Casino-ology

I have been preaching for some time that there is a new world of game security having to do with proprietary table games and side bets. With the flood of new games in the market, there is hardly time to keep up with the new opportunities. Every popular game needs to be analyzed for advantage play.

The gaming world was in a dither after Dr. Eliot Jacobson published his finding on EZ Baccarat’s Dragon 7 side bet on the Wizard of Odds website last year. Eliot’s information pointed out that the Dragon 7 side bet was susceptible to card counting, but then again, all side bets on deck depletion dependency games (i.e., blackjack and baccarat) are subject to card counting. It’s whether or not they can be counted profitably.

The question of why advantage players do what they do is answered in the popular media by images of glitz, glamour, parties, piles of chips, cat and mouse, and youth. The motive is greed and the timeframe is now. But there is another class of advantage players (APs) who definitely do not fit in this Hollywood stereotype. I’m talking about the professional APs – the lifetimers.

With years of blow back from what comes out of my big mouth, I have come to the conclusion that companies that create proprietary games often don’t know their game’s weaknesses, don’t want to know their game’s weaknesses, and don’t want anyone else talking about their game’s weaknesses.

Nightmares happen in our industry all the time. The following is a scenario that could happen in your casino and is “loosely” based on a real incident. This narrative is meant to help educate, and not to embarrass any parties who were involved.

From time to time the question of card counting in baccarat comes up. Because baccarat is dealt from a shoe, it follows that the odds for the banker/player/tie bets change as cards are dealt. As more and more cards are dealt, a counter will get an ever more precise estimation of the composition of the cards that remain.

During this past July, a husband and wife team from Argentina allegedly beat several Las Vegas Strip casinos out of hundreds of thousands of dollars by using a dice cheating technique known as a “dice scoot” or “dice slide.”

Once a year, in preparation for G2E, I take a walk through a host of Las Vegas casinos. I have two primary objectives for this walk. The first is to survey the changing landscape of proprietary table games and electronic versions. The second is to consider security and advantage play issues for these variants.

Your swing shift supervisor has left you a note. He’s letting you know that there has been some unusual play in baccarat over the past several nights. It appears that up to three different baccarat players have been making large wagers towards the end of the shoe on several occasions, and are winning an aggregate total of $60,000. He wants you to review the play.

Just recently, everyone in gaming became aware of a player named Don Johnson who connived casinos in Atlantic City into a number of concessions that he claimed reversed the tables in his favor. Is this situation uncommon, or is it common enough to be a continuing threat to the casino bankroll?