 This meeting was held in exciting Las Vegas, Nevada from July 9th through the 11th, 1999. This is video tape number 10, Hacking Las Vegas. This is my cloth. How are we doing with this one? Can you hear? There's no event staff at all, so I have no idea whether this warps or not. There's no event staff at all, so I have no idea whether this warps or not. This guy? I have that one. Ok, that's working a little better. Since there's no event staff I guess they introduced me. I'll introduce myself and then I'm going to ask for a request. My name is James Jorash. What I'd like to talk to you today about is Las Vegas, gambling, cheating, having casinos defend themselves, all kinds of stuff that you never thought you'd know. Some of you might have seen the speech that I did a couple years ago here at TopCon. What I've done is update the speech with a lot of new stuff. So I'm interested in exciting cheats that have happened in the last couple years that I'll update you on. I have a lot of slides. I want to get through a lot of material. If there's someone in the audience who wanted to do slides for me, it would be a big help if someone could flip these slides. I can get through a lot more than I can get through the material. I'd be willing to provide lots of great gambling information, how to beat the casinos and black check card counting. We have a winner. This one? This mic is on. I tried this one earlier. It doesn't seem to... I'll try. Is this any better? I just don't get much range with this. We'll start, as I said, we'll have to kind of rip through this. What I want to talk to you initially about is basically how the casinos defend themselves. And then we'll take a look at and spend much more time, I think, on the attacking techniques. The attacking techniques, basically in two groups. One is the outright cheats, the illegal maneuvers. The second part is really ways you can legitimately beat the casinos. So just an idea of how much money we're talking about, how much money these guys make, billions and billions of dollars. I live in Las Vegas itself, just the city itself, won five billion dollars just in slot machine revenue in the last year. We're talking about some monster dollars here. This is certainly something that casinos really want to protect. They're not willing to let a billion dollars here that slip by. Lots of money to take. Lots of people have targeted Las Vegas because of all this money. We'll quickly talk about the regulatory agencies. This is just the way that Las Vegas defends itself, or partly defends itself. The difficulty, I think, is that lots of these jobs are... Well, our government jobs don't pay that well. Don't exactly attract the best and the brightest. But this is sort of the regulatory structure for Las Vegas. The various commissions and control boards. It's the same in Atlantic City. It's the same in various gaming jurisdictions throughout the United States versus in the situation. The casino hierarchy. Basically, the question is who is out there defending against cheats? Who's watching out for cheats? This particular slide talks about the rankings and the VP of casino operations as well. It all starts. He's the head cheese. And it goes downhill from there to a ship supervisor, pit bosses, four persons and dealers. You've seen all these people in the casinos will move on. Surveillance. The people on the previous slide were the people who were there in the casinos that were actually watching you and looking in real time to see whether or not you're cheating. This is the electronic surveillance system, which is the surveillance... The people that you don't see that are hanging out upstairs in surveillance. Now, surveillance works in conjunction with the Black Book and Griffin. The Black Book is basically a list of the undesirables, the people in Nevada, who can't even step into a casino without being thrown out. There are 26 people there. They reserve this for people such as mobsters, people who have been convicted of various criminal felonies. I believe anyone convicted of cheating the casino automatically goes in. Anyone... Let's see. What kind of guy I think was script kiddies to kill him? No, I'm sorry. They're not really in the book. 26 people in the Nevada Black Book. And Atlantic City has a similar book as well. The other thing that they have is what's called a Griffin Book. It's a full-volume series, and it is just chock-filled with pictures of various undesirables. I don't want to say if you are in there, but it wouldn't surprise me. Thorn flares and elevators might get you in. I don't know. It's mainly for people who are cheating at Blackjack and people who are cheating slot machines. They also throw in for good measure. People like card counters, who, according to the Griffin folks, are cheaters. God knows why. Using your brain would be considered cheating, but they do it, and they throw these people into the book. There are no laws or anything like that who can go into the book. So if you happen to be standing next to a cheater, and the folks in the Griffin agency think that since you're standing next to a cheater, you must be a cheater yourself, and you go into the book. It's about 2,000 names. It's updated monthly. Used in a couple hundred casinos all over the world. One thing to note at the end here, five players were added to this book a while ago, just because they posted some things onto the internet. Perhaps about card counting. Just be careful out there. I don't know. I don't think that I am. I'm over Blackjack puritation. The Griffin 2000 system, they actually are trying to upgrade their systems and make it a little more electronic. Believe it or not, they have heard of databases of photographs and face recognition and stuff like that, and they're starting to develop systems now where they can take an image from a casino. They'll take a surveillance camera image. They'll get to a central control or