Inside Asian Gaming

inside asian gaming May 2016 50 Tech Talk shuffled by dealers. In 1998, a dealer at Melbourne’s Crown Casino was paid US$20,000 to perform the task in a special slow way, so that the cards’ undersides could be captured by a camera hidden in a handbag on the table. Her briber analyzed the footage in a nearby hotel room, returned to the table and won US$1.4 million. Most smartphones today, in fact, would be up to the job. They can shoot in high-definition at 240 frames per second, before uploading their footage via broadband for analysis at a remote location. A team called the “Cutter Gang” used a camera hidden in a member’s cufflink to the same end, cheating Las Vegas’ Cosmopolitan casino out of more than US$1 million in 2011. Accepting the standard offer to cut the deck after the dealer shuffled, the rogue would drag one particular card (the “cutting card”) along the deck, separating the cards before placing it back in the pack. His cufflink camera, meanwhile, was videoing their undersides. A big advance to counter these kinds of scams has been automatic shufflers. Early machines were only able mix cards randomly when they first appeared in casinos in the 1980s. Today, however, they will check a six or eight-deck block for completeness before shuffling, and can even check that the patterning on card backs is not off- center. Corrupted dealers have been known to mishandle cards during transfer from shuffler to shoe, in such a way as to expose their undersides. That is why shufflers are now appearing that will close the loop by docking onto a shoe into which the shuffled cards are automatically loaded. This brings us to the point in a card’s life cycle where it finally comes into contact with players. At the beginning of the last decade, card switching at tables in Macau came to be a serious problem. Cheats would steal cards from casinos, before swapping them with cards they had been dealt with during play. One Cambodian gang used a device to shoot cards out from under their shirtsleeves. Some tricksters were so artful they could switch cards undetected, even though they were suspects under surveillance by security cameras and casino staff around the table. The equipment makers’ invention to thwart this was the intelligent card shoe, which appeared a little over ten years ago and is now almost universal in large casinos. It reads cards as they are dealt, sometimes by means of invisible ink and sometimes by optical pattern readers. Now, casinos can be sure the cards gamblers show are the same as the cards they were dealt. So what’s the future for card security? You might think the invention described earlier, in which an automatic shuffler checks a block of cards for completeness and regularity, before shuffling and loading it directly into an intelligent shoe, would shut down the scammers. Shuffle Master is now testing such a system, named Safe- Bacc, at casinos in Europe and Australia. An advertisement for the product boasts “No more scams or collusions.” But a way around the concept has already been tried out. In 2011 thieves took Macau’s Grand Lisboa for HK$24 million by switching its automatic card shufflers with similar machines they had fitted out with hidden cameras. Routine maintenance uncovered the devices, which had been capturing and transmitting footage of card order. (Shuffle Master says its design permits no room to install such a camera.) The cat and mouse game between card security professionals and their cheating adversaries looks certain to continue. Pre-shuffled blocks of cards are delivered to casino tables in secure plastic card vaults In 1999 blackjack players across South Africa started getting very lucky. Takings from the game at one venue, Caesar’s Casino in Johannesburg, dropped 11 percent in three weeks. Of course it wasn’t luck. Shuffle Master’s Safe-Bacc system promises to up the ante on cheats by checking and shuffling cards before loading them automatically into an intelligent shoe