The casino industry knew all about this in 2014.[1]
"Right now there is some scary technology coming out of China that incorporates IR marked cards, concealed cameras and computer analyzers. Combined to create a high-tech card marking system, I must say that this device could do for cheats what silicon did for the cosmetic surgery business. The devices are being marketed as poker analyzers."
"The technology works like this. The long edge of every card in the deck is marked with an invisible IR marking. Each mark identifies an individual card. In collusion with a poker dealer, the special marked deck is swapped into play. The player sits opposite the dealer on the table. He positions a concealed camera on the table (usually disguised as a cell phone). The camera has an IR lens that is used to transmit an image of the edge of the deck of cards to a small computer located in a smart phone (the poker analyzer) in his pocket. The image is transmitted during the period after the dealer has shuffled the cards and the deck is resting in front of the dealer before cards are dealt to the players. The IR snapshot of the cards looks like a barcode. The poker analyzer identifies every card in the order that they will be dealt to the players in less than a second. A computer-generated voice message is sent to the player via a Bluetooth mini earpiece communicating the rankings of all the hands on the table."
And the countermeasures:
"Most surveillance cameras, in their natural state, actually have infrared viewing capabilities. The problem is the picture is not so good, so manufacturers add a cut filter over the CCD chip to block out infrared light.
... A number of major surveillance camera systems provide end users the ability to remotely change the IR status of the camera via the operator’s keyboard. This allows the operator who suspects someone is marking cards at a table to use a PTZ camera assigned to the table to switch to IR mode so the cards can be checked live on the game. If you currently don’t have this feature, speak to your manufacturer."
I guess my thinking is that if you own the dealer and the deck of cards, the game is already over. There are bound to be easier ways to cheat under those circumstances than adding a Rube Goldberg contraption into the mix.
You would be right. I used to run poker games myself. Basically home games that people find out about through meetup etc. While I never condoned cheating and only made money on rake, I had dealers who would offer to cheat. They basically used anything from simple slight of hand tactics to brazenly just stealing chips. The alcohol is always free at the games and bad dealers will pass around drugs to any willing victims.
Some will organize with a group of 5-6 people. They basically come in and collude with a lot of cash to rob the other 4-5 sitting at the table. Once I realized how pervasive cheaters were I stopped playing and hosting games. I was trusted by the cheats and could have worked with them. I didn't think it was worth losing morals over nor the risk. Soon the higher end games started getting straight up robbed at gunpoint.
An interesting bit of computer history trivia is that Claude Shannon co-invented the first wearable computer with Ed Thorp to beat roulette in Vegas in 1961. It used a button in the shoe as an input device for the user to record the speed and location of the ball which was used to infer the likely ending location using orbital decay algorithms. An auditory signal was then sent by wire to an earpiece to let the user know where to place bets (it wasn't pinpoint accurate - the user would bet on 8 numbers which still gave him a positive expected value).
Versions of the same device from this century use lasers to get a more accurate read on the ball's location, with one group using the system to net £1m from London's Casinos: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/4069629.stm
Thorp was also involved in developing the Blackjack system that was showcased in the film 21 and later ran a hedge fund, details on which were recounted in his interview for this book https://www.amazon.com/Hedge-Fund-Market-Wizards-Winning/dp/.... Very interesting guy.
Although as I recall the EP version used a shoe with toe switches for input and buzzers for haptic feedback, it also used a 6502 so it must have been a later effort either invented in parallel or reinventing Mr. Shannon's work.
I haven't been to a casino that allows a phone on the table in ages, especially in Asia. Not only that, but most decks are tightly controlled in reputable casinos.
This is more for backroom games (which are still lucrative), but get caught cheating in those and you'll regret it quickly.
I played 2/5 NLH at the Venetian in June of 2015 and had my phone on the table most of the time. I had earbuds in and would check twitter and text friends playing at other tables between hands. No one seemed to have a problem with it and I wasn't the only person doing something like that. I never thought it would be a problem actually.
The cheating device in this article also required a marked deck. So as long as the house isn't in on it, this cheating method wouldn't work in casinos.
The article did mention that some anonymous sources claim to be using these devices in Vegas casinos, so I wonder of there are some corrupt dealers in cahoots with the cheaters.
There was a British show called The Real Hustle where the cast basically performs real world scams on people filmed with hidden cameras. One year, they went to Vegas.
In one of their most brazen scams, they gathered a crew to swap the card shoe at a casino table. It's amazing how much damage nerves of steel, team work, and a split second distraction can lead to.
The expert at the end does mention it is likely bribing dealers and camera operators would be the most likely scenario since the payout is large enough to make it affordable to do.