central repository. They'll compare it with images in a book or images in a database, make the connection, send the picture back to the casino. So just now in 1999, beginning to get into the electronic age. The manpower and the budget of the casinos, kind of, this is a question of how much surveillance is there out there. The average casino has about 250 cameras, but this is changing pretty rapidly. As casinos are being built on the strip, you'll notice the monster casinos, 3,000 rooms, those have a lot more cameras now and they've definitely moved towards bigger and bigger cameras. Taj Mahal claims to spend $20 million per year of combat cheating. I think that's just Donald Trump being a little overzealous. He also claimed 1,200 cameras, which was more than any building except the Pentagon. I believe that has been eclipsed recently by Foxwood's casinos, if any of you live in East Coast. They claim to have 3,000 cameras now at that casino. And one thing to note, these cameras are not just about catching cheaters. It's actually catching things like slip and fall cases. And you think that casinos are worrying more about losing the cheating than someone falling down and selling them for $10,000, but it turns out those lawsuits are pretty common and some of those can be for very large amounts of money. So those cameras are actually there in many cases to stop a fake slip and fall suit. There's still a lot in the bathrooms. The equipment, cameras were added in the 1980s. Casinos are tending to go towards a single camera on every single game. So if you think that you're going to lock into a casino and pull off some cheating move on one particular black check table, hoping you haven't got a camera on it, well, good luck. In the modern casinos and the larger casinos, they're going to have a camera on every single game. And in many cases, they're going to be videotaping every single game every single hour of the day. They're going to keep those tapes for a couple of days. As I said, the larger properties, many larger properties now have almost 1,000 cameras. The technology won't get into details, but as you can imagine, they're using surveillance cameras from the retail industry, for example, and they're using them in the casino business. They're gritty driven. They think that's pretty cool. I think it took them a decade to get there, but they've got a map of the casino, and they can basically look at the map and touch this area on. The map and several cameras will automatically swivel and turn to that particular area. A cash register tie-in, I thought, was kind of neat. They've got some cameras that are up in cash registers because, of course, they've got bartenders that are taking, you know, 50 bucks a day out of the register or ringing up drinks. What they do is they have a camera on the register and at the same time, all the data from the cash register is being sent to the surveillance system. So they've got a split screen set up where they have all the point of sale data showing up at the same time. They also have a picture of the guy and what he's doing. Cage and credit. This is kind of interesting. A lot of people cheat the casinos in Blackjack by getting credit and then stiffing the casinos, of course. So cage and credit is a hot topic for slot cheats. One interesting thing to know about credit is the fact that the only two things they look at when deciding whether or not to give you credit, other than whether you're a hacker or not, would be how much money do you have when checking your account? And have you ever stiffed the casino? That's all they look at. That's all they care about. They don't care about savings account. They don't care if you've got $6 million in Yahoo options. Makes no difference. Things like income, debt, previous credit history totally irrelevant. Typical credit fraud. This is how lots of people like to sting the casinos. It's easier said than done, but here's basically how it works. You go into New York, for example, and you get $100,000 in cash, and when you set up your bank account, you go to the casinos and you establish a line of credit. Now they lick their lips thinking, geez, here's a guy who's got $100,000 in cash in their bank. He wants to set up a line of credit. We're going to take this guy, take the guy to the cleaners. Well, you establish the line of credit. You arrive in Vegas on Friday night and you start taking out markers, which is basically taking out a loan from the casino. They don't care because you've got a $60,000 line of credit. So you take markers up to $55,000. You start gambling. You start palming some of the chips, throwing the chips into a purse or throwing the chips into your pocket and pretending you're losing lots of money. You give those chips to your confederates. They cash the chips in, and at the end of the whole deal, you leave the casino owning them, perhaps $50,000. They deposit those markers, assuming they're going to go to your bank and they're going to clear against your $100,000 on a credit. But of course, on Friday afternoon or perhaps on Monday morning at 8 o'clock, you close the account down, withdraw all the money, and you are gone scot-free. General cheating concepts, I worked for one of the larger strip casinos for about five years before I got smart and got into internet startups. Cheating actually is really successful. Casinos would like you to believe that no cheaters get away with it, and they love to do things like they like to talk about surveillance systems and things on television shows. You'll see Dateline ABC, I think had a recent thing about casino cheating, and they love to make it sound like there's 600 people watching you and that there's no way you could get away with even winning $0.50 off the casino. But the truth is and what the cheaters will tell you is that the professionals are often very successful. What trips them up, generally they'll do things like