WELL, THEN ACTUALLY this scheme was first done back in 1908 during the silent film era.  One chap filmed the shuffle with one of those turn crank cameras.  The spool of film was brought to a filmhouse and developed.  The film was then watched by a local theatre complete with a ragtime piano soundtrack and INTERTITLES. 

Signals were then communicated back to the table via morse code.  Dot meant hit, dash meant stay.

Percival Dunwoody made thousands of dollars that way (which was alot of money back then).  This allowed him to finance the development of his time machine a year later.
 

If the simple set of rules is the best you can do, and you’ll still only
get a 49.5% win rate then sticking to it isn’t good play. You’ll lose.

That’s assuming a flat utility of money. If the money you win can be worth more to you than the money you bet, you win overall. If there’s a particular threshold beyond which you can bribe the officials and get out of Casablanca, it’s entirely rational to gamble.

Insurance works similarly, but in reverse: your last dollar is worth a lot more to you than any other, so you’ll pay a premium to avoid losing that last dollar.

No, you’ll lose on slightly more than half of your hands. Only a complete naif doesn’t understand that the house always has an edge. But that edge is over the thousands of people who gamble there every day or every year. It’s entirely possible to for a particular gambler to come out ahead on a casino trip; I’ve done so many times. I’ve also come out behind many times. My overall balance is negative, but as they say, you win some, you lose some.

If you’re making trips to Las Vegas as your retirement plan and you’re playing against the house, then you’re an idiot. If instead you’re gambling for the fun of playing card games for the chance to win money, then what’s wrong with that?

> In 2009, a hacker was caught after he installed a program that took over the credit meter on a slot machine. after deliberately jamming the machine by sticking his finger in the payment slot, he called a casino tech to fix it. With the machine open, the hacker peered inside to locate the input-output slot on its computer. Once the tech left, the hacker deftly inserted a wire into the slot through a gap between the lower and upper doors of the machine. He then plugged in a chip with a program that gave him 50 credits every time he punched a button connected to the chip.

The hacker, having located “the input-output slot”, then inserted a second wire that made all the little silhouette men in the local street-crossing lights have fistfights with each other, and he reprogrammed a weather satellite to destroy the world’s coffee crop with the weather it made.  I know this is all completely possible because Ilya Salkind told me so on the “Superman III” commentary track where he patiently explained to us that nobody knows what a computer can do when hacked, therefore this means computers can do ANYTHING.

Fortunately Superman escaped from the plastic bag the computer put him in, and Richard Pryor lived happily ever after.

The ‘spys’ had tie clasps and jewelery with a micro camera that transmitted video off site to ‘control’.
A large computer center run by Burgess Meredith.  They used the computers to slow down the shuffling of cards and transmit the info back to the spy via a audio implant..like a mini-blue tooth.
They also had other tricks such as GPS, ‘google searches’ (Via  staff of libraries and networked computers), and language translation.

http://www.bigredhair.com/search/index.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XVVbYXG557c

 @awjt:disqus  asked why they were relying on hand transferring the information as opposed to an 802.11 compliant WLAN solution. I was trying to explain why a more technologically expedient method of information delivery was not necessarily the best technique in this situation.

I did read the article, thank you.  And if I had to make the same choices, I would choose “sneaker net” as well. It’s far more resilient to side channel eavesdropping than any wireless technology readily available. The last part of my comment was to speculate on what I would do to increase my chances of slipping detection if I, for some reason, *had* to use some method or wireless transmission.

Counting cards absolutely is good play (assuming you don’t get thrown out). Good play is making the best bets you can to give yourself an edge. Incidentally, if you do get asked to leave, do the casinos let you keep your winnings up to that point?

What does “good play” look like? Blackjack, for example, has specific rules that you follow to get the best possible play.

I would say there is nothing in your post that is wrong, but I would characterize counting as “good play.” After all, it’s just a slightly more complicated set of rules to follow that takes more things into account (the cards already played). But fundamentally, you’re doing the same thing as you describe: following a set of rules to maximize your chance of winning.

