High-stakes poker scam used rigged card shufflers, X-ray tables, and special glasses The feds on Thursday charged alleged mafia associates and current and former National Basketball Association players and coaches with running rigged poker games and illegal sports betting. Two federal indictments were unsealed on Thursday, one focused on a high-tech poker cheating scam, the other focused on a sports betting …
I bet those were not X-rays in the sense which show your bones, but rather UV or similar invisible to human eyes. Which is enough to shine through the table fabric and then actually see the card. Literally.
'cause actual X-ray should not be able to see the card (even if you add lead-inlays), it just goes through, and without a plate on the other side you see nothing. And someone placing something on your cards "to get a good picture" would be weird.
> 'cause actual X-ray should not be able to see the card (even if you add lead-inlays), it just goes through, and without a plate on the other side you see nothing.
x-ray flourescence is a thing.
x-ray back scatter is a thing.
soft x-rays are a thing.
x-ray reflective imaging is a thing.
Now it might well not be xrays at all, but you don't have to pass x-ray through objects to image them, and x-rays can be used to image soft organic material.
They should have told the marks about the cards, let them wear the special specs, surround them with ladies in gowns, the likes of which the marks would never normally get anywhere near: let them play at being in a Bond movie.
Then just rake off a higher slice by overall keeping to the rules*, letting the scenario seduce the players into believing they have the upper hand and bet even larger.
* Are there any laws saying the marks in the backs of the cards, visible in the specs, always have to match what is on the front?
> "So I think you stick to games where you can afford to lose or where you know the people. And that's just the kind of common sense for poker altogether."
After spending 7 years as a casino dealer, I would rephrase this to "stick to not playing"... Specially poker. Gamblers are just addicts who need professional help, but for some perverse reason, society has decided to pretend poker is fine.
I tried one of those sports-bet bars, was dragged in initially by a friend (US-variant of friend, not German). It is one of those TipBet bars. Initially I won 200 € by dumb luck and a two weeks later I was at -200 €. Result: Yep, TipBet has their math under control, even though sports is not as simple as roulette, where it is obvious. It showed clearly: They don't need to know much about sports, the gamblers know enough about sports, and that is the input the payouts are based on. Just statistics the most boring way possible.
Only gamble what you can afford to lose, and only for the entertainment aspect. If you do win then lucky you, but don't expect to always win. That's what I was told as a kid and I believe it.
Unless you're my brother: He just... wins. All the time. doesn't matter what he's playing: Slot machines, horses, cards... Not necessarily large amounts, but enough that he walks away with as much or more than he went in with.
Not that he gambles often, just... lucky sod that he is, he keeps winning. Guess he just knows when to quit.
A long time ago, I was given sixpence (I did say it was a long time ago) to spend on the slot machines. After a few minutes, I had won my sixpence back plus sixpence: result.
I haven't bet since.
Except at a day at the races more recently. I'm not naive, I thought. I took cash. At the end of the day, I was the mug. Broke. Had I had more in my pocket, I'd have lost that too. I didn't have enough money to buy a cup of tea. The tea-lady at the stall sympathised and gave me a free cup of tea: "Pay me next year!"
Gambling companies pay a lot of high-end mathematicians to ensure they always have the lead - games are designed accordingly. And that's why they don't like people who know mathematics too and use them agains them, and ask them to leave the venue. It shoulld be illegal - if I do not cheat I should be able to play, and if I can use mathematics against you as you use it against me should be fair game...
In some jursidiction if you're a public business you can't deny entry or to serve customers - because maybe they are the wrong skin color, religion, or smarter than you.
Of course businesses based on extractrig money from fools have to keep the non-fools away, and don't care about the law, or pay to have the law bent to their interests.
I would make gambling illegal, because it's a criminal business - no wonder mafia was involved - but it looks too many fools are happy to lose money, and politicians prefer to keep the fool foolish, easier to get votes.
>I would make gambling illegal, because it's a criminal business
The problem is that if you ban gambling, then illegal gambling blooms. This isn't a hypothetical; it's been tried many, many times in history and it always has that result.
The smart policy would be to allow gambling; ban gambling advertisement; heavily discourage positive representations of gambling in media; teach everyone in school the problems with gambling; fund recovery from gambling addiction programs. Pay for this (it's not that much actually) with taxes on gambling.
True. But illegal gambling is far less appealing and harder to get at. You don't have shiny venues to lure people in. They need to look for them, under the fear of finding themselves in a police raid and explaining what they were doing there. Also, money can be sized.
I've seen people ruined because gambling was too easy. If they had to go through some effort to burn their money, they wouldn't.
