is it possible to rig the shuffling machines in blackjack?

I think a good deal of the misguided aura surrounding Indian casinos relates to a spill over from some of their civil situations in which tort actions can be heard in tribal courts only and only if represented by a tribal lawyer.

Many view Indian casinos as "lesser" casinos often perhaps because they are smaller and more remote. Some are poorly run and this creates a certain viewpoint. Sort of a motorist on his way to Reno situation. He might prefer what he considers to be the "real" thing in Reno, but several Indian casinos are right there near the roadside and why should he drive over the mountains in Winter when "real enough" is right there. This then bleeds off the traffic to Reno sufficiently to affect Reno casinos. The motorists laments the days of old while he plays at the Indian casino.

I play at Indian casinos. I don't think they are well run. Rude floorpersons, ill-trained dealers, special monthly coupons mailed half way through the month, using a fifty dollar match coupon takes more rigamarole than would be worth it, special events poorly planned (99cent beer in one place, 99cent hotdogs in another, 9.99 tee shirts in yet another; some of the most poorly run corporate parties I've ever attended). Heck, I don't think those Indian casinos even know what a Tit Pit is. One recently opened a set of special blackjack tables with supposedly sexy costumes on the dealers but I think the wardrobe mistress worked in a convent or something.

Riverside county in California had a murder related to a tribal audit and many Indians who objected to the results of the audit were threatened with dis-enrollment. These things all create an aura of "shadyness". Its sort of the same view when an Indian casino dealer loudly referred to a player as a "corksucker" and the Floorperson echoed the viewpoint byloudly asking "which one of those corksuckers" thus resulting in the entire MiniBacc table leaving even though they perhaps were non-tippers and might indeed have been "cork" suckers. Or a Pit Boss who ended a rebellion about raised minimums by declaring that in one minute anyone who was still seated at that table would be arrested by tribal police, taken to a tribal jail and hauled before a tribal judge. These things affect the players a bit more than the incidents may actually merit. I don't think a dealer in Vegas could get away with such things and the Floorperson might echo the dealer's sentiments about the players but it would have been a whispered echo rather than a bellowed one which the players involved all heard and darn near half the casino heard as well.

I don't like the notion that a tribal commission is separate enough from the tribe, though I imagine the dollar amounts at stake in New York and Florida make things honest enough. Casinos in Vegas do declare some slot payouts to be "malfunctions" but I've a certain subjective impression that it happens more frequently in Indian casinos and seems far more of an impenetrable wall of silence when it happens.

Indian casinos are close by and thats the best I can say about them. Perhaps I should have a more tolerant attitude towards them, but I simply don't. I probably should have a more tolerant attitude towards Terribles too, but I don't.

Quote: Face

Quote: Ayecarumba

Well, there's always the case of crooked bingo at Barona in California. I don't think, "Indian Gaming" has ever recovered from that black eye.

Quote: Ayecarumba

Like this story from the FBI's website about a ring of crooked dealers (who started in Indian Casinos with weak protection) working with accomplices to take advantage of pre-sorted sequences of cards in shoes. In this case the casinos were victims of crooked personnel, but isn't that always going to be the case. While I think the vast, vast majority of legal casinos in the U.S. have no need to cheat customers with underhanded gadgets, the lack of oversight noted when these stories do come out regarding crooked employees at Indian casinos doesn't fill me with confidence.

You are certainly entitled to your opinion and I wouldn't fault you a bit if you choose not to patronize a tribal casino. I'm just trying to figure out the stigma behind some of the comments, specifically the ones that state that the tribe, through use of the casino, is ripping someone off. Your first example looks to be the work of a shady employee, done for his benefit. It is certainly not a case of the tribe participating in any action that would short a player for their gain. The second one with the Tran orginization, those guys were running that scam for years in Asian casinos and made off with many more millions than the relatively paltry sum they got in the States. And besides, their deal affected the players in no way whatsoever, that was a scam against the casino.

Yes, I'm probably being defensive, but I also truely don't see where the concern is. In my personal experience, any gaming issue is handled jointly by the tribe and the state, and any legal issue is handled by County Sheriffs, State Police, and in some cases, the Secret Service and FBI, and I just don't see how the idea that tribal casinos are somehow lawless came to be.

For the most part, I think that the Indian Casinos are run on the up and up. There isn't really any reason to mess with RNG's or shuffling machines when you are already pulling in billions.

However, there is the problem with the "image". For me, it is related to the lack of accountability that comes with being considered "sovereign". See this article for a long, but pretty complete description of what I am getting at. The controls and oversight employed by the government on non-indian casinos, do not directly apply. The non-tribal gambling public is called on to trust in regulatory systems that may have been set up with the intention that they perform in a similar fashion to the Nevada or New Jersey systems, but in fact, are not accountable to the citizenry since the non-tribal public has no say in who sits on the boards, or what decisions they make. If there were allegations of the misuse of public monies, we could vote someone out of office. Instead, we had to deal with the Seminole's David Cypress.