one, they'll be a little bit too greedy and they'll take a lot of money and decide they can take an awful lot more money. They get greedy and they end up getting caught. Alternatively, they have cheating scams that involve a team of people, and guess what? You've got four people on your team and one guy gets disgruntled, his girlfriend goes to somebody else, he gets mad, he tips off the feds, and the next thing you know, you guys are all in prison. As far as cheating goes, the casinos are definitely worried about somebody coming in from the outside and cheating them, but what they really dread is somebody on the inside cheating because if you've got, for example, in Blackjack, a dealer colluding with a player capturing the players and figuring out that it's happening is really, really difficult. Some of the typical player cheating methods that you can see on the casino floor are marking cards, bending cards, bending the tens and aces, pass posting where you are playing a roulette wheel, for example, and you're actually making the bet after the ball has stopped bouncing. Collusion with dealers is fairly common and the cheaters typically will go after a dealer that they think owes money to someone or in some way, you know, for whatever reason, have a drug habit or something like that. They need the cash and somebody will go to that dealer and say, look, I can solve all of your debt problems, just collude with this player for a while and they'll take the casinos for some money. Counterfeiting is a very popular form of cheating. The disadvantage, of course, is that it would be a federal crime and you tend to end up in federal prison for many, many years, but the lure of being able to print your own money is just a bit too strong and there are some people who've decided to go after casinos in these counterfeiting cases. Atlantic City seems to have been attracting their most attention and that there are three casinos that have lost more than $100,000 in counterfeiting. It's not just bills that people are going after. It's also the casino tokens like slot machines, for example. If you see the high-end slot machines, they'll have $5 tokens, $25 tokens, or even $100 tokens. So counterfeiters have decided to counterfeit those instead of counterfeiting real bills. An example is, Caesar's got stuck with $10,000 in $100 chips that looked very real, but you can only tell the difference by dropping them under a hard surface. Washington mobster was involved in counterfeiting slot machine tokens. It's a big business. It's a lot of money. Luzcovoecchio was one of the bigger counterfeiters on the East Coast. His counterfeit tokens were so good that they actually needed microscopes to tell the difference between his tokens and the real tokens. The way that they actually found out that this guy was passing bogus $5 tokens was that the inventories in some of the Atlantic City casinos started increasing dramatically. They just didn't know why. Ultimately, they found out. Secret Service Asian friend Glennon, probably not here today, was the one who cracked the case open. This was actually a violation of the trademark violation for counterfeit. Don't mess with the patent and trademark office, they're tough guys. Bad checks, always popular. It's getting more popular in Vegas, I guess. Chinese organized crime, they claim have been passing as much as $500,000 a month in bad checks in Las Vegas. It's very difficult to stop these crimes, but I know quite a few of the Las Vegas police are involved. One thing to note here, the fact that it's not just counterfeit checks, they're doing more identity takeovers, which is kind of interesting. It's not really a counterfeit check, they're getting the IDs of gamblers, for example, and getting checks, getting legitimate checks printed up and using them. My guess is that the identity takeovers is going to become a bigger and bigger slice of this market. Bull validators, this is definitely one of the more popular targets for cheats, and it's a very popular target for counterfeiters. If you want to counterfeit a $100 bill and hand it over to a grocery store clerk, for example, they're actually going to handle the building and look at it, and if your bill is not really good, they're going to catch you right there. But a bill validator, if you walk up to a video poker machine and it takes $100 bills, there's no one watching you. It's a very tempting target, and if you try to put a billing that's not accepted, it just kicks the bill out. It doesn't call the feds automatically. That would be kind of interesting, in addition to the machine. The technology has been improving over time. Originally, at least, they were a magnetic head which read iron levels in ink, because dollar bills and currency had high iron levels. Unfortunately, there are a number of copiers that also had the same high levels of iron in their ink, and so the second generation machines that are now coming out are kind of looking at the iron content within the ink itself and looking at finer particles, and this has actually been very successful. CacheCode is a company that's been talking about how they've had some very high technology and higher technology practices. They talk about how secret their technology is. You can get some of these secrets if you want by taking a look at the patent databases. They've issued a couple of patents in this area. You can also take a look at four patents which publish 18 months after their priority date in the U.S. The patents are a good source for getting information about their values. Coin statistics, just some kind of odd numbers to throw at you to get a sense of the scale of the casinos and how many coins we're talking about. Opening up casinos takes millions of dollars in coins. I've got some stats here about some various casinos that opened up recently. Huge casinos and how many tons of coins it takes to open up. I think one thing to note, if