casino surveillance used to send me copies of all the Griffin flyers as they came out. At one point, I had three full copies of the book, many hundreds of pages. The book also had an extensive index, so players could be looked up by name.
One of the features of the annual Blackjack Ball, a professional players get together that took place in Las Vegas every January, was the Griffin book on the kitchen table and a huge stack of flyers. The pros could look through all the the alerts and peruse the latest edition of the book to see if they or any of their friends or teammates had been ID'd.
I can also tell you this: A lot of misinformation appeared in the book. Primarily, players were identified as pros working on teams or partners of known pros when they weren't. In some cases, the pros knew who the non-pro players were and they realized they were cases of guilt by association.
All that said, most players don't find out unless they’re told they’re listed, directly by casino personnel, usually when they’re being barred.
