24 August 2008 319 views No Comment Print This Post  Email This Post

Beating the casino’s is something only the extremely talented can rarely do. As security tightens, gambling systems become more complex and new methods are devised to catch culprits, coming out a winner from card counting on a blackjack table is only heard of at old establishments that can’t afford to keep up with new technology.

Nowadays, intricate surveillance systems manned by numerous cctv operators look out for the tell-tale signs of a group of cheaters - hand signals, movements, playing styles etc. But, one Irish student has taken this surveillance a step further by developing an automated system that can spot if a player is counting cards. Using “smart” video cameras and statistical analysis, PhD mathematician Wesley Cooper has created an algorithm that builds up a profile of each player and spots anomalies during a game.

The Trinity College mastermind behind this breakthrough stated “Blackjack is beatable if you have a good maths brain,”. “At the moment, casino surveillance staff have to watch the tables and try to identify suspicious play using their experience and instincts. This system does the same job automatically using computer-vision techniques and algorithms.”

Clear Deal, which Cooper developed at Trinity’s Graphics, Vision and Visualisation research department, is being tested with an international casino operator. “The feedback has been good and I’m hoping that other casinos will adopt the technology once the trial is over,” he said.

As part of his research, Cooper worked as a croupier in Las Vegas. “I learnt that one of the most important things in a casino is to build up a profile of each serious player, so they can identify the ‘profitable’ patrons and target them with complimentary drinks and food to keep them at the table,” he said.

Funded by the Irish Research Council for Science, Engineering and Technology, Cooper’s system compares each decision a player makes to that of a “perfect” simulated player in order to determine a gambler’s skill.

“It can determine if someone is proficient or just lucky. A skilled player with a good mathematical mind can count cards, giving them a statistical edge over the casino. Blackjack is 3,000 years old and people have been counting cards as long as it has been around,” he said.

Talented individuals that can count cards gain an advantage in Blackjack by keeping a mental record of what cards have already been dealt. Knowing what cards are left allows a player to calculate their odds of winning and bet accordingly, a valuable advantage that equates to about 0.5-2%.

Counting cards was recently dramatised in the movie 21, a film starring Kevin Spacey and Kate Bosworth, which tells the story of how a group of maths students from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) won more than €500,000 from Las Vegas casinos by counting cards.

Although counting cards is not illegal as you are not exactly cheating (you are just good a maths!), casino’s view it as an offence and reserve the right to ban players. In movies, this can mean visiting the “room with no cameras” for a chat with security staff.