I was just reading on another forum about cheating.

How rampant is it? Someone mentioned that you can tell a cheating dealer - on pitch games - is they keep their thumb on the deck.

Any comments?

That a reason to not read other forums. Where would you suggest they place their thumb, up their nose ? If I win, I am great. If I lose, I was cheated. Same old story from losers !

Quote: BigJer

How rampant is it? Someone mentioned that you can tell a cheating dealer - on pitch games - is they keep their thumb on the deck.

Any comments?

The topic of cheating dealers comes up on other sites fairly often. Blackjack is game of great swings and fluctuation. Whenever some newer player, who hasn't yet realized that, hits one of these inevitable down period, their first though is that they are being cheated.

Truth is cheating by the casino is almost a thing of the past. In this day of corporate casinos, there is simply too much too lose by cheating. Plus they don't need to. They just bend the rules a little more in their favor giving themselves an even bigger house advantage, LEGALLY.

I would say the few remaining incidents of cheating are not company sponsored. Maybe a few rouge dealers still engage, probably at smaller type stores with less oversight. Maybe an occasional incident of such a rouge dealer cheating the general public, but then allowing his associate to win the extra take, so his table appears to come out just about right. I think this is a rarity. If you play enough you can spot or in the case of dealing seconds, hear anything that is out of the ordinary. Again, I wouldn't worry about cheating. It really is almost nonexistent. However, that being said, I do worry about places like Indian jurisdictions, cruise ship casinos and foreign casinos, that aren't as regulated.

Quote: Buzzard

That a reason to not read other forums. Where would you suggest they place their thumb, up their nose ? If I win, I am great. If I lose, I was cheated. Same old story from losers !

They were mentioning this in terms of dealing seconds.

Yeah , and they were right. About 50 years. John Scarne ( look him up ) actually was trying to convince gaming in Nevada to
make a shoe game mandatory. Not because of counters. this was 1961. Thorpe's book Beat the Dealer came out in 1962.
But because of cheating.

Ever hear of the Real Deal poker site? Ir had machines shuffling decks of cards, then running them over an optical reader. That web site attracted all the guys who knew random number generators were fixed. And what did they do after playing a few hundred hands theer ? Why, insist the game was rigged. LOL

Those guys on the other forum are idiots. Post the forum and thread here and I will be delighted to tell them so. I am sure they have moved on now. Probably talking about how Obama stole the election. Or about the millions of voters who were scared of the Black panthers and did not vote.

I agree 100% with KewlJ's assessment. The risk of losing their license and their business far outweighs the potential profit from a few cheating incidents. The amount of effort it would take to keep cheating under wraps would be extensive. I wouldn't put it past tribes/cruises/foreign casinos like KewlJ said since the governing bodies for those places are not as proficient (or in some cases nonexistant).

If you are ever truly concerned that something happened, contact the gaming commission for whatever state you are in within the next day or two and they will almost always look into it.

There are 2 ways for a Dealer to Cheat: In Favour of the casino OR in Favour of the player.

Cheating in favour of the casino, I think is a very rare (almost non-existent issue) in the US or other jurisdictions with good regulation.
Outside the US in jurisdictions with little on no regulation, it is still rare but it does happen.
I have personally been cheated outside the US in such places 1 time for sure and suspected cheating in another 2-3 cases.
For those who have been there, one of these suspect places was the casino at the airport in Prague, Czech Republic. (no longer exists)

For a dealer to cheat, he must be very well trained in that form of cheating (ie dealing seconds). There is no incentive for a casino in the US to cheat via a dealer. The dealer must be well trained and well paid to agree to that and the dealer will always have something to expose the casino. That's a risk that no major corporation would take.


Cheating in favour of the player (ie colluding with player and sharing the profits) does happen though in the US. There have been a few stories in recent years for dealers (and pit-bosses) of been caught and sentenced and there probably more that the casino might have suspected but could not prove and just fired the dealers.

The way I got cheated was as follows (this I found out after the fact)
The 6 decks come (without been opened and shown) with all 312 cards existing But with segments (around 1/2 deck each) of clumped cards of cards Ace,2-6 (small cards and Ace) and other segments of Cards 7-10. Not all cards are clumped like that, just around 4 1/2 deck segments.
Playing Basic against such clumps is a complete disaster with huge HE.
Counting is even worse.

The trick was that these clumps remained in subsequent shuffles by false shuffle techniques by experienced dealer (using a certain method to identify these clumps which I will not mention here).

Note:
What I describe above has nothing to do with Clumping Theories which are complete Voodoo.
I am talking where the clumps are delibarate put in place by cheating casino and dealer.

Quote: Buzzard

If I win, I am great. If I lose, I was cheated.

Yep. Same here. That multi-million dollar casino brought in a "cooler" to shuffle the cards and cheat me out of my five dollar bet.

Quote: FleaStiff

Yep. Same here. That multi-million dollar casino brought in a "cooler" to shuffle the cards and cheat me out of my five dollar bet.

Damn, you too ?