A manual shoe? I've never seen one of those in a while I guess some casino use them. Shufflemaster (Scientific Games) makes the One2Six shuffler that's common and it weighs about 30 pounds the bigger model iDeal has a camera to read the cards and it records each one in the order it's ejected.
I have to laugh at all the card manipulation half the time the cards warp and bend due to humidity so they are replaced often.
Dealers have so many eyes and cameras on them I can't see anyone trying this unless they were desperate.
Ballsy and dangerous coördinating that many people to execute something like this. Cool show with the play-by-play shot well / from multiple angles to explain it all. Will check out more of it.
The New Yorker is precisely where I saw & adopted the dieresis way back when. It's also simpler to type on vkeyboards than a hyphen -- click-and-hold vs switching layouts and back.
If you had a rigged deck and sleight of hand, you could probably slowly replace the casino cards with the rigged cards. In Blackjack I imagine you'd only need 10 cards in the deck to make it +EV. You could even have one player plant, the other take advantage in teams.
If the rigged cards ever make it into a deck (of the multiple decks used) it won't match what the shuffler has set in software it will be rejected.
There is a list of manufacturers and all are different almost like money from different countries we have a PDF of card types we program into the shufflers. We're lucky if we get it working well with genuine cards lol
You could coat your fingers with infrared ink. Each card would naturally have a different pattern imprinted on the back depending on how you touched it.
Well there's the rub. It's certainly technically possible if the device described in the article is. Tagging the cards with "smart dust"[0] might be easier, and harder for the casino to detect.
There is a reason RFID chips are the size they are. The smaller they are the closer the scanner has to be to energize their antenna. Either that or you increase the power but the power needed goes up exponentially with distance. I don't see this working. At least not with today's tech.
Through play. Camera would need to recognize card type from capture of card face up. This plus the back of same card would link the unique signature and the card value.
Most poker rooms don't like it when you talk on the phone if you're in a hand, or if you speak a different language, especially if it's a big game.
Otherwise, people don't care that much, as long as the conversations are pretty short. "Hey man, I'll be done in half an hour" wouldn't raise an eyebrow.
I'm not a gambler, so wondering why this is? Because you can see every card at some point? Is this to stop the phone from doing so and keeping a count?
From the second video it looks like the device supports a key fob accessory which contains a second camera/LED system. This seems to communicate remotely with the phone, which could be placed in the user's pocket.
He mentioned that there's a number of accessories available, which leads me to believe that there's a lot of various devices that the external camera can fit into. Perhaps even some way of alerting you to card movements through vibration or something.
I don't think you'll have a problem finding a poker room in the US that allows phones on the table, but finding one that didn't realize you were lighting up the cards with IR light would be pretty impossible.
Good point. I also wouldn't ever use it on the same network as any other private devices or use any of its services with private data (as noted, it is a fully functional phone - I would assume that it phones home regardless of my ability to detect it). Sure, the manufacturer would hurt their business by ripping off their clients, but we've already established loose ethics.
I wouldn't trust this device as a phone, especially not as a smartphone. You couldn't pay me to associate it with a trusted wifi network, put my SIM in there, or actually use an app.
The article says this device is used to cheat in Vegas, but I don't see how that would be possible since you have to bring your own cards. It's hard to imagine casinos colluding on this, so I guess they're talking about private games that happen to be in Vegas?
I assume there are a lot of games being played in Vegas at far from reputable establishments, where the owners of such places would love to kick the odds in their favor.
You know, the kind of place where your alcohol is mostly water (or floor cleaner) and clothing is optional for the wait staff.
> I assume there are a lot of games being played in Vegas at far from reputable establishments, where the owners of such places would love to kick the odds in their favor.
Or where a dealer would collude with players for the right price.
> the kind of place where your alcohol is mostly water
The less reputable places would typically have a vested interest in decreasing your judgment and inhibitions, not in keeping you clear-headed. Remember that many casinos will reward high-rollers with free drinks, among other perks.
Not all businesses are run optimally. Some even favor short term gains over long term profit and reputation. Particularly shady casino type businesses.
Indeed. Vegas is about as sanitary and clean as it gets. There's almost no sleaze left. Fremont at night can get sketchy, but only in the sense of desperate poor people.
But I guess that's how good they are at selling the myth of Vegas. They want you to believe it's wild, sexy, out of control, and naughty. In reality, it's all highly regulated, calculated, and completely under control by large corporations.
Nah, not any more. These days the casinos are run by big corporations and cheating is illegal. They just call the cops like anybody else.