Quote: SOOPOO

Help me out, forum. Is there a blackjack game where you have to pay a fee for the right to play the game? And people complain about 6:5?
In my wildest dreams I could not envision playing ONE hand where I had to pay an 'ante'. Yuma- it is possible you have had disproportionately bad hands, but if you are really paying an 'ante' you have NO CHANCE.

Kinda off topic for this thread but.......For any gamblers out there that used to play in the Seattle area and remember when the gambling laws first passed around 1997 and anyone could open up a card room. Kennmore Lanes bowling ally was one of the first places to have blackjack tables on the eastside. They Used to have a 50 cent ante per hand but....You were not playing against house money. In other words the house was not the bank....

They used to have 4 tables. The limit was $5-$25 bets. And anyone could be the banker. You had to put up at least $500 bank roll. And you could choose to quit after each shoe was completed(6 deck shoe). I did it a couple of times and broke about even. The house could care less if the players won or lost it wasn't there money either way they were just collecting 50 cents a hand antes. It was cool to be banker there was always a line of people waiting to be bankers on the weekends LOL.

Is it possilbe to rig a shuffler? It would be tough, as most gaming regulators require independant certification and testing of harware and software (such as GLI - Gaming Labrotories Internation) before approving them for use. In any case, the casino probably lack the engineering/software devepoment expertise to rig a shuffler. However, if the shuffler does not use card recognition technology (most do not), they only verify that the correct amount of cards are in the shoe when they shuffle, not the composition. A casino could remove some of the aces/tens and replace them with 5's/6's. This would increase the house edge and the player would be playing at a greater disadvantage.

Most casinos wouldn't risk their license and negative publicity for a few percentage points on blackjack. The real money is made in the machines in most jurisdictions; tables are an afterthought. I see some incidents cited, but they are generally crooked staff taking advantage of poor operational controls.

In Oklahoma, there would be no reason that the house would want to cheat a player; quite the opposite in fact. That jurisdiction is a "Player Banked" jurisdiction, which means that all the winning (execpt for a small % of operating cost) must be returned to the players in some form of prize. That is why they collect a commission on each hand (and with that, they make more money off players than they could by scamming them). cheating a player only to give his winnings to another player sound logical???

Once gaming is legalized in Texas, that jurisdiction will probably have to conform to traditional house-banked games, like in vegas and other real table game casinos. IMHO, until then, if anyone loses money playing in that state, they got what they deserved.

I flagged the post that is/was directly above this one because miltonwinston is dropping online links again. I purposely didn't quote it so that when it disappears it won't be seen in my reply. There was nothing in the link about the topic of this thread.

Stop it milton!

Quote: benbakdoff

I flagged the post that is/was directly above this one because miltonwinston is dropping online links again. I purposely didn't quote it so that when it disappears it won't be seen in my reply. There was nothing in the link about the topic of this thread.

Stop it milton!

Yes, but you visited the link so he got his affiliate fee...

Quote: MathExtremist

Yes, but you visited the link so he got his affiliate fee...

I did visit the link but it won't happen again. From now on I'll just use my flagging privilege and that goes for the other two identities that I suspect this poster of using.

I agree, I go to choctaw and winstar, these auto shuffling shoes are terrible, i was in winstar for 9 hours sat 7/30, NOONE WAS AHEAD, i played over 15 tables, each table i played at EVERYONE LOST.

I COUNT CARDS AND THESE AUTO SHUFFLERS ARE TERRIBLE!!! I WILL NEVER GO TO THESE CASINOS AGAIN

Any game that has an ante to play and plays at 6:5 blackjack you really can't win at. Even if you are playing at the green level, you are suffering a 2 percent loss per hand. If Blackjack plays 6:5, then you throw away another 1.4 percent. So, you're playing a game where at best, you are playing at a 4% HA at the greens. If you are playing $10/hand, you're basically playing at a lousy slot machine with a 7% HA and low variance. It's a guaranteed money maker. Of course, nobody will win.

If you play 100 hands at $10 a hand, for $1,050 of action, expect to lose $50 + $20. If you're dumb enough to play a blackjack game with a $.50 commission per hand, you're also dumb enough to stay on a 12 vs a 2, double 8s, not hit soft 18s vs a 10, stay on 15 vs a 7... enough to add another 2 percent to the HA, so $90 over 100 hands. If you play for 4 hours, you're playing about 300 hands, and you could expect to lose $270, which is alot.

Even at perfect play at $10 / hand, you're still playing at a 7% house advantage. With 7% HA ($10/hand), your expected return over 100 hands is -$61.95. 95% of the time (2 standard deviations) you would expect a return between -$276 and $152. If you manage to last 300 hands (4 hours), the expected loss if $186 with a 95% expectancy of between -$557 and $186 and a chance of gain of only 15.9%. So no wonder everyone is losing. Only 1 of six players will come out as winners in that scenario.

And actually the original poster mentioned a .50 cent ante. His lack of mathematical knowledge destroys his entire credibility. I have often seen bananas marked at .39 cents a pound. How often I wanted to buy a pound, cut a penny (cent) in half and give it to the checker.