Are the casinos fair game

Back when I worked in gaming, there were numerous punters who basically hated the way that casinos operated in certain areas. Like in instances where casino operatives and management were blatantly and clearly resentful of punters winning substantial amounts of money. The process of quickly replacing dealers who were losing heavily and managers hovering around losing roulette tables was a process that I always disliked and still do.

Both are entirely unnecessary and can simply be worked around by a little imagination. It is these tactics that make millions of punters resentful. The follow on effect of this is that they have little or no sympathy when any casino either gets took for a large amount of money or was scammed. This is why many punters actively try to cheat. In their mind, getting paid out on a bet that they shouldn’t have is a little victory to them that can be marked up.

Many punters who cheat do so for different reasons. Some do so purely because they are financially desperate. Others do so just for amusement and merely because they can. The majority of cheating incidents inside casinos are simply opportunists looking for an angle and trying to exploit sloppy dealers and inspectors.

When they cheat, they are merely getting away with a few dollars which doesn’t even come close to offsetting what they lose. Cheating does cost the casino industry billions of dollars worldwide and the true figure cannot really be known. I would hazard a guess that in any one English casino then around £1000 a day is cheated or payments are made that shouldn’t have been. This isn’t quite the same thing but it is still money that the casino should have had.

There are about 140 casinos in England so that equates to £140,000 per day. That is close to a million pound per week and over £50 million per year just in the UK alone! Now transfer that worldwide and it is an absolutely staggering figure. Not one single person who is not connected with a casino or casino gambling (and most of them who are) would feel the least bit sympathetic by this statistic.

Punters think that casinos are fair game as they are making massive profits. This isn’t always true as some of them are struggling to pay their way financially. Quite often the overheads and expenses can leave many smaller casinos struggling. These are the casinos where this type of leakage is very costly.

As casinos expand across the globe and the number increases as the demand for gaming increases then the amount of cheating and the figures associated with it will increase. Although the advent of Internet gaming and electronic casino games like roulette and blackjack could mean that the figure could drop alarmingly if less people are going to casinos and gambling at home or they don’t have access to older easier cheating methods.

So are casinos fair game, well at the end of the day they are running a business and like all businesses, they have to account for the cost of doing business. They are merely providing recreational entertainment although many punters simply do not view it that way. But some of the practices involved in the day to day running of these businesses do leave a bad taste in the mouth of many punters.

Carl “The Dean” Sampson