A few generations back it was different, since if you were cheating you were stealing from organized criminals instead of nameless shareholders. It was their money and they took it personally.
Casinos ban cell phones at black jack because you are playing against them. The allow cell phones at poker because you are playing against other players. You can bet that the casino is not aggressively putting security into watching poker dealers. They make rake regardless of the cheating as long as customers don't stop walking in the door.
Yeah, definitely this. The gambling scene is heavily involved with exceedingly shady characters and I can't imagine the vegas police particularly investigate too hard on deaths of people who are cheating others and undermining the economy that supports themselves and everyone they know.
This would never work in vegas for a bunch of reasons. I think this kind of thing would only work in a home game where you are mostly playing with friends/acquaintances. Maybe you're okay with cheating strangers in vegas, but you'd really have to have no conscience to be cheating your friends.
At every casino I've been to they will yell at you if you pull your phone out at any table game. If you want to respond to a text you need to step away from the table and wait a hand/spin to bet again.
This isn't about the house-run, house-edged table games you find in the middle of casinos; it's about Texas Hold 'em poker rooms. Most poker rooms I've been to let me keep my phone on the table next to my cards. I doubt that'll be the case now.
The technique with the markings on the edge of the card is also used in a well known card magic routine - but using wax instead of infrared ink, so you can feel the slight differences in texture when you handle the card (though only if you're paying attention to it).
This is an impressive breakdown of an even more impressive device. Realtime(ish) cheating software running on custom concealed hardware in a lookalike device? Used for scamming high rollers in private games? Color me fascinated.
I wonder how long this has been around. I would be very interested to hear from anyone who knows how long these have been available/prevalent. My apologies if this is somewhere in the video, I have not been able to watch it yet.
You could never take this into a real casino. The cameras would pickup the infrared signals. The security guys would know something is up since a regular phone doesn't do that.
Good point, but it works with marked cards so you essentially have to have control over the deck anyways. It can't work in an official game by a player, the house has to be in on it.
My guess: this device is used to rip off players in backroom games. Marked cards are nothing new. The only novelty here is that the system is hard to detect if you don't know about it.
This thing could be completely stealthy though, I suspect that you only have to turn on the infrared LEDs if the environment not lit well. And even that can probably be solved by using a more expensive camera module...
That's interesting. I dealt roulette occasionally in my younger years ('90s) and we had 3 different sized balls to work with if we sensed someone getting a little too lucky.
I don't know the inner workings of casinos in the modern day, but back then we had a lot of ways to deal with cheating. I'm sure there were pros that we never noticed, but the people who read how to count cards and decided to try it out were easy to spot and deal with. I remember one time the pit boss telling me over my shoulder "that's enough, bring it in" and I said "I'm trying!" because I actually was. I had dumped most of my tray of chips (not all that much on a $25 table) and it was very obvious we had 2 people at the table working on the rookie dealer.
He pushed me out for my twenty minute break twenty minutes early and when I came back the tray was full and the players were surly. I commented "what happened to all your chips?" and the guy on third base stood up, pointed to the dealer that replaced me, and said "that bitch took it all". Cue security and the table cleared out just about instantly.
A few of the things we could do to change things up on a blackjack table:
- burn extra cards
- change the shuffle
- new deck of cards
- prematurely end a hand
- encourage non-standard play from the other players
- encourage a player to walk away
When I ran into the players I mentioned above, I only knew about burning extra cards. You pick up other ways from other dealers who've been around longer and want you to pull your weight by bringing in better tips.
For roulette, there were just the two ways (changing the ball, stop and start the wheel), but it was pretty rare for me to deal that game, so who knows.
This is from a British show called The Real Hustle. They show a modern way to cheat at roulette using a tiny computer and an earpiece to predict where the ball is going to land. The scammers then quickly place bets on all the immediate slots around the predicted slot (because it is imperfect). They admit, this is still pretty tricky to pull off.
No. It's perfectly legal. And the counters you can notice are generally pretty bad at it anyways.
Still, it's discouraged. The casinos would much rather a weekend tourist walk away with a day of winnings than a pro. Tourists tell their friends and inspire them to visit.
A very skilled counter I know in real life made over 6 figures a year. She played 7-8 months out of the year 8 hours a day 5 days a week. Bets sized from $25-$100 generally. It's not illegal but, once you are identified you are banned from all casinos in Vegas at least. They use facial recognition and catch you walking in the door. There is one guy that works for all casinos and recognizes faces manually along with the FR equipment. My friend mostly only played in Mississippi and other states in the East.
