Spanish word of the day

Yeah I was gonna say I’ve spoken Spanish at blackjack tables in Florida and California - and I don’t think many people at the Pai Gow table are speaking English either

Quote: AutomaticMonkey

Quote: Dieter

Quote: harris

Tangentially related but do surveillance teams have multilingual members to make sure that people aren't disguising their colluding/counting/APing behavior by communicating in Spanish or Cantonese for example?

Anecdotally, I saw some counter's file which stated that he said the count aloud in Spanish - but I imagine that most people know the numbers 1-10 in Spanish.
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Sticking with the obvious, "Only English at the table, please" is pretty ubiquitous.

That said, paranoia demands the assumption that anything said on a casino floor will be overheard by adversaries, and they can read whatever lights up on your phone screen.
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At a poker table it's English only, but I've never heard that at any other table game. Boyd Gaming would have to lay off half of their dealers if that was the rule.
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Fair enough. I hear it pretty commonly out here in the sticks, to the point that it's often a clearly posted house rule for all table games.

When Pai Gow Poker was more popular I used to sit at PGP tables populated by Chinese Americans talking Mandarin. They would glare at me until I learned to speak up in English and say "I have no joker" or "joker is busy in my hand. Sometimes the Chinese players would also want to know how many Aces I had. Dealers didn't seem to care.

could the Chinese strat yield an advantage?

Quote: harris

could the Chinese strat yield an advantage?
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There used to be internet sites with published PGP strategy changes for when the Joker is busy and also when the number of aces remaining is 0 - 4. The most important changes were when player has two pair, some three of a kind hands and AApair + 5 singletons (an occasional advantage in splitting the aces.)

According to my analysis you cannot make PGP a +EV game by sharing that information. You can reduce the HE a bit, arguably making the game a bit more fun.
I once spent a lot of effort creating a capability to analyze PGP decisions with shared information on Joker, Aces and Kings with up to 6 players at the table. This made notional strategy rules at the table quite complicated and still was not coming close to yielding an advantage.