The legality signals that gambling is a legitimate activity. I think it should be illegal but there is no need for heavy handed enforcement. Just make it very clear that it's not a publicly sanctioned activity. Same should go for drugs. If people want to ruin their life or health, let them, but please don't encourage them. And I fully agree, there is need for public education about the problems with gambling.
A pet peeve of mine is sports betting. Do you really believe that you can run billion dollar businesses on sports gambling and there won't be any cheating? How much will it cost to buy a referee or a player? You only need to find the weakest link to buy a game. So obviously your favorite sports is corrupted by gambling. Go watch you local amateur team instead, they play for fun and not for money.
I just play with friends. Using a box of nice chips. Everybody gets their initial stack (no real money involved). It's just for the fun - never for the money. You may just lose your self-esteem as a poker player. And friends are still friends.
The same way we can play other games as well.
I don't think I've ever, in many decades, finished a Monopoly game. They invariably descend into sulking, acrimony, "I'll lend you €2000 from my stash to allow you to pay the fine you owe me so you don't have to drop out" and so on, until the participants just drift away out of sheer boredom.
Clue(do) on the other hand, and especially its fiendish mirror-counterpart, "Kill Doctor Lucky"... now, those are fun and can be played without losing friends and alienating people.
Never gamble.
The indicted weren't gambling. ;)
USD 7 million is chump change I would have thought. The law enforcement operation would cost vastly more than that. I imagine the average NY drug dealer clears that months if not weeks. I suppose the charges are serious enough to ensure the accused organised crime operatives might spend a few decades in a federal prison or cut a deal... which given it's the Mafia really is a gamble...
I'm going to guess that this is the figure that they can easily prove. I.e. the idiots had documentation laying around when raided, detailing this amount of money taken in (probably effectively the last few months before the money was laundered and the documentation destroyed).
I'd also suggest that this would be something of a slow burner, if you fleece the fools too quickly, word would get around. A steady stream of taking say a million a month on a pretty low risk setup would allow you to run under the radar for a very long time (and the FBI admitted this has been running for years!). Even if the Marks began to suspect something, going to the cops and saying you got fleeced at an illegal gambling night, is unlikely to get you much sympathy or much of an investigation.
I can only assume that either someone talked and the FBI caught wind of an easy collar, or they got greedy and started trying to take too much from the marks. There's a certain point where people will actually report stuff like this, even if it gets them in trouble personally.
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I thought the mafia made their money from drugs. And with that trade worth billions it seems a scam like this is just something they did for the LOL's
Often puzzles me when a criminal enterprise that's trying desperately to stay off the police's radar, goes and does something like this. Like the drug courier driving an uninsured wreck of a vehicle at high speed with a tail light out. Just smacks of idiocy.
I'm reliably unformed that drug smuggling is funded by downloading pirate music.
Always slightly confused how drug smuggling needed external funding, I thought it would be a profit center, and surely drug smuggling would be funded by my paying for music and the music industry paying for drugs.
As with any business, it's good sense to diversify.
Plus there are always employees in companies, especially family run companies, that are there due to familial connections rather than due to talent. These people are often shuffled off to side businesses, so as not to f%&k up the main jobs. I can imagine there are more than a few people who fit that category in the Mafia, and this would make a relatively good side hustle for them. Hard to fuck it up too bad (although it seems like they must have to have been caught like this!).
It's encouraging to see the Mafia following best corporate practices...
Old fruit machines used to have "guaranteed 70% payout" (or similar) in small letters, somewhere unlikely to leap out at you on them. That meant over time you were destined to lose 30%. The only somewhat unlikely way to win was to watch someone else stuff it full of coins and not win anything, then you might play and take advantage of the guarantee.
Nothing to say over how long or how much money that 70% was to be over.
It could be that the machine is set to pay out £700,000 from £1,000,000 but that it doesn't pay out a penny until it reaches £999,999... of course it's purely chance that the main board dies at £800,000 and has to be replaced (resetting the counters in the process) or that the machine gets taken off the floor because it's not a popular machine (because it never pays out).
I'm reminded of John Scarne's book _Scarne On Cards_, which I read as a teen. It's the book that Fleming has Bond consulting as he preps for a card table showdown. Required reading if you play poker with strangers.
He would have appreciated some of these tricks. Or maybe not. This is the guy who could take a new, unprepared deck, have a spectator shuffle it, riffle shuffle it himself, then cut to each of the aces. By skill alone.
He would play poker with friends, but there were rules. IIRC, his cards had to remain on the table and he was only allowed to touch them one at a time, with left hand thumb and little finger, and then only lift a corner to see the value. One day they decided to suspend the rules. On his turn to deal, everyone wound up with straights, full houses, and the like. He had a royal flush.
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