I remember Doyne Farmer giving a talk on this 20+ years ago. The basic premise is that each table has a slight tilt to it, and this can be calculated by measurements of the ball position, velocity and landing position over multiple spins. While the concept and maths was interesting, the amazing part was the wearable shoe computer that they built. Some photos are on his wikipedia page [0].
Apparantly they did some consulting to the gambling industry afterwards and that is the origin of the diamond-shaped obstacles which add more unpredictability to the ball.
Though given the Real Hustle video posted by another commenter, the same idea still works today, but the calculations involved must be more significantly complex to compensate.
This seems like it'd be mostly used in private games, of which I'm sure there are a huge number. Many of those are probably also going to be pretty high stakes, and if someone loses a bunch they may not be inclined to go to authorities and claim cheating - if said authorities would do anything anyways. ("Awww, you lost your money in an off the books backroom private game? Perhaps next time you'd like to try one of our fine professionally run casinos.").
I suspect that most casinos are set up with surveillance designed to catch point source IR LED illumination these days.
Hmm with an incredible enough camera you theoretically ought to be able to see and then memorize idiosyncracies per card with any deck and then take it to Vegas at any table. I'd say its possible now, although too slow and expensive and obviously seeing the same card as the same card from every side is the hardest part. The camera and light would probably be a fair amount larger, too.
With an unmarked deck, I don't believe the technology currently exists.
I would accept that at a given magnification, every card is unique (including when viewed from the side), and can be uniquely identified.
But without a marked deck, it would need one (probably more than one) run through the deck, to see the value of a card and associate it with an image of the side of the card. Bear in mind you only get to record cards that are shown, so it could potentially take many games to record the full deck, and that's assuming the deck stays consistent.
But even with multiple run-throughs of the deck, I don't think we have the technology to produce that high resolution a camera in a small enough form-factor. Even putting aside expense, the trick here is pre-marked decks, with markings visible only to IR.
Without that, we'd need serious advancements in lenses and sensors before we could have a tool that was discreet enough to pull out at a game.
> Bear in mind you only get to record cards that are shown, so it could potentially take many games to record the full deck, and that's assuming the deck stays consistent.
Depending on what game you are playing, you don't need to mark anywhere near the full deck. In hold'em, you can get a definite edge if you manage to mark two aces.
The primary problem is optics. All optical devices are limited by the quantization of light. No matter how good your camera technology, if there are not enough photons bouncing off a target, you cannot see it accurately. Modern cameras (and even your eyes!) are much closer to the hard limits placed by physics than most people think. In the case of a side of a card in not very well lit indoors, I don't think you can discern enough detail without either a large lens or a long exposure, both of which could be hard to pull off inside a casino.
Even painted on markings, they need a bright IR light to pull this off at a close distance. Similarly, your camera would need a bright light source.
Either that, or any device that can generate the right wavelength with the precision to see through exactly 1 card thickness is lab equipment the size of a refrigerator... in which case I assume they don't worry about it.
It relies on an IR led. Casinos have cameras which this IR will show up like a blinding flashlight. People use IR Led's to blind security cameras. I've been to home games that had cameras everywhere that would detect this. They were more for the armed invasions though.
It's been done via IRC using hacked proxies and VPN forever now. I got in the underground trading scene around 1993. Back in those days I doubt a single Fed knew what IRC even stood for. Now they have infiltrated everything.
I heard something some time ago about casinos marking their cards with rfid chips to avoid cheating. I wonder if you could make something to read those RFID chips.
I think it would be easier to count cards then to rely on something like this. Sure, you're still working with odds, but then you don't have a device and marked cards which limits your exposure to having something horrible happen to you in some back room game.
> I can't believe the manufacturer agreed to send them the device!
The way I understood the article, the manufacturer assumed the guy was a normal "legitimate" customer. They did not expect the guy to do a teardown of the device and write an exposé.
Why would you specifically mention "Chinese made" in the title? The actual article has a different title. Also, why does the fact that this device is made in China says anything about the device itself?
Half of the entire article is about the difficulties of acquiring the (Chinese!) device, him trying to figure out if this is actually a real device (only made in China!), and eventually going direct to a factory (which is in China!).
It's the author's right and responsibility to accurately advertise the article, not the submitter's. We've updated the title from “High end, Chinese made, poker cheating device”.
> Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait.
HN should really avoid this old jingoist tendency in tech. Nearly all devices are made somewhere in Asia at this point, so this should not be noteworthy.
I'd wager the engineers behind this have thought a lot about voting machines, except I'd bet they'd find a way to cheat me out of both of these gambles.
This is pretty silly. No casinos or card rooms let you have a phone/device at the table.