you look at the statistics, carefully, something jumps out clearly they've got some really badass armored trucks I think because they only took then 15 armored trucks. They took Bellagio 56 armored trucks so clearly they've got some really big armored trucks. Interestingly, Bank of America has what they call coin vaults. Most people think of a bank. They think there's branches everywhere. There's Federal Reserve branches. There's now these vaults that are just for coin transactions and they've got one in Las Vegas that actually has the Bank of America vault has like four separate bays for armored trucks to pull up. We'll take a look at some quick notes on some of the cheating, some of the spectacular cheats that have happened. I think Gare Thackeray mentioned Ron Harris earlier today. This is one of my favorite examples. Ron Harris worked for the Nevada Government and worked for the Nevada Game and Control Board and basically his job was to check the chips that are put into slot machines and so we go into the field and it opened up a slot machine and they took a video poker machine, they bought the chip and they take it back to their offices to check to see whether or not the chip had been cheated. Well, Ron Harris, as he's doing this job decided he would introduce some of his own software into the chips and then go back out into the field. So guess what? After hours, after he finished working, he go back to the same machine that had this chip he would have his own code implanted into it and what the code did was it looked for certain patterns of coins. So if you entered like four coins and then three coins and then three coins and then five coins and then one coin and then two coin and you trigger a jackpot. And so he did this and was very successful for a while but ultimately was convicted and I believe he's now in prison, he was caught in this hotel room with a laptop, computer, police scanner and cell phones. That's not a very familiar, I think to me. Dennis Mikrash, I'm going to pronounce his name, was a very recent cheat. I think Wired Magazine actually had something about Dennis. He won six million dollars, so his team allegedly won six million dollars from cheating slot machines. He initially said he was going to tell the feds exactly how he did it and he backed off of that and I haven't seen any information yet about exactly how he did this but the rumor is that he was taking chips, taking a chip he would get to the slot machine he would get a key to open up the slot machine he would take out the old chip put in his gaffed chip and then replace the chips again, close the machine up and someone would come by, one of his accomplices would come by to get the wind, to pull the wind off the machine. It was cracked by an FBI source, oddly enough, who happened to just overhear a conversation between a couple of people and the FBI source told the FBI, blew the case right open. One of the guys on the team another very nice guy apparently, Richard Charlesworth, convicted of a slot cheating scheme, ten million dollars in 1984 so he's been around the block, he's done a few things but I mean that's bad but you know what's really bad, he was arrested with mecrash for bull rows and pay telephones now that, that's really, that's too much, you know, I can see it's ten million dollars slot cheap but pay phones, you can't do that anti-camera fitting, I talked about counterfeit tokens that are being used in casinos they're now starting to defend, they're trying to defend because it's been a fairly common crime, they're defending by putting more intricate bevels and edges and they're also starting into computer chips built into the tokens themselves Osborne coinage has some out now they said it last three to six years the problem is that these coins in a casino, you can get as I said, you know, as you saw in the previous slide tons and tons of coins and they're pouring out of buckets and they're pouring into counting machines you know, tremendous forces on these tokens and so computer chips you know, fairly fragile, tend to get too beat up but they are working with this and apparently I don't know if any casinos in Las Vegas or Atlantic City that are testing this yet I believe it's more being tested internationally right now but expect to see this soon and I also expect there's going to be some case of some guy who hacks the chip and it's got to happen one of these days Canadian Kino fiasco one of my absolute favorite casino disasters this was not a case of casino cheating this was a case of a casino mistake it was wonderful what the casino was doing was they bought a new casino, a new Kino machine and if you've seen Kino being played it's a newer device and the balls blow around and they get and the person who reads the ball it's kind of like bingo they decided to buy one of these devices that was a new device that didn't have any of these blowing balls, it was a random number generator you know, it saves some time I think this was a Canadian operation they weren't too swift and they installed the machine and at the end of every day they just turned the machine off and the next morning they turned it back on again well they didn't read the manual which they basically keep the machine on at all times and they said, jeez this is kind of interesting the numbers are about coming up the same every day well, rather than telling the casino this of course he of course decided well, if I knew what the numbers are I might as well bet a few 8-spot tickets or 10-spot tickets which pay off like $50,000 and he managed to collect about several hundred thousand dollars before the casino figured out what was going on but of course what can the casino say? jeez you know you're stupid the cheating devices I talked about Ron Harris and I talked about opening up a machine and replacing chips for example putting it back in, you might think it's ridiculous if you go out on the