gambling laws

#1
I was looking for information on gambling laws. Trying to find states definition on what is cheating and not cheating. For example counting isn't cheating but would a team be cheating etc. What electronic devices are cheating and do they have to be directly on you. Personally I've only ever just counted using Wong's halves so it's more of a curiosity killed the cat question.
 

MeWin$

Well-Known Member
#2
Beat the Players

Beat the Players by Bob Neressian(sic) is a book that deals extensively with gaming and cheating laws.
For a short version; devices are always illegal, teams arent, past posting is illegal, crimping or marking is illegal, counting is legal, spooking is legal- team spooking is legal but possibly not and so on. I dont know of any states that deviate from this but i bet there are.
 

WRX

Well-Known Member
#3
MeWin$ said:
Beat the Players by Bob Neressian(sic) is a book that deals extensively with gaming and cheating laws.

For a short version; devices are always illegal, teams arent, past posting is illegal, crimping or marking is illegal, counting is legal, spooking is legal- team spooking is legal but possibly not and so on. I dont know of any states that deviate from this but i bet there are.
Most states new to gambling have enacted laws that copy large parts of the Nevada statutes verbatim. Those states have inherited the problems surrounding the vagueness of important parts of the Nevada statutes. Outside of Nevada, and to a much lesser degree New Jersey, there are very few reported court decisions interpreting these statutes. So we're left with a situation in which it's hard to predict how a number of important questions might be decided. For the most part, there's no clear reason that would lead other states to deviate from the interpretations that have been made by the Nevada courts, but their courts would be free to do so.

Beat the Players (Bob Nersesian is the correct spelling of the authors name), together with Robert Loeb's books Gambling and the Law, and Blackjack and the Law, cover the subject about as well as anyone reasonably could, but their authors speak candidly about how many issues are unresolved.

"Spooking" is usually defined as the reading of a hole card by a person not seated at the table, who signals the value to a team mate who is playing. I don't know what form of spooking other than "team spooking" could exist. A number of authors have stated the opinion that spooking is "probably illegal," but that can't be said to be more than an opinion. There is no citable court or administrative decision on point that actually decided a controversy. My own reading of the statutes is that there's no sound reasoning to distinguish spooking from the reading of hole cards by seated players, the legality of which is not by now generally considered open to serious question. But again, that's only an opinion. Spooking would have to be considered hazardous to one's health under the current unsettled state of the law. And not only for the reason exemplified by the actions of Lefty Rosenthal, fictionalized in the movie "Casino" as Ace Rothstein. Please see the past threads on this topic, I don't want to enter into a new debate.
 
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moo321

Well-Known Member
#4
WRX said:
Most states new to gambling have enacted laws that copy large parts of the Nevada statutes verbatim. Those states have inherited the problems surrounding the vagueness of important parts of the Nevada statutes. Outside of Nevada, and to a much lesser degree New Jersey, there are very few reported court decisions interpreting these statutes. So we're left with a situation in which it's hard to predict how a number of important questions might be decided. For the most part, there's no clear reason that would lead other states to deviate from the interpretations that have been made by the Nevada courts, but their courts would be free to do so.

Beat the Players (Bob Nersesian is the correct spelling of the authors name), together with Robert Loeb's books Gambling and the Law, and Blackjack and the Law, cover the subject about as well as anyone reasonably could, but their authors speak candidly about how many issues are unresolved.

"Spooking" is usually defined as the reading of a hole card by a person not seated at the table, who signals the value to a team mate who is playing. I don't know what form of spooking other than "team spooking" could exist. A number of authors have stated the opinion that spooking is "probably illegal," but that can't be said to be more than an opinion. There is no citable court or administrative decision on point that actually decided a controversy. My own reading of the statutes is that there's no sound reasoning to distinguish spooking from the reading of hole cards by seated players, the legality of which is not by now generally considered open to serious question. But again, that's only an opinion. Spooking would have to be considered hazardous to one's health under the current unsettled state of the law. And not only for the reason exemplified by the actions of Lefty Rosenthal, fictionalized in the movie "Casino" as Ace Rothstein. Please see the past threads on this topic, I don't want to enter into a new debate.
Good book recommendations. Generally, the rule is that you can't "alter the odds of the game". Card counting doesn't alter the odds, it only discovers when they shift in your favor. Seeing a sloppy dealer's hole card doesn't alter it either: you had the same chance of winning if you didn't know it.

Generally, computers, marking cards, altering bets, etc. are all illegal, and we all knew that.
 
#5
moo321 said:
Good book recommendations. Generally, the rule is that you can't "alter the odds of the game". Card counting doesn't alter the odds, it only discovers when they shift in your favor. Seeing a sloppy dealer's hole card doesn't alter it either: you had the same chance of winning if you didn't know it.
Not quite so, card counting does alter the odds of winning when we use our index plays. Just like card marking, it provides us with information we were not expected to have when they dealt the game. The same could be said for holecarding, but we're not the ones compiling the information, the dealer is giving it to us by not doing what he was trained to do. All of these things are grey areas as the law is written, and I think it is intentional.
 

Sucker

Well-Known Member
#6
WRX said:
Robert Loeb's books Gambling and the Law, and Blackjack and the Law
"Gambling and the Law" was authored solely by I. Nelson Rose; "Blackjack and the Law" was co-authored by Rose and Loeb.
 
#9
Automatic Monkey said:
Not quite so, card counting does alter the odds of winning when we use our index plays. Just like card marking, it provides us with information we were not expected to have when they dealt the game. The same could be said for holecarding, but we're not the ones compiling the information, the dealer is giving it to us by not doing what he was trained to do. All of these things are grey areas as the law is written, and I think it is intentional.
How could we not be expected to have information on the count when they SHOW you the cards played as a normal part of the game? Varying bets and index playes are the best way to play the game under their own rules and they have to (mathematically) acknowledge that.
 
#10
not a lawyer or anything, but you arent alterring the odds of the game by knowing the odds at any given time. if u were then a bs player doubling down because he knew that he had a high probability of winning his 11v10 would be alterring the odds, as would anytime u hit, stood, dbl'd or split. id consider a grey area would be a casino shuffling a deck in a high count as a countermeasure against counters or something like this, as it seems pretty intuitive to me that if they did this every time the count got high then it would definately increase the odds in their favor
 
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