Cheating in casinos

Cheating in casinos refers to actions by the player or the house which are prohibited by regional gambling control authorities. This may involve using suspect apparatus, interfering with apparatus, chip fraud or misrepresenting games. The formally prescribed sanctions for cheating depend on the circumstances and gravity of the cheating and the jurisdiction in which the casino operates. In Nevada, for a player to cheat in a casino is a felony under Nevada law. In most other jurisdictions, specific statutes do not exist, and alleged instances of cheating are resolved by the gambling authority who may have more or less authority to enforce its verdict.

Advantage play techniques are not cheating. Card counting, for example, is a legitimate advantage play strategy that can be employed in blackjack and other card games. In almost all jurisdictions, casinos are permitted to ban from their premises customers they believe are using advantage play, regardless of whether they are in fact doing so and even though it is not cheating, though this practice of barring law-abiding citizens from public places is subject to judicial review. So far, courts in New Jersey and North Las Vegas, Nevada have found the practice of barring law-abiding citizens to be illegal.

Online casinos are also vulnerable to certain cheating methods. In the early 2000s, some players discovered that the random number generator at one poker site did not produce truly random sets of "decks", and instead chose from about only 200,000 different possible deck configurations. Generation of true random numbers by machines continues to be difficult. This allowed the players to know what flop was coming if they knew the hands being held by three players.

The methods for cheating in a casino are often specific to individual games and include the following:

Cheating can be reduced by employing "proper procedure" - certain standardized ways of shuffling cards, dealing cards, storing, retrieving and opening new decks of cards.

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