casino floor how can you like open up a machine and put a chip in and not have someone notice you? well, what the cheaters are doing are using blockers, boomers lookouts and collectors blockers are guys that are typically six foot five and they're 300 pounds they're enormous people they know exactly where the cameras are and they're standing in a strategic location often they're going to pick a slot machine in a certain area of the casino that has less coverage in other areas of the casino boomers are typically typically scantily glad women who will stand somewhat away from the area of action and just create something ruckus they're going to fight with their boyfriend it just creates some kind of disturbance to distract attention they'll look at it just someone there who makes sure that none of the casino personnel happen to be walking by at the same time the collector is someone who's going to step in to collect the jackpot because if you've got a cheating team and you've got one guy opening and closing the slot machine you don't want him actually collecting the jackpot so you've got some guy who looks like he just came from someone from Ohio or something and gee, he just happened to run this jackpot the monkey paws a legendary cheating device which I think was used more in the past slot machine companies have done a lot to defend against this device but in the past at least what people did was it's kind of like a little, simplistically a flashlight bulb on the end of like an 8 inch wire and what you do is you put that into the area of the slot machine where the coins fall out and where the coins fall out you've got various sensors that check that count the number of coins that are falling through so if you disable that sensor and you hit a jackpot instead of winning, instead of 10 coins falling through the coins just keep falling through because the sensor can't tell that coins are falling through so it just keeps saying send more coins so you can actually get all of the money from the slot machine to go pouring out but these are very difficult to use and as the last note mentions it requires a kind of strange body posture that's kind of a dead giveaway and it's also hardware when they catch you with one of these devices you're hanging under this thing that's definitely a cheating device lots of states out there that have mandatory prison sensors for using these things slot machine keys you might also wonder exactly how is it that someone would just open up a slot machine on the floor well there are more keys for a slot machine that the casinos have but it's very difficult to maintain control over these keys you often have slot machine mechanics that just don't pay that much money maybe they owe someone money for gambling losses or whatever someone approaches them and says look for $3,000 if you give me one of the keys would you give me the money sometimes they say yes and that gives you access to the machines you can actually open up a slot machine and turn the wheels and set a jackpot it's a bar bar bar and then close the machine up again and win the jackpot that way next slide this way you need slot machine cheating methods just about every method has been used in the past one of them is drilling where people will drill a very small hole into the machine and they'll insert a wire into it and use that wire to set the wheels on the machine sometimes they'll hide the drill bit they'll put the drill into a cigarette pack or into a purse or something like that and just hold it against the machine electrostatic discharge is one of my absolute favorite cheating methods there were machines I believe they're called P&M poker machines that you won't find anywhere on the floor today but you could actually walk around the casino and generate and pick up a certain amount of static electricity touch the machine and the static discharge will actually cause the machine to pour all the coins into the tray I understand this there's some really wonderful footage of a guy playing the machine and he's standing there and his leg is like kind of cocked out to the side he's like rubbing furiously on the floor and he's very surreptitiously kind of touching the machine and collecting the money but like I said, those machines are gone hand manipulation you wouldn't think that you could actually cheat a slot machine with no tools at all but there were some bar top video poker machines manufactured by IGT where you could in some way cheat the machine and cause it to pay out I think IGT was very quiet about exactly how that happened and they have since instituted various measures to prevent that but it did happen and it cost them a lot of money some of the really simple stuff, tow tappers and slot fleas tow tappers are just people who are stealing money out of people's purses they're dragging a purse close to them slot fleas, people who are stealing money out of a person's bucket next to them so cheating is not always a very high tech affair it's not just the players that are cheating there are manufacturers who cheat as well sort of an equal opportunity to cheat 1989 American coin actually manufactured video poker machines that did not come up with royal flushes it just couldn't happen on the machine it changed the software on the machines it's pretty policy to do that they got caught, I don't know I think they lost their license they lost a couple of senior employees I don't know if it was in prison time it was a pretty bad scene internationally although in the US I would wager that 99.999% or 100% of the machines right now are fair internationally if you're going to go to Moscow for example or go to Rio and play machines some of the machines are rumored to be gaffed and cheated and will cheat the players I would be careful internationally Silicon gaming is an interesting story there are no machines on the floor but it's an entirely computer driven there are no spinning