robison@eosp1.UUCP (Tobias D. Robison) (11/27/84)
For net.rec.gamble (or net.bet?), I suggest a slightly wider charter:
(1) Discuss systems of betting, for situations where gambling is legal.
(2) Discuss illegal practices to beware of (see below).
(3) Discuss illegal gambling also, but do not condone it (just as in
other groups we discuss discuss, but do not condone, copyright
infringements).
Regarding item 3, I would be interested to hear about how various
illegal gambling industries (such as numbers games) continue to
flourish despite what may be terrible odds for the players.
Samples of item 2 follow:
- Most good books on blackjack warn the reader to avoid
crooked dealers. This is not idle advice! There are
crooked dealers and crooked games, and they can wreck
your odds. I watched a low stakes game in Las Vegas
where the dealer was very methodically pretending to
riffle-shuffle the deck, then pulling the cards apart
and stacking them. Does anyone have advice about reporting
such behaviour? It seemed to me that by far the safest
thing to do was simply to walk away.
- When dealing from a shoe with a marked deck, it is possible
for the dealer to cheat in blackjack. A simple method
requires that the player sitting to the dealer's right (last
hand to draw) be a confederate. After giving additional
cards to the other players, the dealer turns to the
confederate, determines whether he wants to draw the card,
and signals. The confederate will take one or more cards
if the dealer doesn't want them. It's easy to spot this
scam, or the potential for it; the player next to the dealer
will make insane decisions about drawing, and the dealer will
then "luck out" more than average.
One last question: There are a lot of good players at the $100-chip
tables, but there are also hackers who just feed stacks of $100 chips
to the dealers. WHERE DO THESE PEOPLE COME FROM??
- Toby Robison (not Robinson!)
{allegra, decvax!ittvax, fisher, princeton}!eosp1!robison