For some strange reason, the casinos look at it differently. Go figure!

True up to a point. They will ask card counters to play, counting isn’t illegal, and plenty of people agree that counting cards isn’t even against the rules of the game. But casinos will ask counters to leave.

On the other hand, don’t conflate counting cards–a specific technique–with any kind of good play. Casinos don’t ask good players to leave. They especially don’t ask people who are winning to leave. It’s pretty simple.. all casino games have a house edge. If you don’t have an observable cheat or edge that the casino has spotted, then they assume that they, the casino, still has the edge. If they still have the edge, then the longer you play, the more of your money they’ll get. If you’re winning, the longer you play, the more of your winnings you’ll give back. If you’re losing, the longer you play, the more of your money you’ll give over.

But, as I said, they do get rid of card counters. That’s because card counting is detectable by monitoring behavior and statistically analyzing play. The easiest way to detect is for the casino to count the cards themselves and match your behavior up with the predicted behavior of particular counting systems. If they match too closely, you’re using a counting system, and it’s time to go. This doesn’t happen by accident, or as a result of “good play”.

What does “good play” look like? Blackjack, for example, has specific rules that you follow to get the best possible play. It’s not hard at all (really, it’s not–the work of a few hours with an online blackjack simulator) to memorize these rules and play “perfectly” according to the system, which has nothing to do with card counting. Start with rules like Dealer 4,5,6=bust card, never hit a risky hand. Dealer 7-A, you must hit a risky hand until you get a 17+. (2 and 3 get more complicated.) Never buy insurance. To know when to double and split, there are tables you must memorize. If the house has fancy rules like surrender, then you must learn how those affect the tables as well.

This simple set of rules gets you something like 49.5% win percentage if you stick to it. (I’ve read that a surrender rule will actually put you over the 50% margin, but I’ve never been in a casino that had one.) So even perfect play doesn’t get rid of the house edge. And *casinos know this*. Why would they ask this perfect player to leave, when they have a better than even chance of getting money back the next hand?

The difference in card counting is that it gives the player a winning edge, but also that it’s *detectable*. Now that the casino *knows* it no longer has an edge, it makes sense to ask you to leave.

A casino can ask you to leave for any reason they want, even if that reason is just that you’re winning too much. Counting cards? That’s a situation where a player is paying attention to what is happening (all knowledge that they gain through means permissible by the game’s rules) and using that knowledge to make better betting decisions. And if they even think you might be counting cards they’ll escort you out quickly, or worse. Hell, the casino in the town I work in got caught adjusting the payout levels of their slot machines to illegally low levels. Sure, they got hit with hefty fines, but a fat lot of good that does for the folks they took the money from by these illegal machines.

So yea, these guys were cheating, but I find my sympathy lies with them anyway. At least their cheating was a lot more skillful and creative than the casinos.

A single tear runs down my cheek.

For the life of me, I don’t understand why anyone who ISN’T running a scheme like this is even in a casino playing a game against the house. The casino sure as hell isn’t gambling; as you say, they’ll ask good players to leave – and that’s all counting cards is – good play.

Meh. I guess I just don’t get gambling. Bird in the hand and all that.

With these tools, I may not be able to see the payload, but I’ll be able to see that an ad-hoc network is formed between stations A (wireless camera), B (handheld), and C and know where they are located fairly quickly. Since this traffic is outside of any white-listed policies I have set up, it’s flagged for immediate investigation. As long as the devices are transmitting, I can continue to pinpoint them as they move.

If I’m going to implement a scheme that requires an exchange of information, I’d most likely implement a solution that involves very bursty compressed traffic with a low gain antenna, in an unusual sprectrum (maybe FM), maybe on the very threshold of having a useful SNR.

Or just, not cheat in the first place. The amount of work, ingenuity and sheer invention involved in some of these schemes makes me wonder how much money a person can make via legit applications.

This was done by sneakernet???