wheels it's basically just a PC with a big screen on it obviously this is kind of interesting to the hackers out there because hacking used to be kind of an interesting win the problem with Silicon Gaming now is that the company is not doing well to put into IPO terms their IPO I believe went up to about 20 like a year ago they're now trading at 50 cents a share I guess the company is still still holding on but I think they might fade away from existence in which case you might not see these machines anymore but they certainly have started kind of a trend in the industry and a lot more machines are going towards completely electronic devices Blackjack cheating of course is very popular and has been for many many years there are some fairly sophisticated methods I mentioned that you could just mark cards for example but there are also some sophisticated methods like cameras like a guy's sleeve and that guy's arm is on the table and he's trying to actually capture on video that deals whole card in Blackjack for example transiting it out to a van the van relays that signal back to a guy's earpiece for example and he makes bets it's very high tech I don't think it's written on it it's certainly very uncommon when you get caught again you run off a lot of hardware on you it's certainly going to be substantial prison time the slug scams are performed by the dealer who is not shuffling correctly and they're going to find a clump of 10s for example or a clump of aces and try to shuffle them such that they stay in one clump and then players will exploit those cooler is a really pretty spectacular move cooler is actually introducing an entire set of cards into play that you have pre-arranged and what people do is you might see a game like a six-deck shoe in Blackjack well people will go home and change a six-deck six-decks of cards in a certain order and they're going to a casino and they'll collude with a dealer of course they'll get seven players to sit at every single spot and when the dealer puts the cards out for the player to cut someone will actually take the cards drop them into a purse and pull out the pre-arranged six-decks of cards they'll put that into the shoe they'll start dealing the players know exactly what card is coming but it is a pretty gutsy move because hiding the fact that you're pulling six-decks out the table and replacing them is not easy to do of course but it does happen and casinos can lose upwards of $50,000 to $100,000 in one shoe to this method and inside jobs I do happen as well the former VP of the Sands actually was colluding with the dealer one day oddly enough when he was arrested he got no prison time whatsoever and got probation that's life in the OVP I guess marked cards a lot of different ways that you can mark cards one shoe to claim to have used cobalt pasting the guide you're carrying strapped to his leg this may be more apocryphal than real I certainly haven't seen one of these devices lots of people have lost lots of money worldwide gamblers at the Syguant in California lost $100,000 recently I think Caesars in South Africa lost about a third of a million dollars to cards that were marked at the factory itself which was kind of interesting lastly one player was suspected of marking cards on a river boat casino I say he was suspected someone from the casino sort of walked towards him he got spooked left the table and actually jumped off the river boat and ended up dying which is not a really good outcome I guess I guess the lesson would be learn to swim before you learn to cheat concealed computers were more popular in Las Vegas many years ago when they were legal now there's a one-year minimum sentence if you caught using concealed computers to cheat in blackjack but it gives a person a 2% edge to play perfect basic strategy with a computer and what people do is you've got a computer and as the cards are coming out you're entering data into the computer by actually pressing small switches in your foot occasionally early on at least people got caught because they had very primitive computer equipment and it was short out smoke would come out of the back of their shirt so it was difficult roulette you still get some cheating it's not a big game in the US it's much larger in Europe there was magnetized balls have been used putting lead into the ferrets inside of the roulette wheel it's not going to bounce out as often so it tends to land more in that spot but roulette is not a big game in Las Vegas and I think I'm sure there's almost no cheating roulette in Las Vegas craps is another game that attracts cheaters generally speaking cheating is harder in craps than in blackjack it requires much more deft moves and much more training you have dice sliders who actually will throw the dice across the felt one die bounces the other die sort of slides along the bottom of the felt and if you can control one die control it to be a six for example there are certain bets that you can make and craps they will pair off but that kind of move people will typically spend six months a year or even more just perfecting that one move you also have rail birds and rail thieves the common kind of stuff you see all the time in Las Vegas where someone just leans over and grabs your chips when you're not looking bakra bakra attracts a lot of attention just because the size of the bets that are allowed these numbers are a little bit dated the mirage I think used to take bets up to 750,000 a hand I would believe now I can't imagine the mirage would take I'm sure they would take a million dollar bet belagio would definitely take a million dollar bet so with that kind of money in action it certainly attracts cheaters but the casino surveillance is going to be much stronger than the bakra opinion anyone who's betting that much money you can be guaranteed there are multiple cameras taking this thing you can be guaranteed that the casino surveillance