Anyone interested in this would do well to read Gambling Scams[1] by Darwin Ortiz and How to Cheat at Everything[2] by Simon Lovell. There's also an interesting Real Hustle episode where they manage to cheat their way in to winning a high stakes game against some famous professional poker players.[3]

The books mentioned above talk in detail about cheating methods in all sorts of games, not just poker, and have solidified my own determination to never gamble for money. It's way too easy to be cheated -- and the cheaters don't need any high end devices to do it either. Plenty of methods are very simple, very cheap (if you don't count the medical, legal, or funeral bills if you get caught), and very effective.

[1] - https://www.amazon.com/Gambling-Scams-Detect-Protect-Yoursel...

[2] - https://www.amazon.com/How-Cheat-Everything-Simon-Lovell/dp/...

[3] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=63jgfmgqkO0

> (if you don't count the medical, legal, or funeral bills if you get caught)

I see this anecdote/joke tossed out every time a gambling cheating story appears, but I don't think I've ever seen evidence that such retributive tactics are used with regularity. Especially by the major casino corporations.

Incidentally, while having a look for Ruelle's book on thermodynamic formalism I stumbled upon a book title something along the lines of "the dynamics of roulette". I expected something about rare events in probability theory, perhaps betting strategies for optimising expected profit for certain levels of risk, but it ended up being on the mechanics of the roulette table itself - pages upon pages of hefty calculations of roulette balls including spin, velocity etc etc. It is crazy how much effort people put into getting an edge at a game.

You might want to look for a book called "The Eudaemonic Pie." It's about a bunch of chaos theorists who analyze roulette and figure out how to gain a statistical edge.

>"Note that taking a screenshot of the cheating app turned out to be more difficult than expected because the ROM is hardened against analysis. In particular, they removed the ADB server (Android debugging) and the ability to take a screenshot when the phone is operating in cheating mode. However, with a bit of work, I was able to re-establish the functionalities needed to take the screenshots of the app used in this section."

I'd have used a camera.

edit - this got me thinking, taken as an average, each playing card's face is a unique colour. As a card is placed face down onto a table, if you point a camera at the patch of table where the card is being placed, you should be able to work out which card it is if you look carefully at the change in the colour of the light reflected. As it gets really close you can also pull out some pattern.

Nice tear down and a remarkable device, but how could one ever expect to get the marked cards into circulation?

they don't. this isn't casino gambling this is back parlor gambling.

This is for scammers who are cooperating with the house.

More commonly this happens in private games, not in casinos.

Organise your own high stakes game. Happens more often that you would think.

Richard Turner always talked about how much he had to turn down offers to fix home-games.

A machine doesn't have any pesky ethics or morals.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Turner_(magician)

The concept is very simple - a marked deck, marked with a bar code in IR-reflective ink on the card edges. The readout device is a modified phone. It's nicely implemented, but you have to be able to get your own deck into the game.

A less sophisticated version could work if you were able to mark decks yourself with some IR redlective and sweat.

You may not be able to mark all 52 cards uniquely, but knowing the 10s and face cards from the non- should be a huge edge in some games.

I could think of more dangerous but lower tech ideas, but my imagination isn’t free!

Discussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12769819

This makes me glad I stayed away from the house game circuit when I played professionally (never mind the collecting lent money aspect). Usually the idea with house games is they are a little more loose with money, rules, drinking, weed etc, so you wouldn't be calling people out for having devices on the table.

He shoulda got KEM cards or other real plastic cards though if he was serious about ripping off a game!

I can see something like this being more developed for the magician doing card tricks and then brought in as a way to fix poker games.

This is outstanding tear-down work.

I wonder how they read out the ROM. JTAG?

And what was in the part of the phone where the camera and LEDs are now?

Maybe nothing. With all the phone manufacturing going on in China it'd be pretty easy to take an existing cheap phone design and shuffle around the internals or design a main board from scratch with the necessary space.

They lost my interest and intrigue what I learned you had to get the dealer to use a marked deck.

I'm surprised how well an engineer needed to make this device, would actually go ahead and make it with the obvious purpose understood.

I was getting really excited until I realized you needed the special deck also. Still a pretty cool piece of tech, for sure, and not easy, but ultimately, just a slightly fancier QR code reader, right?

That’s how I felt, too. I was envisioning some sort of high framerate camera that could take an image of the cards as they’re dealt.