What would stop a casino...

[Frostbyte]

How is it different from a rigged slot machine?

Video gambling machines are inspected with some degree of regularity, aren't they? That's how Ron Harris was able to slip his Konami Code into that AC keno machine.

...from using a gaffed shuffle machine to rip off its customers?

I have never seen this happen to the best of my knowledge. But a few times this thought occurred to me while I was playing an especially poor shoe. When everything seems to be going along as if scripted, the thought may force its way into your consciousness. Every time you hit a double down 11, you get an ace, deuce, three, or four; every time you hit a stiff, you bust; every time you have 20, the dealer hits 21; and so forth.

For this to work you'd have to enforce NMSE and know in advance exactly how many players were going to be at the table and exactly what plays each one would make, and program the ASM accordingly on the spot. So to my mind it's about as feasible as planting explosives in the base of the towers while pretending that three planes are hijacked but in fact rerouting them to Pennsylvania and replacing them with two military jets flown into the towers loaded with more explosives, and simultaneously shooting down all the witnesses on a third plane with an F-15 and blowing up your secondary target with a cruise missile. It would only be the world's most intricate and flawlessly executed plan ever, ever.

We also know that machines can be built that can read the cards and actually count cards-- yes, Mindplay.

True. But Mindplay was a commercial failure due to the effort required to make full use of it, which is dwarfed by the scenario you describe.

We all know that conscienceless individuals, mobsters, are sometimes associated with running gaming operations.

In a poker game, with only one deck to stack and where a shoe doesn't make it nearly impossible to covertly deal seconds, sure. Or in a roulette game, where the wheel can be deliberately imbalanced. But in the former case we have the shoe and in the latter the disparity in odds can cut both ways once someone notices the imbalance. I suppose you could do what the French roulette cheats did and use a remote-controlled ball to manually alter the results of every spin and prevent anyone from winning, but that's a level of sophistication beyond that which we can non-conspiratorially contemplate.

So, what is to prevent a company from manufacturing a shuffle machine that can not only read the cards, but can stack them in "cooler order" on demand so that the player loses every hand, or more difficult to detect, the majority of hands, where BS is used by the players. Such a cooler is impervious to the cutting of the cards, the burning of cards, the changing number of players, and to player mistakes. The technology exists. It can be done.

Why is the cooler impervious to cut? A difference in cut of a single card could conceivably reverse the cooling effect and cause the dealer to bust on every stiff and the player to draw to 21 with spine-tingling regularity. We were concerned about the preferential shuffling possibilities opened up by MindPlay, but this never materialized, partly due to the effort involved and partly due to regulatory limitations NGCB imposed when they approved the system.

What keeps the casinos from employing such a device? Probably the biggest reason is the risk of losing its license to operate a place of gambling. It would require some people to know about the cheating and we all know how hard it is to keep a "secret" secret when more than one person knows it. But, OTOH, that did not stop casinos from other kinds of cheating in the past, and other types of thievery, such as the practice of "skimming." And if certain gaming and government officials have been bribed, the risk of being caught is diminished considerably.

And of course, loss of license is a serious risk. Anyone who exposed this sort of cheating would ruin the casino whether gaming brought the hammer down on them or not.

It's a sobering thought, but much less sobering when considered outside the context of a seriously negative shoe or two.