guys are watching this one very very closely but there are occasional cheats that happen there was a false shuffle it took about 700,000 from the casino so it happens a kid being stud poker was a relatively minor game in the scheme of things people can pass cards back and forth there was a fairly sophisticated scheme at least when the newspaper reported it was a fairly sophisticated scheme involving this computer hard miniature camera and a van outside New Jersey State Police were baffled but we didn't know exactly how the cheat worked I suspect that they were just checking to see what a dealer's card was or other player cards were being sent back to the van even the lowly poll tab this is strictly speaking not really a casino cheating thing but if any of you have been in the Midwest for example you've seen those little pieces of paper where you pry open those little bits of paper and you can see if you line up three matching bell symbols you can win a certain amount of money well counterfeiters stepped in and created counterfeit poll tabs and cashed as much as 40,000 per day for a while until something was caught I'm not sure how that person was caught but again when you've got six people working on this someone's going to be upset this crime that's how these things happen mistakes are my favorite things to talk about for casinos the two for one blackjack promotion happens all the time when you pay two for one in blackjack the player age is like 2.31% but a lot of casinos just aren't that sophisticated they don't read the blackjack books they don't like math at all and I think generally fun a lot of the promotion will play blackjack's two for one well some casinos have done that and the minute you do that if they will take large amounts of bets the information ends up getting onto the net within a matter of hours for example and the very best blackjack players who play for very high stakes were sweeping from all over the country to send them a game and take it for hundreds of thousands of dollars there was a riverboat casino that I believe lost several hundred thousand dollars maybe more than half a million dollars to a promotion like this and it was just kind of stupidity the casino really should have known that there was a lot of money like that Texas station had a similar kind of situation where they decided to offer double payouts they didn't think it through they didn't think about the math involved and once again the sharp people descended on the casino there are various internet news groups and there's various electronic mail newsletters the information spreads very rapidly these days everyone shows up to beat the games and they lost an awful lot of money before they finally closed the promotion down I'm going to skip through some of the next slides we're going to do a brief loop we're going to do a brief loop but this is just some numbers that give you an idea of how much the casino edge is and how much of an edge the player can have with legitimate ways to win I think the interesting thing to note here that in blackjack if you're a card counter you think that you're going to win every time no not at all a professional card counter and these guys are very very rare I'm getting like a 1% or 1.5% edge of the casino it's certainly not something that's going to make you rich unless you're betting an awful lot of money you're going to have to gamble hand craps is kind of a game where it's a very small house edge as long as you're playing pass and don't pass if you're betting any of the field bets and stuff like that you can easily get crushed craps of course is a game you cannot beat lots of people will tell you oh find a hot table various insurance methods various double up betting schemes and things like that no the fact is the math of the game says you cannot beat the game so unless you're going to cheat some mistake and promotion or something you're not going to be craps other games various house edges ranging from as much as you know 30% down to very tiny tiny edges like in Baccaro slaw machines is where all the money comes from in a casino you know when most people think about a casino they think of the table games they think craps and blackjack and kind of the exciting games they don't think about slaw machines well all of the monies and slaw machines these days I believe it in Las Vegas on the strip now something like 70% of the revenues are coming from slaw machines now and slaw machines you know you buy one for $6,000 and you plug it in and you gotta pay electricity on it and you earn on the strip at least about $100 a day from these machines so if you do the math if you're paying like $5,000 for the machine after 50 days you've paid it off and every day from there is gravy of $100 and paying electricity is really not not that expensive so it's really a lot cheaper than paying blackjack floor people and dealers and pit bosses and all that kind of stuff so all the profits on slaw machines everything the casino does these days is to get you to play the slaw machines the table games are there almost just to keep you into a casino to make sure you don't walk across the street but just want you to play the slaw machines I've talked a lot about beating casinos by cheating them certainly those are illegal methods there are plenty of legitimate methods and a lot of what I did at the casino that I worked with years ago was taking a look at legitimate ways to beat the casino on how to defend the house and some of those ways are simply infrequent gambling and low house edge games video poker, blackjack card counting and poker these are all ways to get a very small house edge over the house so somebody must want that actors thing how do I compete I could give her a hundred dollar bills or something a little access right here it's all food infrequent gambling is one of my favorite ways to beat the casinos they're counting on you to gamble