That aside, you need to have a special marked deck. People have tried something similar with flourescent ink and special glasses. I think professional shuffling devices have some kind of built in blacklight check now for this. IR is a bit better since its harder to detect without a camera. You would still need to have a tub of ink and manually mark the cards though.
You'd basically need to have the dealer in on it, and if that is the case you don't really need the device at all.
> No casinos or card rooms let you have a phone/device at the table.
That's simply not true. I'm not aware of a single cardroom that currently prohibits cellphones - indeed, several casinos have installed USB chargers in their gaming tables for customer use. Using an electronic device during a hand is prohibited, but this is primarily a matter of etiquette to speed up play.
These devices pose no threat to the integrity of games at casino cardrooms. Their surveillance systems are more than capable of detecting an unusual IR emitter. Their dealers are more than capable of preventing deck switches and detecting suspicious card handling. These devices only pose a serious threat to games played in unlicensed venues.
I meant "on the table" as in on the felt. That's generally the rule I've seen at nicer cardrooms. But yes I agree nothing like this would ever work in a casino.
Someone has gone to extreme lengths to build these things and people pay lots of money for them. And yet your first instinct is to declare it useless.
When you can't see the point of something, maybe it is because you are cleverer than all the other fools, or maybe it is because you don't know as much as you think you do. It is very telling when people automatically assume they are the smartest.
We're talking about a system for people trying to cheat card games. It's not novel or technically sophisticated.
This would never work in a casino/card room. The people who buy this would do so with the intention of scamming their small group/card game. Yes it is silly.
I'd say they are more lax now with using your phone, but I doubt they would let you set your phone ON the actual table next to the cards during a hand.
I'm talking strictly cash games here. (I know tournaments are different.) Most rooms allow your phone to be on the rail or in a cup holder, immediately next to your cards but not on the felt itself.
Poker is players taking money from players. The house gets the rake whether cheating is involved. They are so worried about people cheating black jack and rigging machines I doubt they really spend a whole lot of attention if Customer A just robbed Customer B when the house gets their cut either way. There is not much ROI for them to care unless the cheaters are so active they run off customers.
Isn't this sort of overly-long, overly-detailed, yet still totally vague blog post just a clever way to get people to transfer $2000 via Western Union to a stranger?
If it is a con, it is the longest long con you could ever invent.
1) Work hard, become a chief of anti-abuse team at Google.
2) Work harder, publish several papers ranging from self published papers about hacking Heartstone to multi-author papers at conferences like WWW.
3) Create a scam device, describe it in detail.
4) Go present it with you own face and name to the DEFCON.
5) Write a blogpost about the said non-existent device.
Rake in the 2000 USD (which is reeeeally big fat reward for all your effort, risk and credibility) wired to a stranger in China who isn't even identified in the blog... You win a prize.
4) Film a video that looks like a DEFCON speech. Some simple video editing should fix the face. Voice likely doesn't matter. Start speech by saying "oh this talk is not listed, we changed topic last second"
"Right now there is some scary technology coming out of China that incorporates IR marked cards, concealed cameras and computer analyzers. Combined to create a high-tech card marking system, I must say that this device could do for cheats what silicon did for the cosmetic surgery business. The devices are being marketed as poker analyzers."
"The technology works like this. The long edge of every card in the deck is marked with an invisible IR marking. Each mark identifies an individual card. In collusion with a poker dealer, the special marked deck is swapped into play. The player sits opposite the dealer on the table. He positions a concealed camera on the table (usually disguised as a cell phone). The camera has an IR lens that is used to transmit an image of the edge of the deck of cards to a small computer located in a smart phone (the poker analyzer) in his pocket. The image is transmitted during the period after the dealer has shuffled the cards and the deck is resting in front of the dealer before cards are dealt to the players. The IR snapshot of the cards looks like a barcode. The poker analyzer identifies every card in the order that they will be dealt to the players in less than a second. A computer-generated voice message is sent to the player via a Bluetooth mini earpiece communicating the rankings of all the hands on the table."
And the countermeasures:
"Most surveillance cameras, in their natural state, actually have infrared viewing capabilities. The problem is the picture is not so good, so manufacturers add a cut filter over the CCD chip to block out infrared light. ... A number of major surveillance camera systems provide end users the ability to remotely change the IR status of the camera via the operator’s keyboard. This allows the operator who suspects someone is marking cards at a table to use a PTZ camera assigned to the table to switch to IR mode so the cards can be checked live on the game. If you currently don’t have this feature, speak to your manufacturer."
[1] http://ggbmagazine.com/issue/vol-13-no-2-february-2014/artic...