they're going to set the room rates they're going to set food and beverage at very low prices don't point them and don't gamble play things like sports bets 20 dollar sports bets where the casino is going to make very little money on you video poker a lot of people don't realize how beatable this is there's certainly a lot of people in this room that have the brains, the discipline to beat video poker it's not very complicated get a good video poker book get this offer and learn how to play there are machines that will pay back approximately 100% of what you put in you can play those machines and you can get a lot of money back in the front of free rooms and free food and beverage doesn't take that much discipline to do it you can even play video poker with a card I've played video poker with a sheet of paper that described exactly what I should do every step of the way every single decision is laid out you have to be that smart to beat video poker blackjack obviously you can do card counting this is very difficult to do there are a lot of card counters you talk to maybe one can actually make money when we ask people about card counting I come across this all the time people will tell me, oh yeah I know how to card count and you say, what system do you use high low high up to red seven what system do you use oh, gee I count tens it's a dead giveaway they have no idea how to beat the game if you're a good card counter you play precisely there are no hunches if a person is a good card counter they can rip through all the basic strategy decisions they can rip through the value of the cards it becomes almost automatic the problem with card counting I think most of you could actually count card successfully it's really boring exploring the comp system is one of my favorites every consumer has a formula basically that tells them how much to give you in front of comps and they look at your average bet times the hands blade times the house edge times the comp blade they're better on blackjack they're going to expect to play 60 hands per hour a 2% edge and they're going to comp back 40% of your money so they're willing to give you $48 and so if you play it 100 bucks a hand they'll give you buffet comps or room discounts and stuff like that well if you're a comp expert you can actually go after each and every one of these numbers you can go with a starting bet of $100 for example and then when you're not looking for a 5 the hands played you want to play very slowly you're going to find a table you can't do 60 hands per hour you're going to find a table that's doing 20 hands per hour people are yelling, talking, ordering drinks stuff like that you can also beat them up on the house edge they're going to assume that you are a tourist and that you're playing at like a 2% disadvantage well if you're playing basic basic strategy in blackjack it's like a half a percent edge so if you multiply all that out so if you're exploiting and you're asking for comps this is a way to actually this is a way to get a lot of value out of the casinos we're not even card counting just an idea of what it takes to get comps if you're looking to get something you know how much money it takes this is going to vary of course casino like card casino card counting I won't go through this it's just a rough indication of how the game works it's less of a science than you think people see the movie Rain Man for example and they think that card counting is all about memorizing cards it has nothing to do with memorizing cards it's only memorizing point values like an ace is plus one or as I eat, well ace would be minus one that ten value, minus one seven plus one, that two plus one you're just netting numbers out so what you're keeping in your head it's just a cumulative number it's like plus three, plus four, plus five plus four, plus three so it doesn't take a photographic memory there are some software now to track blackjack card counters the casinos were very unsuccessful at stopping card counters partly because they weren't sophisticated enough to understand and believe it or not, there are lots of casinos that would employ a blackjack expert to capture the blackjack card counters and stop them from playing while some of those guys didn't even know how to count cards they didn't want to read the books they didn't want to get any technical details but they were very unsophisticated so what they're starting to do right now is to use software to actually watch people play entering all their playing decisions and let the software tell them whether or not they're coking poker is my favorite game of course it's probably the toughest casino game to beat legitimately it takes years and years of dedication discipline a fair amount of intelligence you can make like $100,000 per year but it's a tough living there's no 401k there, no health benefits and I think if you're good enough to win $100,000 a year on poker if you're smart enough and disciplined enough you really should get into Java programming or start up your own startup company or something it's much more lucrative and that's the end I left a few minutes if people have questions also I have a printout of some more detailed notes in the presentation so at the end if people want to take a look at the more detailed notes I can give those out but take a few minutes of questions the question is do casinos shift the payout rates on slot machines it's a common misconception sort of a lot of people think that they do they really don't just decide what is the house edge for a casino and once they plug that chip in it stays pretty much so can you go over to that if anyone has follow-up questions I will try to show up tomorrow some time and maybe schedule one of the smaller rooms just to take questions or hang out in the main hall or just stop me and ask me I'll be happy to talk about all your insane blackjack questions or casino questions thank you